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October 9: Leif Erikson Day
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Maine Fast Fact: A family from Wells appeared on the ABC television series Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in December 2005 when their double-wide trailer was built into $500,000 log house.
Births:
- 1873: Charles Rudolph Walgreen, American businessman and founder of Walgreens
- 1900: Joseph Friedman, American inventor of the flexible straw
- 1940: John Lennon, British musician and songwriter, member of The Beatles
- 1941: Trent Lott, former U.S. Senator from Mississippi, resigned in December 2002 from a controversy over racist comments about Strom Thurmond’s presidential candidacy
- 1944: John Entwistle, British musician, singer, songwriter and bassist for the rock band The Who
- 1948: Jackson Browne, American musician, singer and songwriter
- 1952: Sharon Osbourne, English music manager and wife of Ozzie Osbourne
- 1953: Tony Shalhoub, American actor, known for his role as Adrian Monk on the television series Monk, attended the University of Southern Maine in Portland
- 1970: Annika Sorenstam, Swedish golfer
- 1975: Sean Lennon, American musician, son of John Lennon
- 1981: Zachery Ty Bryan, American actor, know for his role as Brad Taylor on the television series Home Improvement
Deaths:
- 1974: Oskar Schindler, German industrialist, credited with saving almost 1,200 Jewish lives during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, is the subject of the novel Schindler’s Ark and the film Schindler’s List
History:
- 1514: Louis XII marries Mary Tudor.
- 1635: Roger Williams, founder of the state of Rhode Island, is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for speaking out against punishment for religious offenses and for giving away Native American land.
- 1701: The Collegiate School of Connecticut is chartered in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, later to be renamed Yale University.
- 1824: Slavery is abolished in Costa Rica.
- 1861: The Confederate troops make an attempt to capture Fort Pickens but are kept back by Union forces at the Battle of Santa Rosa Island in Florida.
- 1864: Confederate troops are defeated by Union calvarymen at Tom’s Brook, Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley at the Battle of Tom’s Brook.
- 1888: The Washington Monument is opened to the general public.
- 1914: Antwerp, Belgium falls to the German troops during World War I.
- 1936: Electricity is generated at Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam) from the Colorado River and is transmitted to Los Angeles, California, 266 miles away.
- 1940: St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is hit by a bomb during a night-time raid by the German Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in World War II.
- 1962: Uganda becomes an independent Commonwealth realm.
- 1981: Capital punishment is abolished in France.
- 1999: The London Eye, the largest ferris wheel in Europe, is built.
- 2001: The second of the anthrax letters is sent from Trenton, New Jersey.
- 2006: North Korea tests its first nuclear device.
October 9 is Independence Day in Uganda, celebrating the day it gained independence from Britain in 1962. It is also the Romanian Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day to celebrate Jews in Romania and remember those lost in the Holocaust during World War II.
Today is also Leif Erikson Day in the United States, Iceland and Norway. It is a day honoring Leif Erikson, the first European known to have set foot in North America. October 9 was chosen for this day because the Norwegian ship Restauration arrived in New York Harbor on this date in 1825, the beginning of the first organized immigration from Norway to America.
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