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Trivia Today |
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• Today is Valentine’s Day and National Have A Heart Day. One promotes romance, the other promotes eating your vegetables. • Today once was the Feast Day of St. Valentine, the patron saint of lovers. Father Valentine was beheaded in Rome on this date in 269. The church dropped the feast from its liturgical calendar in 1969. The first valentine card was probably sent by the Duke of Orleans while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1415.
Valentine Fun • Today is Have a Heart Day, a day to remember that vegetarians live about 15 years longer and suffer less than one-tenth the heart disease as non-vegetarians (Vegetarian Awareness Network).
• Today is Read to Your Child Day. • Today is Oregon Day. It became the 33rd U.S. state on this date in 1859. • Today is Arizona Day. It became the 48th U.S. state on this date in 1912. • On this date in . . . 1920: The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago, and Maude Wood Park was chosen as its first president. 1929: The "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" occurred in Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone's gang were gunned down. 1972: "Grease" opened off-Broadway, where it ran for a decade and 3,388 performances. 1979: History's oldest caged guinea pig, Snowball, died in Bingham, England, at age 14 years 10½ months. 1980: CBS announced that reporter Dan Rather had been chosen to succeed retiring "CBS Evening News" anchor Walter Cronkite. 1984: At Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, 6-year-old Stormie Jones of White Settlement, Texas, received the world's first combination heart-liver transplant as her only hope of overcoming a genetic disorder. Stormie died November 11, 1990, at age 13. Students at her school renamed the gymnasium in her honor, and Texas named a newly discovered wildflower "Stormie Jones" because it was "small, beautiful, and tough." 1988: Connecticut teacher Catherine Pollard received official permission from the all-male Boy Scouts to become a troop scoutmaster. She had unofficially led her son's Boy Scout troop from 1970-74. 1990: Friends of Beer was founded in Czechoslovakia as a political party with a platform of improving the quality of Czech beer while forcing down the price. 1991: For Valentine’s Day, President George Bush gave First Lady Barbara a small electronic thesaurus and dictionary. 1998: Singer T.G. Sheppard was best man for 35 different grooms at a Las Vegas hotel. The event was held for the winners of a national radio promotion for Sheppard's song "She's Gettin' the Rock." 1999: Theresa Mueller of Philadelphia announced that her $8.95 chocolate heart, life-size and shaped like a human heart, was her chocolate shop’s best-selling Valentine novelty ever. It even beat out the top-selling body-part novelty from 1998, a dozen chocolate noses. 1999: Singer Elton John guest-starred as his-animated-self on the Valentine’s Day episode of The Simpsons. 2001:
Four rustlers removed the
back seat from a 4-door Russian sedan and carried a dairy cow named Mashka 40 miles with
her head sticking out the window to a village east of Moscow. Police arrested the four
shortly after they sold the hot cow. Mashka survived. Birthdays . . . .
Q: Before "The Brady
Bunch," was actress Florence Henderson a star: (a) in Las Vegas; (b) on Broadway; or
(c) on radio? Q: Which fruit has
the fewest calories per serving: (a) papaya; (b) cantaloupe; or (c) banana? Hairy Truth: Your hair grows fastest in the morning. 26 years ago today:
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