Births
which occurred on a May 08: ^top^
1943 La FAO es creada en Hot Springs (EEUU) para
combatir el hambre en el mundo.
1940 Peter Benchley
(author: Jaws, The Deep, The Island)
1933
The first police radio system,
^top^
connecting headquarters to patrol cars and patrol cars to one another,
was installed in Eastchester Township, New York, by Radio Engineering
Laboratories of Long Island City, New York. The township contracted
with the company for one transmitter of 20 watts for the headquarters
and two transmitters of 4.5 volts each for the two patrol cars. Among
its other uses, the police radio system became a popular prop for
radio, television, and film drama. From the basic "Calling all cars!"
exclamations of early radio drama to the poignant use of police radio
in the 1965 film The Chase (with Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, and
Robert Duvall), the police radio system became a dramatic device as
essential to twentieth-century narratives, as was the royal emissary
in the days of Shakespeare. |
1914 Romain Gary, French novelist, war hero and diplomat,
who died on 02 December 1980.
1914
Paramount Pictures is formed.
^top^
W.W.
Hodkinson creates the film financing and distribution company Paramount
Pictures. Hodkinson had opened one of the country's earliest cinemas
in 1907 in Ogden, Utah, where he later started a film exchange with
other theaters in town. Within a few years, he was soon a leading
film distributor on the West Coast. In 1915, Paramount struck deals
with two of the leading production studios, Adolph Zukor's Famous
Players Film Company, and the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company,
which had released the first feature-length movie, The Squaw Man,
in 1914. In 1916, Zukor and Lasky merged their companies, forming
the Famous Players-Lasky Company, and the new entity absorbed another
dozen production companies soon afterward. The new company then acquired
Paramount and began buying movie theaters. In 1927, the company changed
its name to Paramount Famous Lasky Corp., then to Paramount Publix
Corp. in 1930.
The company became
one of Hollywood's most powerful studios, releasing blockbusters like
The Ten Commandments (1923). The studio's stable of stars
included Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, and Douglas Fairbanks.
Despite the studio's success, its finances were shaky, and the company
declared bankruptcy in 1933. After two years of reorganization, the
company was reestablished under the name Paramount Pictures Corp.
in 1935. The company continued to contract top stars, including Gary
Cooper, Claudette Colbert, and Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s, and
Mae West, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope in the late '30s and early 1940s.
In 1949, all studios fell on hard times: The US Supreme Court broke
up their monopoly power over the industry, requiring them to sell
off their theater chains. Nevertheless, Paramount continued to release
hits, including Sabrina, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Psycho. In 1959,
the studio introduced VistaVision, a widescreen technology meant to
give movies an edge over the up-and-coming medium of television. In
1966, Gulf and Western purchased the studio, which continued to produce
hits, including Love Story (1970) and The Godfather (1972), Raiders
of the Lost Ark (1981) and Top Gun (1986). Gulf and Western changed
its name to Paramount Communications in 1989. In 1993, former studio
head Barry Diller, who had run the operation from 1975 to 1984, engaged
in a hostile battle with Viacom to purchase Paramount, but lost. Viacom
gained control of the studio in 1994. |
1905 Karol
Borsuk, Warsaw mathematician who died on 24 January 1982.
1899 Friedrich von Hayek, Austrian-born English economist;
awarded Nobel Prize in 1974. He died on 23 March 1992.
1899
The Countess Cathleen opens
^top^
The
play, by William Butler Yeats, opens at the Irish Literary Theatre
in Dublin, the theater's inaugural performance.
Yeats, already an accomplished poet, had been persuaded to help launch
the theater by his friend Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, a writer
and collector of Irish folklore. Until 1907, Yeats managed the theater's
business affairs and wrote numerous plays. On occasion, his experimental
works sparked riots in the audience.
Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 but moved to London when he was two.
