On this date in . . .

1878: Emma M. Nutt became the first female telephone operator in the U.S., for the Telephone Dispatch Company of Boston.

1905: King Zog became the first king of Albania.

1933: Harold Jenkins was born in Friars Point, Mississippi. As Conway Twitty he had 54 #1 pop and country songs. He died in 1993.

1945: RKO sold rights to the movie script "The Greatest Gift" to Frank Capra for $10-thousand. Capra turned it into a film called "It’s A Wonderful Life."

1949: "Martin Kane, Private Eye" debuted on NBC-TV.

1956: Elvis Presley gave his mother a Cadillac—a pink Cadillac.

1979: A Los Angeles court ordered actor Clayton Moore to stop wearing his Lone Ranger mask.

1981: Goodman Music Company of Dallas offered a free shotgun with the purchase of any organ or piano.

1985: The wreck of the luxury liner Titanic, sunk by an iceberg in 1912, was found by French and American scientists 370 miles south of Newfoundland.

1992: Whittle Communications’ Special Report magazine published results of an extensive burglar survey that showed 32% of burglars like to browse through family photos while on the job, 27% raid the refrigerator, and 7% watch TV.

1993: In Munich, Germany, a burglar returned a violin to its owner with a note that it was out of tune. The 300-year-old violin was worth $80-thousand.

1998: Vancouver police announced that a weekend radar trap had caught 12 rollerbladers barreling along at 12 to 15 miles an hour in a 9-mile-an-hour zone. Police set up the speed trap after pedestrians complained about unsafe skating.

2002: Actress Sarah Michelle Geller married her "Scooby-Doo" co-star Freddie Prinze Jr. in Mexico.

2004: Sexual assault charges against pro basketball star Kobe Bryant were dropped at the request of the prosecution after the alleged victim refused to testify.

2005: A Silicon Valley computer engineer who lost his job because he ate two pieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a company meeting won a free Caribbean cruise for winning an Internet contest that solicited stories about outrageous firings. Jim Garrison's story was chosen from more than a thousand entries.