Monday, Ocotber 3

This Day In History

• 1226   St. Francis of Assisi died.
  
• 1863   President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.
  
• 1906   One of the nation’s pioneer retailers, W.T. Grant, opened a 25-cent department store on this day.
  
• 1922   Rebecca L. Felton, D-Ga., became the first woman to be seated in the U.S. Senate. She was appointed to serve out the remaining term of Sen. Thomas E. Watson.
  
• 1929   The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes formally changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
  
• 1941   Adolf Hitler declared in a speech in Berlin that Russia had been ''broken'' and would ''never rise again.''
  
• 1951   New York Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to win the deciding game of a three-game playoff series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, sending the Giants into the World Series.
  
• 1955   ''Captain Kangaroo'' premiered on CBS, and ''The Mickey Mouse Club'' premiered on ABC.
  
• 1974   Frank Robinson was named major league baseball's first black manager as he was put in charge of the Cleveland Indians.
  
• 1981   Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, ended seven months of hunger strikes that had claimed 10 lives.
  
• 1991   Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
  
• 1994   Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy announced his resignation because of questions about gifts he had received.
  
• 1995   A jury found ex-football player O.J. Simpson innocent of murder in the 1994 slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.
  
• 1997   Attorney General Janet Reno said she had found no evidence that President Bill Clinton broke the law with White House coffees and overnight stays for big contributors.
  
• 2001   The Senate approved an agreement normalizing trade between the United States and Vietnam.
  
• 2002   Five people were killed in random shootings in the Washington, D.C., area within a 14-hour period. Authorities began to search for the ''Beltway Sniper.''
  

Happy Birthday To

• 1900   Thomas Wolfe (author: Look Homeward Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again; died Sep 15, 1938)
  
• 1924   Harvey Kurtzman (cartoonist; founder of Mad magazine; died Feb 21, 1993)
  
• 1925   Gore Vidal (writer: Myra Breckenridge, Burr; actor: Bob Roberts)
  
• 1941   Chubby Checker (Ernest Evans) (singer: The Twist, Pony Time, Let’s Twist Again, The Fly, Limbo Rock, Slow Twistin’ [w/Dee Dee Sharp])
  
• 1944   Roy (Roy Uwe Ludwig Horn) (illusionist: Siegfried & Roy)