May 16
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Events on This Day
1866 - The U.S. Treasury Department added another coin to American currency by authorizing the minting of the nickel, a five-cent coin, on this day. On its face was a shield, while on the reverse was the number 5.
1910 - The U.S. Bureau of Mines was authorized by the U.S. Congress.
1914 - The AHPA was formed in Kansas City, Kansas. Now, don’t throw a fit when we tell you that AHPA is the American Horseshoe Pitchers Association.
1929 - The first Academy Awards were presented on this night, hosted by Douglas Fairbanks and William C. de Mille. This first awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. It attracted an audience of 200 people. (The statuette we know so well as Oscar was not included in this first presentation for films made in 1927-1928. Oscar didn’t make an appearance until 1931.) Janet Gaynor was named Best Actress for her performance in Seventh Heaven, which also won the Best Director/Dramatic Picture for Frank Borzage, and the Best Writing/Adaptation for Benjamin Glazer. Lewis Milestone was named Best Director/Comedy Picture for Two Arabian Knights. Emil Jannings received two Best Actor awards, one for the 1927 flick, The Way of All Flesh, the other for The Last Command (1928) and Wings was selected as Best Film Production. A second Best Film award was presented to Sunrise for Unique and Artistic Production. It also won for Best Cinematography (Charles Rosher and Karl Struss). Other countries honor their film industry each year, too. In Germany, the Oscar is called the Bambi for outstanding motion pictures. In Finland, the award is called the Snosiki. Two thumbs up for the movies!
1929 - Paul Whiteman and his orchestra backed Bing Crosby for the tune, S’posin’, which ‘Der Bingle’ recorded for Columbia Records.
1939 - The Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Indians met at Shibe Park in Philadelphia for the first baseball game to be played under the lights in the American League. The Indians beat Philly 8-3 in 10 innings.
1943 - The Warsaw ghetto uprising ended, crushed by Nazi-SS troops.
1946 - The Irving Berlin musical, Annie Get Your Gun, opened at New York’s Imperial Theatre. It turned out to be one of the most successful shows presented on a Broadway stage and drew audiences to 1,147 performances.
1946 - The first magnetic recording tape was demonstrated by Jack Mullin.
1948 - Israel issued its first postage stamps. The stamps were printed in secret before the state was proclaimed. Illustrated with images of ancient Jewish coins, the stamps were designed by well-known graphic designer Otte Wallish.
1953 - Bill Haley and His Comets made it to the Billboard music charts for the first time with Crazy Man Crazy. The tune went to number six and became the first rock ’n’ roll record to make the pop music chart.
1958 - Test pilot Captain Walter Irwin reached 1,404.09 mph (2,259 kph) in an F-104A Starfighter over Edwards AFB, California.
1960 - On the cover of LIFE magazine: the wedding of England’s Princess Margaret.
1965 - The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, a Broadway musical starring Anthony Newley, made its premiere at the Shubert Theatre in New York City. Cyril Ritchard appeared in the production which entertained audiences for 231 performances.
1969 - The Soviet spacecraft Venera 5 reached the vicinity of the planet Venus and dropped a capsule that sent back information on that planet’s atmosphere.
1969 - The $50 million nuclear sub Guitarro sank at dockside in San Francisco while undergoing final fittings. A House report charged the Navy with “inexcusable carelessness.”
1971 - An ounce of first-class mail rocketed to eight cents for delivery -- two cents more than the previous stamp.
1974 - Helmut Schmidt was sworn in as the new chancellor of West Germany upon the resignation of Willy Brandt. It seems tht one of Brandt’s personal staff, Günther Guillaume, had admitted to being a communist spy. Brandt personally accepted the blame and resigned from office, opening the way for Schmidt.
1975 - Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Her climb was almost 22 years after Sir Edmund Hillary’s highest mountain, and five years before Reinhold Messner would become the first to climb it solo.
1977 - Four people were killed when the landing gear collapsed on a 30-seat New York Airways helicopter atop the Pan Am Building in Midtown Manhattan. The chopper fell over onto the line of passengers who were boarding.
