Events January 19 1825 - Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kensett of New York City patented a canning process to preserve salmon, oysters and lobsters. 1915 - George Claude of Paris, France patented the neon tube advertising sign. His handiwork was regularly seen adorning the Eiffel Tower and many pizza parlors throughout America. Now you can buy a neon sign for your in-home office at the discount warehouse. Probably not in one of George Claude’s wildest dreams... 1937 - Howard Hughes set a transcontinental air record, flying from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds. 1949 - The salary of the President of the United States was increased from $75,000 to $100,000 with an additional $50,000 expense allowance added for each year in office. 1952 - The National Football League bought the franchise of the New York Yanks. To make nice with the New York Giants for having another team in their territory, the NFL permitted the Giants to choose five players from the Yanks roster. One of the five was Tom Landry, who played for the Giants for six years. During that time, the NFL sent the Yanks club to Dallas. They became the Dallas Texans for one season and moved on to Baltimore, where they changed their name to the Colts. In 1960, the Dallas expansion team (the Cowboys) hired Tom Landry as head coach. That original Yanks club was sold to the NFL for a mere $300,000. 1953 - Sixty-eight percent of all TV sets in the U.S. were tuned to CBS-TV this day, as Lucy Ricardo of I Love Lucy gave birth to a baby boy -- just as she actually did in real life -- following the script to the letter! The audience for the program was greater than that watching the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower the following day. 1957 - Philadelphia comedian, Ernie Kovacs, became a major star, when he was able to pull off the challenge of doing a half-hour TV show without uttering a single word of dialogue. 1959 - Dick Clark’s American Bandstand was the number-one daytime TV show in the U.S. Remember Rate-A-Record? Three kids would listen and then rate a new song. Rankings went from 35 to 98. The usual comment, “It has a good beat and you can dance to it.” 1970 - The soundtrack of the film, Easy Rider, the movie that made a star of Peter Fonda, became a gold record. It was the first pop-culture, film soundtrack to earn the gold award. 1974 - Notre Dame ended UCLA’s 88-game winning streak -- at South Bend, Indiana. The Fighting Irish posted a 71-70 basketball win over the Bruins of the University of California at Los Angeles. 1983 - Klaus Barbie (“the butcher of Lyon”), Nazi Gestapo chief in Lyon, France during the German occupation, was arrested in Bolivia on charges of having tortured and killed thousands of people. After World War II, Barbie was protected and employed by U.S. intelligence agents because of his “police skills’ and anti-Communist zeal.” Barbie, together with his wife and children, then escaped to Latin America, where he worked primarily as an interrogator and torturer for dictatorships both in Peru and in Bolivia. He was tried in 1987 and died in prison in 1991. 1985 - The New York Times announced that Lee Iacocca’s book, Iacocca, was the best selling hard cover book of 1984. It wasn’t topped in sales until the arrival of Rush Limbaugh’s first to me in the early 1990s. 1998 - Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Carl Perkins died at age 65 after a series of strokes. Perkins was a Tennessee sharecropper’s son. His first guitar was made from a cigar box and broom handle, and his Blue Suede Shoes was written on a potato sack.
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 14:13:46 +0000
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