His family returned to Dublin in 1880. His father was a former lawyer
turned painter, and Yeats, too, planned to pursue art. He entered
the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin after high school but soon
left to focus on poetry. His first poems appeared in 1885 in the Dublin
University Review.
In 1887, he
moved to London and became a writer, devoting himself to visionary,
mystic poetry. His first book of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin
and Other Poems, was published in 1889, the same year he fell
hopelessly in love with actress Maude Gonne, who refused to marry
him. In 1891, he helped found the Rhymers Club, a society of poets.
In 1898, he met Lady Gregory and spent many subsequent summers at
her estate. He later purchased a nearby ruined castle, which he called
The Tower, and which figures as an important symbol in his later work.
As manager of the Irish National Theatre,
Yeats became increasingly appreciated as a writer of national stature.
His poetry, once ecstatic and dreamy, became tighter, sparser, and
more realistic. He published Responsibilities: Poems and a Play
in 1914 and The Wild Swans of Coole in 1917. Some of his
best work was written after 1917, including Sailing to Byzantium
and The Second Coming. In 1922, he was appointed a senator
of the new Irish Free State, and the following year he won the Nobel
Prize. Yeats died on 28 January 1939 in France.
YEATS ONLINE: Michael
Robartes and the Dancer, Responsibilities,
and Other Poems, The
Wild Swans at Coole, The
Wind Among the Reeds |
1897 José María Pemán, poeta, dramaturgo y periodista español.
1895
Fulton John Sheen. , in El Paso, Illinois.
^top^
He
was ordained a Catholic priest on 20 September 1919, was consecrated
a bishop, as auxiliary of New York, on 11 June 1951. He was US Director
of the Society for Propagation of the Faith from 1950 to 1966. From
1952 to 1955 he became famous through his television program Life
is Worth Living, continued as Mission to the World from
1955 to 1957. He was appointed bishop of Rochester on 21 October 1966
and retired on 06 October 1969. He died on 09 December 1979. Among
Sheen's books are Peace of Soul (1949), Three to Get
Married (1951), Life Is Worth Living (1953), The
Priest Is Not His Own (1963), Missions and the World Crisis (1964)
That Tremendous Love (1967), Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography
of Fulton J. Sheen (1980).
Bishop
Sheen established a very successful niche for religious programming
in U.S. television's early days with his Life Is Worth Living program.
Sheen's show originally aired on the Dumont Network on Tuesday evenings
in 1951 and then moved to ABC where it remained until Sheen withdrew
in 1957. The shows--really half hour talks by Sheen--proved very popular
and ultimately were carried on 123 ABC television stations and another
300 radio stations. Life Is Worth Living followed a simple format.
Sheen would choose a topic and, with only a blackboard for a prop
and his church robes for costuming, would discuss the topic for his
allotted 27 minutes. He spoke in a popular style, without notes but
with a sprinkling of stories and jokes, having spent up to 30 hours
preparing his presentation. Because the program was sponsored by the
Admiral Corporation rather than the Catholic Church, Sheen avoided
polemics and presented a kind of Christian humanism. In his autobiography
he noted that the show was not "a direct presentation of Christian
doctrine but rather a reasoned approach to it beginning with something
that was common to the audience." He covered topics as diverse as
art, science, aviation, humor, communism, and philosophy.
Like many others in its early days, Sheen had moved into television
from radio. As a professor at the Catholic University of America,
he began commuting from Washington DC in 1928 to broadcast on WLWL
in New York. Two years later he became the first regular speaker on
The Catholic Hour, a sustaining time program on NBC radio, sponsored
by the National Council of Catholic Men. In 1940 he made his television
debut presiding at New York City's first televised religious service.