1981 - Bette Davis Eyes, by Kim Carnes, climbed to the top spot of the pop music chart and stayed there for five straight weeks, took a week off (replaced by Stars on 45 Medley by Stars on 45) and came back to number one for four more weeks! It was, obviously, a gold record winner and was played over and over and over for 20 weeks before becoming an instant oldie but goodie. Bette Davis Eyes, incidentally, was written in part by Jackie DeShannon, who had two top ten hits in the 1960s: What the World Needs Now is Love in 1965 and the million-seller, Put a Little Love in Your Heart, in 1969.
1981 - Pianist, arranger and producer Ernie Freeman died of a heart attack. He was 58 years old. Freeman’s 1957 recording of Raunchy was a close second to the Bill Justis version, reaching number four on tbe Billboard Hot 100. Freeman also produced records for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Connie Francis; and he masqueraded as pianist B. Bumble on Bumble Boogie, a 1961 hit by B. Bumble and the Stingers.
1985 - Michael Jordan was named Rookie of the Year in the National Basketball Association. Jordan, of the Chicago Bulls, was the number three draft choice. At the time, he was third in the league scoring with a 28.2 average and fourth in steals with 2.39 per game.
1987 - It was a grand day in New York Harbor. Bobro 400, a huge barge, set sail within eyesight of the Statue of Liberty with 3,200 tons of garbage that nobody wanted. The floating trash heap soon became America’s most well-traveled garbage can as it began an eight-week, 6,000 mile odyssey in search of a willing dumping site. Bobro 400 returned to New York Harbor after the lengthy journey -- and brought all that garbage back with it!
1988 - U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop released a report declaring that nicotine is addictive in the same sense as heroin and cocaine and calling for the licensing of tobacco product vendors.
1990 - Deaths on this day: The entertainer who could do it all, Sammy Davis Jr., died of throat cancer at age 64, in Beverly Hills, California. From vaudeville at age three (with his father and uncle) to the star of Broadway’s Mr. Wonderful, from Las Vegas nightclubs to hit records, the actor, singer, dancer, impersonator, and musician performed his way into the hearts of young and old everywhere. And Jim Henson, the famous puppeteer and creator of the Muppets, died of an aggressive streptococcal infection. Henson was the creator of Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, etc. and was the driving force behind their long run in the TV series Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and films such as The Muppet Movie. Henson was also the voice/performer behind several characters, including Kermit, Rowlf the Dog, Dr. Teeth, The Swedish Chef, Waldorf, Link Hogthrob, and the Muppet Newsman. Through The Jim Henson Company, his work continues to captivate and entertain a global audience.
1991 - Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to address the U.S. Congress. The subject of her speech was Anglo-American unity in a changing and sometimes hostile world.
1992 - Actress Marlene Dietrich, who had died May 6 in Paris at age 90, was buried in Berlin.
1992 - America3, skippered by Bill Koch, won the 28th defense of the America’s Cup.
1994 - Jacqueline Onassis was admitted to the hospital for treatment of cancer. The former first lady died three days later.
1994 - Israel completed its final withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, shutting down the prison and military headquarters where Israeli soldiers had been in charge since the 1967 Middle East War.
1997 - These movies debuted in U.S. theatres: Jungle Book II, starring Jamie Williams, Bill Campbell and Roddy Mcdowall; and Night Falls on Manhattan, with Andy Garcia, Richard Dreyfuss and Lena Olin.
1998 - Real Quiet won the Preakness, two weeks after winning the Kentucky Derby.
2000 - Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas resigned from United Press International. The 79-year-old Thomas began covering the White House when the United States was 10 years from putting astronauts on the moon and the fashionable first lady was wearing a pillbox hat. 40 years and many presidents later, the news agency for which she worked for 57 years was bought by a company affiliated with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. In July 2000 Helen Thomas was hired as a columnist by newspaper publisher Hearst Corp.
2000 - The U.S. Federal Reserve raised its federal funds rate by one-half point -- to 6.5 percent. It was the biggest increase in five years.
2001 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 342 to 11,215. It was the first close above 11,000 in eight months. The Nasdaq rose 80 to 2,166.
