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Thursday November 6, 2014

  • Saxophone Day
  • Zero Tasking Day
  • Basketball Day
  • Marooned Without A Compass Day
  • National Nachos Day
  • Men Make Dinner Day

  • Constitution Day-Dominican Republic
  • Green March Day-Morocco

  • On This Day
  • 1528 --- Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca is shipwrecked on a low sandy island off the coast of Texas. Starving, dehydrated, and desperate, he is the first European to set foot on the soil of the future Lone Star state.
  • 1860 --- Abraham Lincoln is elected the 16th president of the United States over a deeply divided Democratic Party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only 40 percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: 
    Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois. By the time of Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded, and the Confederate States of America had been formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its elected president. One month later, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In 1863, as the tide turned against the Confederacy, Lincoln emancipated the slaves and in 1864 won reelection. In April 1865, he was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after the American Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

  • 1905 --- The original stage production of Sir James Barrie’s Peter Pan opened in New York. Who was the original Peter Pan? Maude Adams starred in the play that ran 223 performances.

  • 1906 --- President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt embarks on a 17-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico, becoming the first president to make an official diplomatic tour outside of the continental United States.

  • 1913 --- Mohandas K. Gandhi was arrested as he led a march of Indian miners in South Africa.

  • 1917 --- Led by Bolshevik Party leader Vladimir Lenin, leftist revolutionaries launch a nearly bloodless coup d'État against Russia's ineffectual Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks and their allies occupied government buildings and other strategic locations in the Russian capital of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and within two days had formed a new government with Lenin as its head. Bolshevik Russia, later renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was the world's first Marxist state. Lenin 
    became the virtual dictator of the first Marxist state in the world. His government made peace with Germany, nationalized industry, and distributed land, but beginning in 1918 had to fight a devastating civil war against czarist forces. In 1920, the czarists were defeated, and in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. Upon Lenin's death, in early 1924, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. After a struggle for succession, fellow revolutionary Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union.

  • 1935 --- Edwin H. Armstrong announced his development of FM broadcasting.

  • 1956 --- President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his VP, Richard M. Nixon, were reelected, as they defeated Democrats Adlai E. Stevenson and his running mate, Estes Kefauver (by some 9.5 million votes). The campaign theme had been expanded from “I Like Ike” (used in 1952) to “I Like Ike, Peace & Prosperity”.

  • 1962 --- Richard M. Nixon lost the California election for governor to Edmund Brown. Nixon blamed the news media for his loss and promised, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

  • 1962 --- The United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution condemning South Africa's racist apartheid policies and calling on all its members to end economic and military relations with the country. In effect from 1948 to 1993, apartheid, which comes from the Afrikaans word for "apartness," was government-sanctioned racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against South Africa's non-white majority. Among many injustices, blacks were forced to live in segregated areas and couldn’t enter whites-only neighborhoods unless they had a special pass. Although whites represented only a small fraction of the population, they held the vast majority of the country's land and wealth. Following the 1960 massacre of unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville near Johannesburg, South Africa, in which 69 blacks were killed and over 180 were injured, the international movement to end apartheid gained wide support. However, few Western powers or South Africa's other main trading partners favored a full economic or military embargo against the country. Nonetheless, opposition to apartheid within the U.N. grew, and in 1973 a U.N. resolution labeled apartheid a "crime against humanity." In 1974, South Africa was suspended from the General Assembly.

  • 1967 --- Phil Donahue began a TV talk show in Dayton, Ohio. The show was on the air for 29 years. 
  • 1969 --- A tie occurred -- for the first time -- in voting for the Cy Young Award. Pitchers Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers and Mike Cuellar of the Baltimore Orioles won equal votes for best pitcher in the American League.

  • 1973 --- Singer Gram Parsons' manager Phil Kaufman was fined $300 for stealing Parsons' body from the Los Angeles International Airport. Kaufman claimed that it was Parson's wish to be cremated. 

