L.A. was founded on this date in 1781. They didn’t call it L.A. then. They called it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola).1
The Edsel was introduced by the Ford Motor Company 51 years ago today.
Paul Harvey is 90 today, and that’s the rest of the story.
Tom Watson (59) and Raymond Floyd (66) share this birthday.
Beyonce Knowles is 27.
Richard Wright was born 100 years ago today.
Wright spent ten years in Chicago, working as a ditch-digger, delivery boy, hospital worker, and a postal clerk. He began to write short stories and his first book was the collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). Two years later, he published his masterpiece Native Son (1940), the story of a black man named “Bigger Thomas” who gets a job as a driver for a beautiful, young white woman and then accidentally kills her. Wright based the character on every bully, rebel, and outlaw he’d ever known.
The Book-of-the-Month-Club demanded that he delete some of the more explicitly sexual scenes from the novel, and publishers worried that even the edited version would be too shocking for most readers. But Native Son sold 215,000 copies in three weeks and went on to become the first bestselling novel by an African American writer. The unedited text of the novel was finally published in 1991.
1 The Spanish mission at the Pecos Pueblo had a similar name: Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula de los Pecos. Porciúncula or Porziuncola is the name of a small chapel near Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis established the Franciscan Order in the early 13th century.