2002 - Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones opened in the U.S. The second episode is actually the fifth Star Wars movie to be made. It stars Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Pernilla August, Jack Thompson (I) and Christopher Lee. The flick marks the first time a movie was produced entirely in digital cinema, using no film.
2003- Down With Love opened in the U.S. The romantic comedy stars Renee Zellweger, Ewan Mcgregor, David Hyde Pierce, Sarah Paulson and Tony Randall.
2004 - Pope John Paul II named six new saints, including Gianna Beretta Molla, revered by abortion foes because she had refused to end her pregnancy despite warnings it could kill her. Beretta Molla, an Italian pediatrician, had died in 1962 at age 39, a week after giving birth to the baby, her fourth child.
2005 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state governments could not prohibit residents from ordering directly from out-of-state wineries if those states allowed direct shipments from in-state wineries.
2006 - After months of intense pressure, the director of J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles agreed to recommend to the museum’s board the return of ancient artifacts in its collections that Greece claimed had been illegally sneaked out of the country.
2008 - Motion pictures opening in U.S. theatres: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, with Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Ben Barnes, Peter Dinklage, Warwick Davis, Vincent Grass, Ken Stott, Pierfrancesco Favino, Sergio Castellitto, Liam Neeson and Eddie Izzard; and Turn the River, with Famke Janssen, Rip Torn, Matt Ross and Lois Smith.
2008 - U.S. President George Bush (II), visiting Saudi Arabia, appealed for increased oil production. After talks in Saudi Arabia, which followed his two-day visit to Israel, Bush moved on to Egypt amid harsh criticism in the state-run media that he was tilting too far toward Israel in Middle East peace negotiations.
2008 - Wine maker Robert Mondavi died at 94 years of age. The pioneering vintner who helped put California wine country on the map died at his Napa Valley home. In 1966, at age 52, Mondavi was a winemaking veteran, when he opened the winery that would help turn the Napa Valley into a world center of the industry.
2009 - U.S. President Barack Obama named Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr, a potential Republican presidential contender in 2012, to the sensitive diplomatic post of U.S. Ambassador to China.
2009 - The Tucson Citizen, Arizona’s oldest continuously published daily newspaper, published its final print edition. The paper’s daily circulation was approximately 17,000, down from a high of 60,000 in the 1960s.
2010 - Oil from the blown-out Deepwater Horizon well was forming huge underwater plumes as much as 10 miles long below the visible slick in the Gulf of Mexico. And the BP oil company wrestled for a third day with a contraption for slowing the nearly month-old gusher.
2010 - Israel opened a huge new desalination facility on its Mediterranean seashore. Using a network of pipes extending far into the ocean from beneath the beach, the $425 million Hadera plant was the world’s largest using reverse osmosis technology.
2010 - 60,000 people participated in the 99th Bay to Breakers run in San Francisco, CA. Lineth Chepkurui of Kenya broke her record in the 12-km run with a time of 38 minutes, 7 seconds. Sammy Kitwara was the winner for the men.
2011 - Las Vegas marked the end of an era as one of the U.S. gambling mecca’s last original ‘Rat Pack’ casino-hotels, the Sahara, closed its doors.
2011 - Jerry Lewis announced his retirement as host of the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual Labor Day telethon. And on Aug 3, 2011 the Muscular Dystrophy Association announced that the 85-year-old Lewis would no longer serve as the organization’s national chairman, a position he had held since the early 1950s.
2012 - French energy giant Total reported that it had plugged a gas leak beneath the North Sea Elgin platform that had cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars and threatened to trigger a major explosion off the coast of Scotland.
2013 - A shipment of gold with a declared value of $625,000 was missing in a suspected heist at Miami International Airport. Miami-Dade police said the gold, packed in a box, had arrived at the airport on an American Airlines flight from Guayaquil, Ecuador. About three weeks later, police arrested two men for the heist: a cargo handler and a pawn shop owner.
2014 - New movies in U.S. theatres included: Godzilla, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins and David Strathairn; Million Dollar Arm, with Jon Hamm, Aasif Mandvi and Alan Arkin; Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, starring Lao Ai, Weiwei Ai and Jerome A. Cohen; Chinese Puzzle, with Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cécile De France; Don Peyote, starring Anne Hathaway, Jay Baruchel and Josh Duhamel; Half of a Yellow Sun, with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton and Anika Noni Rose; and A Short History of Decay, starring Emmanuelle Chriqui, Bryan Greenberg and Kathleen Rose.
