Birthdays

October 2, 1909 - Groucho Marx
Marx was a comedian and film star, creating 13 feature films with his siblings - the Marx Brothers. His distinctive appearance, carried over from his days in vaudeville, included quirks such as glasses, cigars, and a thick greasepaint mustache and eyebrows. Some notable Groucho quotes: "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." "I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." "I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up." 


October 4, 1822 - Rutherford B. Hayes
Think the presidential election of 2000 was unique?  Think again!
Rutherford B. Hayes was the 19th President of the United States.  In the 1876 election, Hayes lost the popular vote to his opponent, Samuel Tilden, by a considerable margin - 250,000 votes, out of a total 8.5 million votes cast. However, the electoral vote was contested in four separate states (one them of being....Florida...how times never change!). In the end, a congressional commission had to decide the matter, and Hayes was awarded 185 electoral votes - one more than his opponent. For the next four years, Democrats would refer to Hayes as "Rutherfraud B. Hayes".


October 8, 1941 - Jesse Jackson
Jackson is a well-known activist of the American civil rights movement, and a Baptist minister. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, and is the founder of both entities that merged to form the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.


Events

Disneyworld Opened - October 1, 1971
Walt Disney World Resort is the largest and most visited recreational resort in the world, containing four theme parks; two water parks; twenty-three themed hotels; and numerous shopping, dining, entertainment and recreation venues. It opened on October 1, 1971, with the Magic Kingdom theme park, and has since added Epcot, Disney's Hollywood Studios, and Disney's Animal Kingdom. The park was envisioned by Walt Disney to supplement California's Disneyland which had opened in 1955. Market surveys revealed that only 2% of Disneyland's visitors came from east of the Mississippi River, where 75% of the population of the United States lived. Additionally, Walt Disney disliked the businesses that had sprung up around Disneyland and wanted control of a much larger area of land for the new project.


Model T Introduced - October 1, 1908
Introduced in 1908, the Model T would later be named the world's most influential car of the twentieth century, and the first to take advantage of assembly-line production instead of individual hand-crafting. Henry Ford's thoughts on the Model T: "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces." The standard 4-seat Model T cost $850 (equivalent to $20,000 today), while competing cars of the era often cost between two and four times as much.

Sputnik Launched - October 4, 1957
Sputnik was the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. It was little more than the size of a basketball and weighed 184 pounds. Sputnik orbited the earth once every 98 minutes, but was not equipped with any scientific instruments. It contained a single radio transmitter, which did little more than issue an incessant beeping that allowed even the most primitive instruments to track it. As an instrument used for gathering data, Sputnik was relatively insignificant. However, Sputnik did usher in the new age of space exploration, and initiated the U.S./ U.S.S.R. space race that would lead to America's moon launch and shuttle program.


Great Chicago Fire - October 8, 1871
The Great Chicago Fire was a conflagration that burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871, killing hundreds and destroying about four square miles in Chicago, Illinois. Though the fire was one of the largest U.S. disasters of the 19th century, the rebuilding that began almost immediately spurred Chicago's development into one of the most populous and economically important American cities. Exactly how did this huge fire start? The traditional account of the origin of the fire is that it was started by a cow kicking over a lantern in the barn owned by Patrick and Catherine O'Leary. (Mrs. O'Leary's cow_. Michael Ahern, the Chicago Republican reporter who created the cow story, admitted in 1893 that he had made it up because he thought it would make colorful copy.