My Birthday ~ And I Share It With Some Crazy Historical Events

Twenty-nine years ago today, this chubby baby made her big entrance into the world.  To the great relief of her mother, who had been pregnant (according to her calculations) for 43 weeks.

This is me, aged 4-6 months (the folks weren’t great with the photo labelling!) in early 1980.  Born October 3rd, 1979, I was a child of the Seventies for about three months.  Peace, man.

Here are some awesome facts about October 3rd - the greatest date of the year :)

• 1226 - St. Francis of Assisi died. He was the founder of the Franciscan order.
• 1863 - U.S. President Lincoln declared that the last Thursday of November would be recognized as Thanksgiving Day (irrelevant to Australians, but kind of interesting for my US readers!)
• 1873 - Emily Post was born.  Unfortunately, we share no genetic traits.
• 1964 - First Buffalo Wings were made at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York (paging Jessica Simpson…)
  
• 1974 - American baseball got its first African-American manager when Frank Robinson took the reins at the Cleveland Indians.
  
• 1990 - the Berlin Wall was in the midst of being dismantled, 11 months after people were beginning to be allowed to cross the borders.  October 3rd of that year marked the official reunification of East and West Germany (Happy German Unity Day!)
  
• 1995 - OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder.
  
• 2002 - Five people were killed in random sniper shootings in the Washington DC area over a 14-hour stretch.
  
• 2003 - Roy Horn, of the duo “Siegfried & Roy,” was attacked by tiger during a performance.

I also share a birthday with Tommy Lee, Gwen Stefani, a singer from the Backstreet Boys (Kevin Richardson for those playing at home), Neve Campbell and Ashlee Simpson.  People who have died on my birthday include Black Hawk (chief of the Sauk Native American tribe - in 1838), Gwyneth Paltrow’s father Bruce Paltrow (in 2002), and Janet Leigh (of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and being Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother fame - in 2004).

Stay tuned later today for a second post.  It’s a doozy :)

Thankyou to On-This-Day.com, Wikipedia and The New York Times ‘On This Day‘ section!

Cheers,
Lizzie