2014 - U.S. Federal safety regulators fined General Motors a record $35 million for taking more than a decade to disclose an ignition-switch defect in millions of cars. The defect was linked to at least 13 deaths. (On June 5 GM said it had fired 15 employees for their role in the ignition-switch scandal.)
2014 - A Chinese court imposed a suspended death sentence on a doctor who had been the leader of a baby trafficking ring that had brought 23 boys and pregnant women to China from Vietnam. Suspended death sentences are usually commuted to life imprisonment after two years. The court, in the southern region of Guangxi, sentenced 23 other group members to from less than two years to life in prison.
2015 - A Russian Proton-M rocket carrying a Mexican communications satellite into orbit failed minutes after launch from Kazakhstan causing the loss of the satellite. It marked a second large project failure for Mexico’s Communications and Transport Ministry in six months.
2016 - The United Nations reported that more than nine million people in the four countries surrounding Lake Chad (Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria) were in desperate need of food aid as the violent insurgency continued to be waged there by Boko Haram.
2016 - Han Kang’s The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize (MBIP) for for fiction. The South Korean book was translated by Deborah Smith.
2017 - A researcher from South Korea’s Hauri Labs said company findings matched those of Symantec and Kaspersky Lab, that the WannaCry malware was created by the Lazarus Group, a North Korea-run hacking operation. The cyber-attack had infected more than 300,000 computers worldwide.
2017 - Boyan Slat, a 22-year-old Dutchman, announced his theory that it would be possible to reduce by half the millions of tons of plastic garbage in the Pacific by deploying floating barriers. Slat and his team hope to collect almost half of the remnants in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which stretches across waters from the U.S. West Coast to Japan, some 150 million pounds of trash, in just 10 years. Slat was testing his prototype the North Sea, and planned to roll out the final system within the next few years.
2018 - The environmental organization Greenpeace announced that it had ended a five-year ‘truce’ with Sinarmas, one of the largest paper companies in the world. Greenpeace accused the Indonesian company and its Asia Pulp & Paper arm of cutting down tropical forests in Indonesia during the entire time of the 2013 conservation agreement. Greenpeace had suspended a global campaign against Sinarmas in exchange for commitments to end deforestation, land grabs and conflicts with local communities.
2019 - The Trump administration cancelled nearly $1 billion in federal funds for California’s high-speed rail project. The Federal Railroad Administration said California had “repeatedly failed to comply” with the agreement and “failed to make reasonable progress on the project.” California Governor Gavin Newsom called the termination “political retribution ... illegal and a direct assault on California.” He said California had not abandoned its original high-speed rail vision, though cost hikes and delays had led the state to scale back the project -- to some $77.3 billion.
2019 - Members of Florida’s congressional delegation characterized as “unacceptable” that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would not publicly identify the two counties where Russian hackers gained access to U.S. voter databases before the 2016 election. A bipartisan group of lawmakers said after a classified FBI briefing that they were told the county names but were not allowed to share that information with the public.
2019 - A former head of Britain’s MI6 foreign spy service said China’s Huawei poses “such a grave security risk to the United Kingdom that the government must not allow it to have even a limited role” in building 5G networks. “I very much hope there is time for the UK government, and the probability as I write of a new prime minister, to reconsider the Huawei decision,” said Richard Dearlove, who was chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (1996-2004). U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said that Britain needed to change its attitude toward China and Huawei, casting the world’s second largest economy as a threat to the West similar to that once posed by the Soviet Union.
2020 - Félicien Kabuga (84), one of the most wanted suspects in the Rwandan genocide, was arrested near Paris, France. The businessman, from the Hutu ethnic group, was alleged to have been the main financier of the Hutu extremists who slaughtered 800,000 people in 1994. Kabuga founded and funded the notorious Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a Rwandan broadcaster that actively encouraged people to search out and kill anyone who was from the Tutsi ethnic group.