  • 1977 --- The Toccoa Falls Dam in Georgia gives way and 39 people die in the resulting flood. Ninety miles north of Atlanta, the Toccoa (Cherokee for "beautiful") Falls Dam was constructed of earth across a canyon in 1887, creating a 55-acre lake 180 feet above the Toccoa Creek. In 1911, R.A. Forrest established the Christian and Missionary Alliance College along the creek below the dam. According to legend, he bought the land for the campus from a banker with the only $10 dollars he had to his name, offering God's word that he would pay the remaining $24,990 of the purchase price later. Sixty-six years later on November 5, a volunteer fireman inspected the dam and found everything in order. However, just 
    hours afterward, in the early morning of November 6, the dam suddenly gave way. Water thundered down the canyon and creek, approaching speeds of 120 miles per hour. Although there was a tremendous roar when the dam broke, the residents of the college had no time to evacuate. Within minutes, the entire community was slammed by a wave of water. One woman managed to hang onto a roof torn from a building and ride the wave of water for thousands of feet. Her three daughters, however, were not so fortunate: They were among the 39 people who lost their lives in the flood.

  • 1982 --- Shirley Allen is arrested for poisoning her husband, Lloyd Allen, with ethylene glycol, commonly known as anti-freeze. After witnessing her mother spike Lloyd's drinks with the deadly substance, Shirley's own daughter turned her in to the authorities. Lloyd Allen was Shirley's sixth husband and the second to die from mysterious causes; the other four had divorced her. John Gregg, who died a year after he married Shirley in 1977, had changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy shortly before his death. Shirley was outraged to find that she was left with nothing. Lloyd, who is said to have complained of a strange taste in his beverages, believed Shirley when she said that it was an iron supplement for his health. However, Joe Sinclair, one of Shirley's previous husband, had been a bit more suspicious. When his coffee tasted odd on several occasions, he went to the police. Although he suffered internal injuries, no charges were ever filed. Instead, he filed for a divorce. When Allen's death was investigated, toxicology reports confirmed that his body tissue contained a lethal amount of ethyl glycol. After a short four-day trial, Shirley Allen was sentenced to life in prison in 1983.

  • 1986 --- Former Navy radioman John A. Walker Jr., was sentenced in Baltimore to life imprisonment. Walker had admitted to being the head of a family spy ring. 

  • 1986 --- Edy’s Ice Cream Company took out a $250,000 policy to protect the taste buds of John Harrison, ice cream taste-tester.

  • 1988 --- Soviet scientist and well-known human rights activist Andrei Sakharov begins a two-week visit to the United States. During his visit, he pleaded with the American government and people to support Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (economic reforms), and so ensure the success of a new, more democratic, and friendlier Soviet system.

  • 1995 --- The owner of the Cleveland Browns football team announces that he is moving the team to Baltimore. The team owner, Art Modell, had purchased the Browns in October 1960 for $4 million. He loved his team and the fans, he said, but Cleveland Stadium was a mess and the city, after building a new baseball stadium and a new basketball arena, didn’t seem inclined to fix it. "They took me for granted," Modell said, "until I had to pull the trigger."
  • Birthdays
  • Sally Field
  • James Naismith
  • John Philip Sousa
  • Antoine Joseph Sax
  • Walter Johnson
  • Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
  • Igancy Jan Paderewski
  • Glenn Frey
  • Maria Shriver
  • Lori Singer

  • 310th Day of 2014 / 55 Remaining
  • Winter Begins in 45 Days

  • Sunrise:6:41
  • Sunset:5:05
  • 10 Hours 24 Minutes

  • Moon Rise:5;17pm
  • Moon Set:6:19am
  • Full Moon @ 2:22pm
  • Full Beaver Moon
  • Full Frosty Moon

This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.

  • Tides:
  • High Tide:9:35am/11:00pm
  • Low Tide:3:25am/4:18pm