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Int'l Left-Hander's Day - KALW Almanac-August 13, 2015

  • 225th Day of 2015 140 Remaining
  • Autumn Begins in 41 Days
  • Sunrise:6:24
  • Sunset:8:04
  • 13 Hours 40 Minutes
  • Moon Rise:5:36am
  • Moon Set:7:27pm
  • Phase:1%
  • Full Moon August 29 @ 11:37am
  • Full Sturgeon Moon / Full Green Corn Moon
  • Full Grain Moon/Full Red Moon
  • The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.
  • Tides
  • High:11:42am/10:44pm
  • Low:4:57am/4:52pm
  • Holidays
  • National Filet Mignon Day
  •  
  • International Left Hander’s Day
  • Women’s Day-Tunisia
  • Independence Day-Republic of Central Africa
  • O-Bon (Festival of Souls)-Japan
  • Annual Pilgrimage-Montserrat
  • On This Day
  • 1878 --- Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner, dies of yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee, after a man who had escaped a quarantined steamboat visited her restaurant. The disease spread rapidly and the resulting epidemic emptied the city.
  • 1889 --- A patent for a coin-operated telephone was issued to William Gray.
  • 1934 --- The comic strip "Li'l Abner" by Al Capp made its debut.
  • 1938 --- Robert Johnson played a show at a roadhouse outside Greenwood, MS. It has been speculated that Johnson was poisoned after the show which caused his death several days later. 
  • 1942 --- Walt Disney's animated feature "Bambi" premiered at Radio City Music Hall in New York.
  • 1942 --- Henry Ford unveiled his "Soybean Car." It was a plastic-bodied car that weighed about 1000 lbs. less than a steel car. 
  • 1948 --- Responding to increasing Soviet pressure on western Berlin, U.S. and British planes airlift a record amount of supplies into sections of the city under American and British control. The massive resupply effort, carried out in weather so bad that some pilots referred to it as “Black Friday,” signaled that the British and Americans would not give in to the Soviet blockade of western Berlin.
  • 1952 --- “Hound Dog” was recorded for the very first time by the rhythm-and-blues singer Ellie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton in Los Angeles, California. Big Mama Thornton was a native of Montgomery, Alabama, who came of age on the R&B circuit in the 1940s after starting her professional career in 1941 at the age of 14. In 1951, she signed her first record contract with Peacock Records and was soon paired with another of its artists, bandleader Johnny Otis, who brought Thornton out to join his band in California. It was there, in late 1952, that Otis asked two young songwriters on the Los Angeles music scene if they would write something especially for Thornton. Those songwriters were Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who would go on to have an enormous impact on R&B and early rock and roll through their work with groups like the Coasters and the Drifters. But hits like "Yakkity Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Stand By Me,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Potion No. 9″ were still ahead of Lieber and Stoller when they did what Otis asked and came back to him with a 12-bar country blues tune called “Hound Dog.”
  • 1961 --- Berlin was divided as East Germany sealed off the border between the city's eastern and western sectors in order to halt the flight of refugees. Walter Ulbricht, the Communist leader of East Germany, got the go-ahead from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to begin the sealing off of all access between East and West Berlin. Soldiers began the work over the night of August 12-13, laying more than 100 miles of barbed wire slightly inside the East Berlin border. The wire was soon replaced by a six-foot-high, 96-mile-long wall of concrete blocks, complete with guard towers, machine gun posts and searchlights. East German officers known as Volkspolizei (“Volpos”) patrolled the Berlin Wall day and night. Many Berlin residents on that first morning found themselves suddenly cut off from friends or family members in the other half of the city. Led by their mayor, Willi Brandt, West Berliners demonstrated against the wall, as Brandt criticized Western democracies, particularly the United States, for failing to take a stand against it. 
  • 1966 --- Prince Norodom Sihanouk, ruler of neutral Cambodia, criticizes the United States about the attack on Thlock Track, a Cambodian village close to the South Vietnamese border. Sihanouk routinely challenged the United States and its South Vietnamese allies for border violations, but tacitly permitted communist forces to use his territory for transit, supply dumps and base areas.
  • 1967 --- The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Joan Baez to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, because of her opposition to the Vietnam War. Baez responded with a performance at a free concert at the base of the Washington Monument. 
  • 1982 --- The teenage coming-of-age comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” opens in theaters around the United States. Written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, the film follows a year in the life of high school students Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Linda (Phoebe Cates), Mark (Brian Backer) and Mike (Robert Romanus) and their assorted classmates and teachers. The ensemble cast also featured the (then relatively unknown) future A-list actors Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Forest Whitaker, as well as Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Ray Walston and Anthony Edwards.
  • 2004 --- The 28th summer Olympic Games opened in Athens.
  • 2008 --- American Michael Phelps swam into history as the winningest Olympic athlete ever with his 10th and 11th career gold medals.
  • Birthdays
  • Annie Oakley
  • Fidel Castro
  • Alfred Hitchcock
  • Jocelyn Elders
  • Don Ho
  • Lucy Stone
  • Bert Lahr
  • Ben Hogan
  • George Shearing
  • Son Seals
  • Kathleen Battle
  • Dan Fogelberg
  • Debi Mazar
  • William Goldman