2020 - COVID-19 news:
1)A federal judge issued an order that allowed North Carolina religious leaders to reopen their doors to their congregations. This, in spite of Governor Roy Cooper’s warning that they were risking spreading coronavirus.
2)Thousands of Germans across took to the streets to protest restrictions to contain the coronavirus. The number of confirmed coronavirus cases increased by 583 to 174,355.
3)Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered a cessation of movement between Kenya and neighboring Tanzania and Somalia to help curb the spread of the virus. He exempted cargo trucks but said drivers would have to be tested for the disease.
4)Greeks flocked to the seaside when more than 500 beaches reopened, as the country sought to walk the fine line between protecting people from COVID-19 while reviving the tourism sector that many depended on for their livelihoods.2021 - In the first Miss Universe pageant in two years (previous year’s ceremony was cancelled due to COVID concerns), Andrea Meza of Mexico was the winner.
2021 - Researchers found that Greenhouse gases had shrunk the stratosphere by 1,300 feet since the 1980s. Without cuts to emissions, that high layer of Earth’s atmosphere will shrink 3,300 more feet by 2080.
2022 - Sweden formally announced that it would seek to join NATO -- after 200 years of neutrality. The change in position came after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
2022 - President Biden released his Housing Supply Action Plan, “...to ease the burden of housing costs over time, by boosting the supply of quality housing in every community.” His plan included legislative and administrative actions to help “close America’s housing supply shortfall in 5 years.” (A year later, there was minimal progress seen, and higher interest rates had led to an overall slowdown in housing construction.)
2023 - Intense rainfall caused massive flooding in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. The storm forced 23 rivers to overflow, resulting in 13 deaths -- and the cancellation of the F1 Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix.
2023 - In a U.S. Senate hearing discussing possible oversight of artificial intelligence, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, said the U.S. “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities.”
and more...
Birthdays on This Day May 16
1801 - William Seward
U.S. Secretary of State: negotiated purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 [Seward’s Folly]; died Oct 10, 18721804 - Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
educator: established 1st kindergarten in U.S. [1860]; author, publisher: The Dial literary magazine, Kindergarten Messenger; sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne; died Jan 3, 18941905 - Henry (Jaynes) Fonda
Academy Award-winning actor: On Golden Pond [1981]; Grapes of Wrath, Advice and Consent, Mister Roberts, Young Mr. Lincoln; father of Jane & Peter Fonda; died Aug 12, 19821912 - Studs (Louis) Terkel
writer: Hard Times, Working; died Oct 31, 20081913 - Woody (Woodrow Charles) Herman
bandleader: Woodchopper’s Ball, The Sheik of Araby, Chloe, Caldonia; died Oct 29, 19871918 - Barry Atwater
actor: F.I.S.T., The Amazing Howard Hughes, Police Story, The Teacher, The Night Stalker, Mission: Impossible [TV], Sweet Bird of Youth, Night Gallery, Return of the Gunfighter; died May 24, 1978
1919 - (Wladziu Valentino) Liberace
concert pianist & showman: The Liberace Show; Las Vegas entertainer; died Feb 4, 19871921 - Harry Carey Jr.
