On This Day: January 25

On This Day January 25

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Celebrity Birthdays
Celebrity Birthdays

1882 – British novelist and journalist Virginia Woolf (d. 1941)

1931 – Actor Dean Jones (“The Love Bug,” “That Darn Cat”) (d. 2015)

1938 – Singer Etta James, best known for her Grammy-winning hit, “At Last” (d. 2012)

1943 – Director-screenwriter Tobe Hooper, best known for the horror classics, “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Poltergeist” (d. 2017)

1957 – Singer-turned-actress Jenifer Lewis (“Dreamgirls,” “Beaches,” “Sister Act,” Cars,” “The Princess and the Frog”)

1981 – Grammy-winning R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys (“Fallin’,” “You Don’t Know My Name,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” “Diary,” “No One,” “Empire State of Mind”)

History Highlights
History Highlights

1924 – The first Winter Olympic Games open in Chamonix, France with athletes representing 16 nations. The event was originally called “Winter Sports Week.”

1949 – The first Emmy Awards ceremony, honoring excellence in television, is held at the Hollywood Athletic Club in Los Angeles. Ventriloquist Shirley Dinsdale becomes the first recipient of an Emmy for her show, “Judy Splinters.” Television was still a new medium at the time, with only about 50,000 American households owning a TV set.

1959 – American Airlines ushers in the Jet Age with the first scheduled transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707 from Los Angeles (LAX) to New York (Idlewild Airport, later known as Kennedy Airport/JFK).

1961 – Beginning a tradition that continues today, John F. Kennedy holds the first live televised presidential news conference, just five days after his inauguration as 35th U.S. president. An estimated 65 million viewers tune in.

1971 – Charles Manson and three of his cult followers are convicted of the brutal 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others.

1995 – The world comes dangerously close to nuclear war when Russia activates its nuclear missile arsenal for the first time in history after its early-warning defense system detects a missile launch near Norway. Russian leaders suspect it might be a U.S. attack, but it turns out to be a harmless scientific rocket that Norway launched to study the aurora borealis, or northern lights.

Musical Milestones
Musical Milestones

1964 – “There! I’ve Said It Again,” by Bobby Vinton, begins its fourth and final week as a No. 1 single. It’s the last song to occupy the top spot on the pop chart before The Beatles have their first No. 1 — “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

1969 – Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” enjoys a seventh and final week on top of the Billboard Hot 100.

1975 – Carpenters deliver a No. 1 single with their cover of The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman.” It becomes the brother-sister duo’s 12th million-selling single gold record.

1986 – Barbra Streisand kicks off a three-week run at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart with “The Broadway Album.”

1992 – “All 4 Love,” by Color Me Badd, replaces Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” as the No. 1 single and holds the top spot for a week

1997 – Toni Braxton is in the midst of an 11-week reign over the pop chart with “Un-Break My Heart.”

2014 – “Timber,” by Pitbull featuring Ke$ha, is in the midst of a three-week run at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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On This Day: January 19

On This Day January 19

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Celebrity Birthdays
Celebrity Birthdays

1807 – U.S. Civil War Confederate General Robert E. Lee (d. 1870)

1809 – Poet Edgar Allen Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven”) (d. 1849)

1923 – Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actress Jean Stapleton, best known for her role as Edith Bunker in TV’s “All in the Family” (d. 2013)

1930 – Golden Globe-winning actress Tippi Hedren (“The Birds,” “Marnie”)

1939 – Rock and Roll and Country Music Hall of Famer Phil Everly of The Everly Brothers (d. 2014)

1942 – Tony Award-winning actor and singer Michael Crawford (“Phantom of the Opera”)

1943 – Rock legend Janis Joplin (d. 1970)

1946 – Grammy-winning singer, actress and Country Music Hall of Famer Dolly Parton

1947 – Emmy-winning TV chef Paula Deen

History Highlights
History Highlights

1825 – Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kensett secure a patent for the tin can as a means of preserving food. Consequently, this is known as National Tin Can Day.

1937 – Millionaire Howard Hughes sets a transcontinental air record, flying his H-1 Racer from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey in just under 7.5 hours. Hughes breaks the record he set a year earlier by about two hours. He averaged 332 miles an hour during the 2,490-mile flight.

1955 – Dwight Eisenhower becomes the first U.S. president to allow a filmed news conference to be used on television and in movie newsreels. The 33-minute conference was cut to 28-1/2 minutes to fit TV formats. 

1983 – Klaus Barbie, the Nazi Gestapo chief of Lyons, France during the German occupation, is arrested in Bolivia for his crimes against humanity. As chief of Nazi Germany’s secret police in occupied France, Barbie (a.k.a. “The Butcher of Lyons”) sent thousands of French Jews and Resistance members to their deaths in concentration camps, while torturing, abusing, or executing many others.

Musical Milestones
Musical Milestones

1959 – The Platters serve up the hottest single on this day with “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which holds the top spot for three weeks.

1967 – The Beatles begin recording “A Day In The Life” at Abbey Road Studios in London. According to John Lennon, the inspiration for the song came largely from Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness fortune, who was killed in a London car crash a year earlier.

1971 – Tracks from The Beatles’ “The White Album,” including “Helter Skelter,” are played in a California courtroom to determine if any songs could have influenced Charles Manson and his followers to murder actress Sharon Tate and four others in a 1969 killing spree.

1974 – Al Wilson’s “Show And Tell” is No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

1980 – Pink Floyd’s concept album, “The Wall,” begins a 15-week run at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and goes on to sell more than 8 million copies. 

1993 – Members of Fleetwood Mac reunite to perform at U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Inaugural Ball. The band’s hit, “Don’t Stop,” had been the theme of his presidential campaign.

1994 – Elton John, John Lennon, The Band, The Grateful Dead, Duane Eddy, Willie Dixon, Bob Marley, Johnny Otis, and Rod Stewart are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York. Stewart is stranded in Los Angeles and unable to attend because of the massive earthquake that had struck two days earlier.

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