After several years off, Sheen
attempted to come back to television a number of times, but without
the success that had greeted Life Is Worth Living. He hosted a series
on the life of Christ in the late 1950s; in 1964, he worked on Quo
Vadis, America?; and he revived the format of Life is Worth Living,
now called The Bishop Sheen Program (1961-1968). Television had changed
and his lecture style no longer commanded audience loyalty. He ended
his long career in broadcasting with numerous guest appearances on
television talk shows during the 1960s and 1970s. Broadcasting was
never Sheen's full-time occupation. He left The Catholic University
of America in 1950 to become the national director of the Society
for the Propagation of the Faith, a fundraising office for missionaries,
a position he held until Pope Paul VI named him Bishop of Rochester,
New York in 1966.
Sheen's importance
for television lies in two areas. First, he pioneered a non-sectarian
style of religious programming and found commercial sponsors for his
message. By doing this he both adapted to and helped to shape commercial
broadcasting's attitudes toward religious shows. The need to develop
audiences meant that only those programs with the widest possible
appeal would find a place in mainstream or network programming. Second,
Sheen provided a role model (if not an ideal) for the next generation
of ministers interested in television--the televangelists. Many of
the later stars of cable religious television acknowledge that the
widespread acceptance of Sheen's Life Is Worth Living inspired their
own forays into television. They too hoped to escape the "Sunday morning
ghetto" of religious programming for a place in the mainstream. |
1895 Edmund Wilson, US essayist and literary critic who
died on 12 June 1972.
1886 Coca-Cola syrup perfected
by Atlanta pharmacist John Styth Pemberton.
1885 Thomas Costain,
Canadian-born US historical novelist who died on 08 October 1965.
1884 Harry S. Truman, near Lamar, Missouri, "Give 'em Hell"
33rd US President (D) (1945-1953). He died on 26 December 1972.
1877
José María Salaverría, escritor español.
1876 Ludvig
Peter Karsten, Norwegian artist who died in 1926. — more
1859 Johan
Ludwig William Waldemar Jensen, Danish mathematician who died
on 05 March 1925.
1834 Antonio Ermolao Paoletti, Italian
artist who died on 13 December 1912.
1828 Jean-Henri
Dunant, suizo fundador de la Cruz Roja Internacional, primer
Premio Nobel de la Paz, en 1901. Murió el 30 octubre 1910. (He
would eventually sign his name Henry Dunant).
1824 William
Walker, adventurer, filibuster, president of Nicaragua (1856-1857).
He was executed on 12 September 1860 by the authorities of Honduras, which
he had tried to invade.
1816 The American Bible Society
is organized in the Dutch Reformed Church on Garden Street in NY City. The
non-profit society was instituted to promote wider circulation of the Scriptures
by publishing Bibles without notes or comments.
1794 US Post
Office established.
1786 Thomas Hancock,
English inventor; helped start the British rubber industry. He died on 26
March 1865.
1753 Miguel Hidalgo, father of Mexican
independence.
1744 (27 April Julian) Nikolay
Ivanovich Novikov, Russian writer, philanthropist, social critic,
and Freemason who died on 12 August (31 July Julian) 1818.
1737 Edward Gibbon, England, historian (Decline and Fall
of Roman Empire). He died on 16 January 1794. — GIBBON ONLINE: The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume I
, Volume
II , Volume
III , Volume
IV , Volume
V , Volume
VI
1639 Giovanni-Battista Gaulli “Il Baciccio”,
Italian artist who died on 02 April 1709. — MORE
ON GAULLI AT ART “4” MAY —
LINKS
— The
Adoration of the Lamb — Pietà
— Apotheosis
of the Franciscan Order — Apotheosis
of St Ignatius — Gian
Lorenzo Bernini — Cardinal
Leopoldo de' Medici
1503 Michele Tosini di Ridolfo
del Ghirlandaio, Italian painter who died on 28 October
1577. — MORE
ON TOSINI AT ART “4” MAY —
LINKS
— Madonna
and Child with the Young St. John the Baptist — a different Madonna
and Child with Saint John the Baptist — Charity |
On
a May 08:
2001
1429
Deaths