actor: Comanche Stallion, Last Stand at Saber River, Tombstone, The Exorcist III, Back to the Future Part III; died Dec 27, 20121922 - Eddie Bert
jazz musician: trombone; died Sep 27, 20121926 - Rube (Albert Bluford) Walker
baseball: catcher: Chicago Cubs, Brooklyn Dodgers [World Series: 1956], LA Dodgers; died Dec 12, 19921928 - Billy (Alfred Manuel) Martin
baseball: played and managed (5 times) the New York Yankees; also managed Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, Texas Rangers and Oakland A’s; died Dec 25, 19891929 - Betty Carter
Grammy Award-winning [best female jazz vocalist of 1988] singer: What a Little Moonlight Can Do, Cocktails for Two, Social Call, Goodbye, With No Words, New Blues (You Purrrrrrr), I Cry Alone; died Sep 26, 19981931 - Jack Dodson
actor: The Andy Griffith Show, Mayberry R.F.D., My Friend Flicka, The Virginian, Maude, Barney Miller, Archie Bunker’s Place, Newhart, Mr. Belvedere, Matlock, Mama’s Family, St. Elsewhere, Hawaii Five-O [1967], The Road West, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; died Sep 16, 19941937 - Yvonne Craig
actress, dancer: Batman [TV], Barbara Gordon/Batgirl [TV], Digging Up Business, It Happened at the World’s Fair, The Young Land, Mars Needs Women; died Aug 17, 2015; more1943 - Donny Anderson
football: Green Bay Packers: running back, punter: Super Bowls I & II1944 - Danny Trejo
actor: Heat, Con Air, Machete, Desperado, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, The Replacement Killers, Reindeer Games, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Smiley Face, Grindhouse, Alone in the Dark II, North by El Norte, Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World, Breaking Wind, Rise of the Zombies, Machete Kills1946 - Roger Earl
musician: drums: group: Foghat: Maybelline, Ride, Ride, Ride, Take It or Leave It, Home in My Hand, Drivin’ Wheel, Fool for the City, Slow Ride1947 - Barbara Lee (Jones)
singer: group: The Chiffons: He’s So Fine, One Fine Day, Sweet Talkin’ Guy; died May 15, 19921947 - Bill Smitrovich
actor: Crime Story, Life Goes On, The Trigger Effect, Bodily Harm, Crazy People, Renegades, A Killing Affair, Splash, Manhunter, The Practice1947 - Darrel Sweet
musician: drums, singer: group: Nazareth: LPs: Love Hurts, Snaz; died Apr 30, 19991948 - Jim Langer
Pro Football Hall of Famer: Miami Dolphins guard & center: Super Bowls VI, VII, VIII1949 - Rick (Rickey Eugene) Reuschel
baseball: pitcher: Chicago Cubs [all-star: bert], NY Yankees [World Series: 1981], Pittsburgh Pirates [all-star: 1987], SF Giants [all-star: 1989/World Series: 1989]1953 - Pierce Brosnan
actor: Mrs. Doubtfire, Remington Steele, The Manions of America, Noble House, The Heist, Detonator, The Fourth Protocol, Don’t Talk to Strangers, The Thomas Crown Affair [1999], The Tailor of Panama; Bond ... James Bond: GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is Not Enough1953 - Richard Page
musician: bass guitar; singer: group: Mr. Mister: Broken Wings, Kyrie, Is It Love?, Stand and Deliver, Hunters of the Night, Run to Her, Something Real [Inside Me/Inside You]1953 - Rick (Richard Alan) Rhoden
baseball: pitcher: LA Dodgers [all-star: 1976/World Series: 1977], Pittsburgh Pirates [all-star: 1986], NY Yankees, Houston Astros1955 - Olga Korbut
Olympic Gold [3] Medalist: gymnast [1972]1955 - Jack Morris
baseball [pitcher]: Detroit Tigers [1977–1990]: pitched a no-hitter in 1984; Minnesota Twins [1991], Toronto Blue Jays [1992–1993], Cleveland Indians [1994]; played on four World Championship teams: 1984 Tigers, 1991 Twins, 1992–1993 Blue Jays1955 - (Mary) Debra Winger
actress: Forget Paris, Shadowlands, A Dangerous Woman, Leap of Faith, Legal Eagles, Terms of Endearment, An Officer and a Gentleman, Urban Cowboy, French Postcards, Slumber Party ’57, Wonder Woman1956 - Clifton Powell
actor: Ray, Next Friday, Friday After Next, Menace II Society, Just Another Day, Meet the Parents-Play, Trapped Haitian Nights, Street Kings 2, 35 and Ticking, Shake, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Numb3rs, The Mentalist1958 - Glenn Gregory
