Today's Highlights in History
On Sept. 1, 1939, World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On Sept. 1, 1907, Walter Reuther, the powerful president of the United Automobile Workers Union from 1946 to 1970, was born. Following his death on May 9, 1970, his obituary appeared in The Times.
On September 1, 1866, Harper's Weekly featured a cartoon about President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policy.
On this date in:
1905 Alberta and Saskatchewan became the eighth and ninth provinces of Canada.
1942 A federal judge in Sacramento, Calif., upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.
1951 The United States, Australia and New Zealand signed a mutual defense pact, the ANZUS treaty.
1969 A coup in Libya brought Moammar Gadhafi to power.
1972 American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik, Iceland, defeating Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union.
1981 Albert Speer, a close associate of Adolf Hitler who ran the Nazi war machine, died at a London hospital at age 76.
1983 A Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace; 269 people were killed.
1998 Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals hit his 56th and 57th home runs of the season, breaking the National League record set by Hack Wilson in 1930.
2004 More than 1,100 people were taken hostage by heavily armed Chechen militants at a school in Beslan in southern Russia; more than 330 people, most of them children, were killed during the three-day ordeal.
2007 Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, announced that he would resign in the wake of fallout over his guilty plea in a Minnesota airport gay sex sting. (Craig later reversed his decision and served out his term.)
2009 A law allowing gay marriage took effect in Vermont.
Current Birthdays
Talk show host Phil McGraw ("Dr. Phil") turns 60 years old today.
71 Lily Tomlin
Comedian, actress
64 Barry Gibb
Singer (The Bee Gees)
53 Gloria Estefan
Singer
49 Dee Dee Myers
Former White House Press Secretary
35 Scott Speedman
Actor ("Felicity")
29 Clinton Portis
Washington Redskins running back
26 Joe Trohman
Rock musician (Fall Out Boy)
Historic Birthdays
Walter Reuther
9/1/1907 - 5/9/1970
American labor leader; president of United Automobile Workers Union (1946-70)
(Go to obit.)
69 Giacomo Torelli
9/1/1608 - 6/17/1678
Italian stage designer and engineer
67 Engelbert Humperdinck
9/1/1854 - 9/27/1921
German composer
66 James Corbett
9/1/1866 - 2/18/1933
American world heavyweight boxing champion (1892-7)
74 Edgar Rice Burroughs
9/1/1875 - 3/19/1950
American novelist; wrote the Tarzan stories
68 Francis Aston
9/1/1877 - 11/20/1945
English Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1922)
37 Marilyn Miller
9/1/1898 - 4/7/1936
American musical comedy actress
74 Carlo Gambino
9/1/1902 - 10/15/1976
Italian-born American organized crime leader
79 Dame Peggy van Praagh
9/1/1910 - 1/15/1990
English-born ballet dancer; founder of the Australian Ballet
45 Rocky Marciano
9/1/1923 - 8/31/1969
American world heavyweight boxing champion (1952-6)
