Shimla, Aug 12 Keekli Bureau
2014
American actress Lauren Bacall—who was known for her portrayals of provocative women who hid their soft core underneath a layer of hard-edged pragmatism—died in New York.
2007
American television producer and talk-show host Merv Griffin—who hosted the long-running series The Merv Griffin Show (1962–63, 1965–86) and was the creator of two of television’s most successful game shows, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune—died in Los Angeles.
1990
The most complete and best-preserved skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found on South Dakota’s Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, and it was nicknamed Sue, after Susan Hendrickson, the paleontologist who discovered the dinosaur fossil.
1966
During a press conference, John Lennon of the Beatles apologized for saying that his band was “more popular than Jesus now”; the comment had sparked protests and album burnings.
1961
East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall, which served as a symbol of the Cold War, separating East Berlin from West Berlin until 1989.
1955
German author and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, who was considered the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, died near Zürich, Switzerland.
1944
Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr.—U.S. naval pilot, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and brother of President John F. Kennedy—died in a plane crash while flying on a secret mission during World War II.
1887
Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contributions to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics, was born in Vienna.
1881
American filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille—who was a cinema legend known for using spectacle in such movies as The Ten Commandments (1956)—was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts.
1851
Isaac Merrit Singer patented his sewing machine and formed I.M. Singer & Company to market the product.
1676
Metacom (also called King Philip), intertribal chief of the Wampanoag, was killed, ending the conflict between Native Americans and English settlers known as King Philip’s War.