singer: group: Heaven 17: We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove Thang, Temptation, Crushed by the Wheels of Industry, Soul Deep, The Foolish Thing to Do; on soundtrack of film: Insignificance1959 - Mare Winningham
Emmy Award-winning [supporting] actress: Amber Waves [1979-1980], George Wallace [1997-1998]; The Boys Next Door, Wyatt Earp, Fatal Exposure, Turner and Hooch, St. Elmo’s Fire, The Thorn Birds1964 - John Salley
basketball [forward]: Georgia Tech; NBA: Detroit Pistons, Miami Heat, Toronto Raptors, Chicago Bulls, LA Lakers; more1965 - Krist Novoselic
musician: bass guitar: co-founder of band Nirvana: LPs: In Utero, Nevermind, Bleach1966 - Janet Jackson
singer: Again, Control, Miss You Much, That’s the Way Love Goes, What Have You Done for Me Lately; LPs: Janet Jackson, Dream Street, Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814, janet, Design of a Decade, The Velvet Rope [has sold some 40-million albums worldwide]; actress: Good Times, Fame, Diff’rent Strokes; Michael’s sister1966 - Laurence Parry
musician: trumpet, flugal, trombone: group: UB40: Here I Am [Come and Take Me], Bring Me Your Cup, One in Ten, Red, Red Wine, Kingston Town, If It Happens Again1966 - Thurman Thomas
Football Hall of Famer [running back]: Oklahoma State Univ; NFL: Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins1967 - Doug Brocail
baseball [pitcher]: Lamar Community College; SD Padres, Houston Astros, Detroit Tigers, Texas Rangers1968 - Ralph Tresvant
singer: group: New Edition: Candy Girl, Cool It Now, Mr. Telephone Man1969 - David Boreanaz
actor: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Hard Easy, Officer Down, Angel, Bones1969 - Tracey Gold
actress: Shirley, Goodnight Beantown, Growing Pains; TV host: That’s Incredible1970 - Jim Mecir
baseball [pitcher]: Eckerd College; Seattle Mariners, NY Yankees, TB Devil Rays, Oakland Athletics1970 - Gabriela Sabatini
tennis champion: U.S. Open [1990]; more1971 - David Boreanaz
actor: SEAL Team, Bones, The Mighty Macs, The Hard Easy, Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Married with Children1972 - Keith Burns
football [linebacker]: Oklahoma State Univ; NFL: Denver Broncos, Chicago Bears, TB Buccaneers1973 - Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuña
actor: Jackass, Armed and Famous, Taildaters, Stories of Lost Souls, The Bronx Bunny Show1973 - Tori Spelling
actress: Beverly Hills, 90210, Co-ed Call Girl, Scream 2, Perpetrators of the Crime, Scary Movie 21977 - Lynn Collins
actress: X-Men Origins: Wolverine, John Carter, True Blood, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, City Island, Angels Crest, Ten Years1977 - Melanie Lynskey
actress: Two and a Half Men, Win Win, Up in the Air, The Informant!, Away We Go, Flags of Our Fathers, Shattered Glass, Sweet Home Alabama, Ever After, Heavenly Creatures1978 - Jim Sturgess
actor: Across the Universe, 21, Crossing Over, Heartless, Janusz, Soren, One Day1981 - Joseph Morgan
actor: The Vampire Diaries, Alexander, Master, Commander: The Far Side of the World, Angels Crest Rusty, The Grind, Immortals, Open Grave, The Originals1985 - Corey Perry
hockey [winger]: NHL: Anaheim Ducks [2005-2019]: 2007 Stanley Cup champs; won Hart Trophy as league MVP [2010-2011]; Dallas Stars [2019]; Montreal Canadiens [2020]; Tampa Bay Lightning [2021-2023]1986 - Megan Fox
actress: Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Jennifer’s Body, Passion Play, Friends with Kids, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Hope & Faith1990 - Thomas Brodie-Sangster
actor: Game of Thrones, Love Actually, The Maze Runner, Death of a Superhero, Bright Star, Nowhere Boy; voice actor: Phineas and Ferb1992 - Kirstin Maldonado
songwriter, singer: Grammy Award-winning group: Pentatonix: LPs: PTX 1 & 2, PTX, Pentatonix, PTX Presents: Top Pop, Vol. I
and still more...
Hit Music on This Day May 16
1944Long Ago and Far Away (facts) - Helen Forrest & Dick Haymes
I’ll Get By (facts) - The Harry James Orchestra (vocal: Dick Haymes)
1953
1962
1971
1980
1989
1998
2007
2016
and even more...
Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end...
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