- 179th Day of 2012 / 187 Remaining
- 87 Days Until Autumn Begins
- Sunrise:5:50
- Sunset:8:36
- 14 Hours 46 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:2:10pm
- Moon Set:12:47am
- Moon’s Phase: 57 %
- The Next Full Moon
- July 3 @ 11:51am
- Full Buck Moon
- Full Thunder Moon
- Full Hay Moon
July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
- Tides
- High:5:19am/5:52pm
- Low:11:02am
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:15.80
- Last Year:28.51
- Normal To Date:23.80
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- Decide to Be Married Day
- National HIV Testing Day
- Please Take My Children to Work Day
- National Orange Blossom Day
- Independence Day-Djibouti
- Anniversary of the Amir's Succession-Qatar
- Memorial Day for War Martyrs-Vietnam
- Our Lady Perpetual Saviour-Haiti
- On This Day In …
- 1859 --- Schoolteacher Mildred Hill of Louisville, Kentucky, composed the melody to the song "Good Morning to You." Her sister Patty wrote the lyrics. The stanza "Happy Birthday to You" was added in 1924, eight years after Mildred’s death.
- 1893 --- The New York stock market crashed.
- 1924 --- Democrats offered Mrs. Leroy Springs for vice presidential nomination. She was the first woman considered for the job.
- 1949 --- Captain Video and His Video Rangers premiered on the Dumont Television Network. Captain Video was initially played by Richard Coogan. The voice of radio’s Green Hornet, Al Hodge, replaced Coogan in 1951. Don Hastings played the roll of the ranger until the series ended in 1955. Maybe, if you check the basement or the attic, you’ll find your Captain Video decoder ring.
- 1950 --- An 8-pound bear cub that had been seriously burned three weeks earlier in a New Mexico forest fire left for the National Zoo in Washington where he lived to the ripe old bear age of 26. Originally named Hot Foot Teddy by the firemen who saved his life, he became better known as Smokey the Bear.
- 1967 --- The world's first cash dispenser was installed at Barclays Bank in Enfield, England. The device was invented by John Sheppard-Barron. The machine operated on a voucher system and the maximum withdrawal was $28.
- 1969 --- New York City police, attempting to serve a search warrant, charged into the well-known gay hangout, the Stonewall Inn. Events quickly got out of hand. Police ejected customers, managers, bouncers. Everyone got booted outside onto the sidewalk. The crowd became increasingly unruly and someone threw a bottle at the police. The plain-clothes police team was trapped inside the bar for over two hours before the the NYPD Tactical Patrol Force arrived and drove the mob from in front of the Stonewall. Police arrested and jailed many of the chanting gays. For the next few nights, the Stonewall Inn became the focal point of gay protests. The gay community began to organize and form committees to bring about change. Many feel that the Gay Liberation Movement had its beginnings with the Stonewall Inn Riots.
- 1971 --- Promoter Bill Graham closed the Fillmore East in New York City. It was a spin-off of San Francisco’s legendary rock ’n’ roll palace, Fillmore West (closed several days later). The Allman Brothers and J. Geils Band were among those performing on the final night. The New York City landmark and its San Francisco sister hosted just about every major rock group of the 1960s.
- 1973 --- Former White House counsel John W. Dean told the Senate Watergate Committee about an "enemies list" that was kept by the Nixon White House.
- 1977 --- In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lawyers could advertise.
- 1980 --- The National Anthem Act, making O Canada Canada's national anthem, was unanimously accepted by the House of Commons and the Senate. Royal assent was also given this day. O Canada, written by Calixa Lavallee and Adolphe-Basile Routhier, was officially proclaimed Canada's national anthem on July 1, 1980.
- 1985 --- After 59 years, the iconic Route 66 enters the realm of history, when the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials decertifies the road and votes to remove all its highway signs. Measuring some 2,200 miles in its heyday, Route 66 stretched from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California, passing through eight states. According to a New York Times article about its decertification, most of Route 66 followed a path through the wilderness forged in 1857 by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Edward Beale at the head of a caravan of camels. Over the years, wagon trains and cattlemen eventually made way for trucks and passenger automobiles. The idea of building a highway along this route surfaced in Oklahoma in the mid-1920s as a way to link the state to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles. Highway Commissioner Cyrus S. Avery touted it as a way of diverting traffic from Kansas City, Missouri and Denver. In 1926, the highway earned its official designation as Route 66. The diagonal course of Route 66 linked hundreds of mostly rural communities to the cities along its route, allowing farmers to more easily transport grain and other types of produce for distribution. The highway was also a lifeline for the long-distance trucking industry, which by 1930 was competing with the railroad for dominance in the shipping market. Route 66 was the scene of a mass westward migration during the 1930s, when more than 200,000 people traveled from the poverty-stricken Dust Bowl to California. John Steinbeck immortalized the highway, which he called the "Mother Road," in his classic 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath." Beginning in the 1950s, the building of a massive system of interstate highways made older roads increasingly obsolete, and by 1970, modern four-lane highways had bypassed nearly all sections of Route 66. In October 1984, Interstate-40 bypassed the last original stretch of Route 66 at Williams, Arizona, and the following year the road was decertified. According to the National Historic Route 66 Federation, drivers can still use 85 percent of the road, and Route 66 has become a destination for tourists from all over the world. Often called the "Main Street of America," Route 66 became a pop culture mainstay over the years, inspiring its own song (written in 1947 by Bobby Troup, "Route 66" was later recorded by artists as varied as Nat "King" Cole, Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones) as well as a 1960s television series. More recently, the historic highway was featured prominently in the hit animated film "Cars" (2006).
- 1992 --- Two of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit California strike the desert area east of Los Angeles on this day in 1992. Although the state sits upon the immense San Andreas fault line, relatively few major earthquakes have hit California in modern times. Two of the strongest, but not the deadliest, hit southern California on a single morning in the summer of 1992. Just before 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning, a 7.3-magnitude quake struck in Landers, 100 miles east of Los Angeles. Because the Landers area is sparsely populated, damage was relatively minor given the intensity of the jolt. In Los Angeles, residents experienced rolling and shaking for nearly a minute. The tremors were also felt in Arizona, Las Vegas and as far away as Boise, Idaho. Just over three hours later, a second 6.3-magnitude tremor hit in Big Bear, not too far from the original epicenter. This quake caused fires to break out and cost three people their lives. A chimney fell on a 3-year-old child and two people suffered fatal heart attacks. Between the two quakes, 400 people were injured and $92 million in damages were suffered. The physical damage was also significant. The quakes triggered landslides that wiped out roads and opened a 44-mile-long rupture in the earth, the biggest in California since the 1906 San Francisco quake.
- 1999 --- A 29-year-old woman was arrested for computer hacking in Grafton, Ohio. After her husband allegedly stayed online several nights until 4:00 a.m. chatting with other women, she hacked his computer to pieces with a meat clever. She pleaded no contest to charges of domestic violence and resisting arrest and was fined $200.
- 2000 --- A San Francisco appeals court ruled that the Rolling Stones improperly borrowed "Love in Vain and "Stop Breakin' Down" from Robert Johnson. The Stones' former record label had wrongly assumed that the songs were public domain.
- Birthdays
- Bob Keeshan / Captain Kangaroo (85)
- Helen Keller
- Tobey McGuire
- Julia Duffy
- H. Ross Perot
- Vera Wang
- Bruce Johnston
- Isabelle Adjani
- Helen Keller
- Emma Goldman
- Willie Mosconi
- Jerome ‘Doc’ Pomus