October 30^th is

Checklist Day *

National Candy Corn Day

Create a Great Funeral Day *

Haunted Refrigerator Night *

World Audio Drama Day *

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MORE!  John Adams, Ruth Gordon and Orson Welles, click

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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS

Australia – Sydney:
Q Station Ghost Sleepover

New Zealand – Marlborough:
Provincial Anniversary Date

Northern Ireland – Derry: Banks
of the Foyle Halloween Carnival

United Kingdom – London:
London Dungeon “Full Scream Ahead”

United States – Salem MA:
Haunted Happenings Ghost Tour

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On This Day in HISTORY

1735 – John Adams born, ‘founding father’ and 2nd U.S. President

1741 – Angelica Kauffman born in Switzerland, Austrian painter

Self-Portrait, by Angelika Kauffmann – 1784

1817 – Simón Bolívar establishes the independent government of Venezuela

1831 – In Southampton County, Virginia, escaped slave Nat Turner is captured and arrested for leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in U.S. history

1839 – Alfred Sisley born, French Impressionist painter

Chemin de la Machine, Louveciennes – Alfred Sisley, 1873 

1857 – Gertrude Horn Atherton born, author of over 60 stories and articles

1863 – Danish Prince Vilhelm arrives in Athens to assume his throne as George I, King of the Hellenes

1864 – Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge born, pianist, endowed first pension fund for Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1916), funded Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Bureau of Educational Experiments, established a foundation at the Library of Congress (1925) that provided for the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium

1864 – Helena, Montana is founded after four prospectors  discover gold at “Last Chance Gulch”

1877 – Irma Rombauer born, author of The Joy of Cooking

1881 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts born, American poet and author; The Time of Man

1885 – Ezra Pound born, expat American poet, notable modernist

1886 – Zoë Akins born, Pulitzer Prizing-winning playwright – she reworked her comedy The Greeks Have a Word for It, as the movie How to Marry a Millionaire

1888 – In the Rudd Concession, King Lobengula of Matabeleland grants exclusive mining rights to agents of Cecil Rhodes led by Charles Rudd

1894 – Daniel Cooper received first U.S. patent for a time clock

1894 – In London, Philip Arnold Heseltine is born, who wrote combative music criticism and papers on early music under his own name, while composing song cycles and choral works inspired by folk and Celtic music under his alter-ego Peter Warlock. He dies of coal gas poisoning in 1930, with doors and window bolted on his London flat, possibly a suicide

1896 – Ruth Gordon born, actress, screenwriter; one of the Lost Boys in “Peter Pan,” with Garson Kanin wrote comedies for Hepburn and Tracy movies, starred as Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker (1954), and in Harold and Maude

1905 – Czar Nicholas II issues the October Manifesto, granting the Russian peoples basic civil liberties and the right to form a duma (legislative assembly)

1915 – Fred Friendly born, pioneering American broadcast journalist

1923 – Gloria Oden born, American poet and academic, her poetry collection Resurrections, a nominee for the 1979 Pulitizer Prize for poetry, was a response to the unsolved murders of her mother and sister

1925 – John Logie Baird creates Britain’s first television transmitter

1928 – Daniel Nathans born, American microbiologist; joint winner of 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics

1935 – Checklist Day * honors the safety innovation of a preflight checklist, which has saved countless lives and aircraft, introduced after a Model 299 prototype for the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress crashed during takeoff at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, because of a gust lock that was still engaged

1938 – Orson Welles radio play of the H.G.Welles classic, War of the Worlds, is broadcast – some people tuning in after the start are fooled into thinking that it’s a real newscast

1939 – Grace Slick born, American singer-songwriter (Jefferson Airplane) “White Rabbit”

1941 – Franklin D. Roosevelt approves U.S. $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid, including food, fuel, weapons, warships, and airplanes, to the Allied nations engaged in WWII, in return for leases on Allied army and navy bases

1944 – Martha Graham’s ballet Appalachian Spring, with music by Aaron Copeland,  premieres at the Library of Congress

1944 – Anne Frank and her sister Margot are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

1945 – Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signs a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers to break the professional baseball color line

1946 – Andrea Mitchell born, American television journalist , anchor and commentator

1947 – The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which regulates international trade, is signed by 23 nations at Geneva during the U.N. Conference on Trade and Employment

1953 – George C. Marshall, who, as secretary of state following World War II, engineered a massive economic aid program for Europe, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace

1953 – U.S. President Eisenhower approves the top secret document National Security Council Paper No. 162/2, that the United States’ arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat, and General George Marshall is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1955 – Heidi Heitkamp born, American politician, U.S. Senator (D-ND 2013- ), first woman elected to the U.S. senate from North Dakota

1960 – Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary

1961 – The U.S.S.R. detonates hydrogen bomb ‘Tsar Bomba’ over Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean; at 50 megatons of yield, it is the largest explosive device ever detonated

1961 – The Soviet Party Congress unanimously approved an order to remove Joseph Stalin’s body from Lenin’s tomb

1963 – – Rebecca Ann Heineman born as William S. Heineman, American video game programmer; founding member of Interplay Productions and  Logicware , now CEO of Olde Skuul

1972 – U.S. President Nixon approves increasing Social Security spending by $5.3 billion

1973 – The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey is completed between the continents of Europe and Asia over the Bosphorus Strait

1975 – Prince Juan Carlos becomes Spain’s acting head of state, taking over for the country’s ailing dictator, General Francisco Franco

1975 – New York Daily News runs headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” a day after President Gerald R. Ford says he’d veto any proposed federal bailout of New York City

1983 – First democratic elections in Argentina after 7 years of military rule

1985 – Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off for its final successful mission before the Challenger disaster

1988 – Metallica releases their single, “Eye of the Beholder”

1993 – Ulster Defence Association paramilitary mass shooting at a Greysteel, Northern Ireland Halloween party, killing 8 civilians and wounding 13

1995 – Quebec citizens narrowly vote (50.58% to 49.42%) in favour of remaining a Canadian provence in their 2nd national sovereignty referendum

1999 – Stephanie Allen West starts Create a Great Funeral Day. * When her significant other died suddenly in 1988, she faced the overwhelming responsibility of his funeral completely unprepared. Then ten years later, her husband went through a similar struggle with his mother’s funeral, who had left no directions or final wishes. So Allen West decided to encourage people to think about how they would like their life to be celebrated by friends and family, and then let their loved ones know their wishes.

2005 – Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks is the first woman to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda

2005 – The rebuilt Dresden Frauenkirche (an historic Lutheran church destroyed in the WWII firebombing of Dresden) is reconsecrated after a thirteen-year rebuilding project

2010 – Haunted Refrigerator Night * is started by Wellcat as a reminder to clear out that spooky stuff at the back of your fridge

2013 – On the 75^th anniversary of the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, the first World Audio Drama Day * is celebrated

2014 – Sweden is the first European Union member state to officially recognize the State of Palestine

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