Daily Calendar for Monday, October 20, 2025

Born

  • Sir Christopher Wren (architect) –
  • John Dewey (philosopher) –
  • Charles Ives (composer) –
  • Jelly Roll Morton (jazz musician) –
  • Arlene Francis (actress) –
  • Grandpa Jones (country music performer) –
  • Art Buchwald (journalist) –
  • Dr. Joyce Brothers (psychologist) –
  • Mickey Mantle (baseball player) –
  • Michael McClure (poet) –
  • Jerry Orbach (actor) –
  • Tom Petty (musician; Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) –
  • Keith Hernandez (baseball player) –
  • Viggo Mortensen (actor) –

Died

  • Sir Richard Burton (explorer) –
  • Herbert Hoover (31st U.S. president) –
  • Jane Wyatt (actress) –
  • Oscar de la Renta (fashion designer) –

Events

  • The town clock in Halifax, Nova Scotia, began keeping time–
  • Louisiana Purchase ratified by U.S. Senate–
  • 49th parallel determined as western U.S/Canadian border–
  • Last day of Prince of Wales’s North American tour, Portland, Maine–
  • Canadian newspaper La Presse debuted–
  • The first cork-centered baseball, invented by Benjamin Shibe, was used in the World Series in Chicago–
  • Laurel and Hardy’s The Flying Deuces debuted–
  • Jacqueline Kennedy married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis–
  • John Bardeen became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field. He received the awards in 1956 and 1972 for his theory of superconductivity and development of electronic transistors–
  • A plane carrying the group Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed in Mississippi–
  • Oakland/Berkeley firestorm began in California–
  • The Boston Red Sox made baseball history by becoming the first baseball team to lose the first three games of a best-of-seven series, then come back with four victories to win it–
  • ABC-TV pulled the plug on Miss America, leaving the famous beauty pageant without a network television sponsor for the first time in 50 years–

Weather

  • Sheridan, Wyoming, experienced a bad snowstorm–

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