On this date in . . .

44 BC: Julius Caesar was assassinated.

1869: The Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first all-pro baseball team.

1955: Colonel Tom Parker became Elvis Presley’s manager. He had managed Hank Snow, Eddy Arnold, and Gene Autry. His 1940s’ promotion of the health tonic Hadicol with the commercial songs "Hadicol Boogie" and "Hadicol Rag" was quite successful.

1956: My Fair Lady opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on Broadway. It starred Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle.

1964: Elizabeth Taylor married Richard Burton the first time at the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal. It was Taylor's fifth marriage and Burton's second.

1968: Life magazine proclaimed Jimi Hendrix as the most "spectacular" guitarist in the world.

1989: Dr. Bimol C. Ghosh at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, removed history’s largest gall bladder from a 69-year-old woman. The patient recovered quickly after losing her enlarged 23-pound gallbladder.

1991: Miami police called the cellular phone in Lynne Rosier’s stolen car; and when a man answered, the officer arranged a meeting to buy the car. The 18-year-old thief was arrested and the car recovered.

1997: Scientists determined the White Cliffs of Dover, one of the national symbols of Britain, get their dazzling whiteness from prehistoric shrimp droppings.

1999: A 19-year-old Sheffield Lake, Ohio, man plea bargained himself into the U.S. Marine Corps after admitting he stole his mother’s credit card to pay for his girlfriend’s $2,496 breast enlargement surgery. He also had to pay a $1,500 fine and re-pay his mother within a year.

1999: Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel and Dusty Springfield were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

2001: An 18-year-old woman was released from a Dallas hospital after giving birth while in a coma caused by a car accident. She regained consciousness a week after giving birth to a healthy girl. She had been a coma for two months.  Her husband said he thought his daughter would never be born and his wife might never regain consciousness. He said he fainted in the delivery room.

2004: Martha Stewart resigned from the board of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia after being convicted in a stock scandal.

2006: After a dump truck backed into Curtis Gokey's car, he sued the city of Lodi, California, for $3,600. The city denied the claim since Gokey, a city employee, was himself driving the dump truck, bumping his own car. So Gokey's wife sued the city. But a judge ruled she could not sue her own husband as a city employee.

2007: An Englishman returned from an extended vacation to his London home to find that thieves had stolen everything in his new kitchen, including the sink.  The burglars got away with $6,000 worth of new appliances and cabinets.

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