Today XXII

Birthdays:

• Sigmund Freud, neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939


• Robert Edwin Peary, explorer, May 6, 1856 – February 20, 1920


• Rabindranath Tagore, aka Gurudev, poet, philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist, whose avant-garde works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, May 7, 1861 – August 7, 1941


• Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antoguolla, aka Rudolph Valentino, actor, May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926


• George ORSON Welles, director of film and the theatre, actor, screenwriter, broadcaster and producer, May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985


• Theodore Harold White, political journalist, historian, and novelist, best known for his accounts of the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 American presidential elections, May 6, 1915 – May 15, 1986


• Robert Henry Dicke, physicist, who designed the Dicke radiometer, a microwave receiver, which he used this to set a limit on the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation of less than 20 Kelvins, May 6, 1916 – March 4, 1997


• Willie Howard Mays, Jr., aka "The Say Hey Kid," Hall of Fame centre fielder, the 1951 Rookie of the Year; the National League MVP twice; on January 23, 1979, he was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, appearing on 409 of the 432 ballots cast (roughly 95 percent); his number 24 is retired by the San Francisco Giants, whose home ballpark is located at 24 Willie Mays Plaza with a larger-than-life statue of Mays in front of the main entrance, surrounded by 24 palm trees, and the right-field wall is 24-feet high, all in honor of Mays; his list of accomplishments is too long for this entry to do him justice!, 1913


• Robert Clark BOB Seger, rock musician, 1945


• Roma Downey, actress, 1960


• George Timothy Clooney, actor, director and screenwriter, 1961

RIP:

• Henry David Thoreau, author, development critic, naturalist, transcendentalist, pacifist, tax resister, abolitionist, and philosopher, July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862


• Lyman Frank Baum, author, philatelist, and the creator, along with illustrator W. W. Denslow, of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919


• Maria Montessori, educator, scientist, physician, philosopher, feminist, and humanitarian, developer of the Montessori Method of Education; the first female Italian physician in the modern era, August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952


• Marie Magdalene Dietrich, aka Marlene Dietrich, actress, entertainer and singer, December 27, 1901 – May 6, 1992

Also:

• The Eiffel Tower is officially opened to the public at the Universal Exposition in Paris, 1889. La Tour Eiffel, named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, is an iron tower built on the Champ de Mars beside the River Seine in Paris. It is the tallest structure in Paris


• The German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is destroyed within a minute while approaching a mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, 1937. Thirty-six people perished in the accident


• Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister CBE, becomes the first person to run the mile in under four minutes, 1954