The Almanac
This is Tuesday, Dec. 1, the 335th day of 2015 with 30 to follow. The
moon is waxing. The morning stars are Jupiter, Mercury and Saturn. The
evening stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus and Venus. Those born on this
date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include French wax-figure
sculptor Marie Tussaud in 1761; detective novelist Rex Stout in 1886;
former United Mine Workers President W.A. Tony Boyle in 1904; baseball
Hall of Fame member Walter Alston in 1911; singer/actor Mary Martin in
1913; soul singer Lou Rawls in 1933; comedian/filmmaker Woody Allen in
1935 (age 80); golf Hall of Fame member Lee Trevino in 1939 (age 76);
comedian Richard Pryor in 1940; Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member John
Densmore (The Doors) in 1944 (age 71); singer/actor Bette Midler in
1945 (age 70); actor Treat Williams in 1951 (age 64); model Carol Alt
in 1960 (age 55); comedian Sarah Silverman in 1970 (age 45); and
Matthew Shepard, University of Wyoming student killed because he was
gay, in 1976. On this date in history: In 1891, the game of basketball
was invented when James Naismith, a physical education teacher at the
International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., put peach
baskets at the opposite ends of a gym and gave students soccer balls to
toss into them. In 1903, the world's first drive-in gasoline station
opened for business in Pittsburgh. In 1917, the Rev. Edward Flanagan
founded Boys Town near Omaha. In 1943, ending a Big Three meeting in
Tehran, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill and Russian Premier Josef Stalin pledged a concerted
effort to defeat Nazi Germany. In 1950, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a
cable to United Press, said that his United Nations forces were
fighting in Korea against military odds without precedent in history,
and warned that failure to meet the issue there will leave it to be
fought, and possibly lost, on the battlefields of Europe. In 1953, the
first Playboy magazine was published. Marilyn Monroe was on the cover.
In 1955, Rosa Parks, a black woman, was arrested in Montgomery, Ala.,
for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus,
signaling, along with its resulting bus boycott and related events, the
birth of the modern civil rights movement. In 1988, Benazir Bhutto was
appointed prime minister of Pakistan, a post she held until August 1990
(and again from October 1993 to November 1996). In 2005, same-sex
marriage became legal in South Africa when the country's Constitutional
Court ruled that laws banning it were unconstitutional. In 2008, U.S.
President-elect Barack Obama introduced Hillary Clinton, his chief
rival in the Democratic presidential race, as his choice for secretary
of state. In 2011, Iceland became the first Western European country to
recognize a Palestinian sovereign state. In 2012, police said Kansas
City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher committed suicide at the team's
practice facility after killing his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins. In
2013, a Metro-North commuter train derailed along the Hudson River in
New York City's Bronx borough, killing four people and injuring 67.
Officials said the train was going 82 mph as it reached a curve with a
speed limit of 30 mph. A thought for the day: Education is the most
powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. -- Nelson
Mandela .
