September

Grandparents Day
Ice Cream Month
Library Card Sign-up Month
International Peace Day
International Solar Month
National Sight-Saving Month
National Better breakfast Month
National Clock Month
Rosh Hashanah
Yom Kippur
Labor Day : Began 1802 with Labor Unions

1. Benjamin Franklin married Deborah Read, 1730. They lived in the house where he had his print shop.
   

2. The crew of the submarine Finback rescued four downed pilots, including a seaman second class named George Bush, 1944.

   London Fire 1666, began in Pudding Lane, destroyed 80% of London with over 13,000 houses and 80 churches burned.

   Birthday of Allen Drury (1819) who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his novel Advise and Consent .
   

3. Sadaharu Oh, first baseman of Tokyo's Yomiuri Giants, broke Hank Aaron's home run record, 1977. He hit his 756th homer.
   

4. Robert Fulton began operating his first steamboat on the Hudson River, 1807.
   

5. Be Late for Something Day
   The first Continental Congress assembled at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelpha, 1774.

6. The third college edition of Webster's New World Dictionary went on sale, 1988. It included defintions for couch potato, fat city, and many other contemporary terms.
   

7. Artist Grandma Moses was born on September 7, 1870. She did not start painting until she was 78 years old!
   Forest fires advanced on Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park, 1988.
   

8. Abraham Lincoln offered sound advice on dealing with people in a speech in Clinto, IL, 1858.
   

9. The first national log-rolling championship was held in Omaha, NE, 1898.
   

10. National Grandparents Week
    John Smith was elected governor of the Jamestown colony of Virginia, 1608.

11. Frederick Law Olmsted was appointed superintendent of Central Park in New York city 1857. (Guess what was on the site before it became a park?)
    

12. Alice Stebbins Wells, the first female police officer inthe U.S. was sworn in by the Los Angeles Police Department, 1910.
    

13. Leaf miner caterpillars eat their way through the leaves of trees, wildflowers, and garden plants. (How can you tell if a leaf was once a miner's home?)
    

14. German composer George Frederick Handel finished the Messiah after 23 straight days of work, 1741.
    

15. William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States was born, 1857.
    

16. The Village of Shawmut, Mass., changed its name to Boston, 1630.
    

17. Tokien Week
    New York governor Alfred E. Smith laid the cornerstone for the Empire State Building, 1930.

18. The Cabbage Patch Scarecrow Contest began in Lahaska, PA. (Why don't scarecrows scare crows?)
    

19. 25 American mothers and children returned from the Soviet Union, 1988. They were part of an exchange program.

20. Chester Arthur became the 21st president of the United States, 1881. His predecessor, James Gaarfield, died the day before.
    

21. The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser became the first daily newspaper published inthe U.S., 1784.

22. Mars passed its closest to Earth in 17 years, 1988. It was "only" 36.5 million miles away.

23. A time capsule was buried at the site of the New York World's Fair, 1938. It included a Bible, a mail-order catalog, and films of President Roosevelt and of a football game. It will be opened in 6938.
    

24. American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was born, 1896. In a letter to his daughter, nicknamed Pie, he told her not to worry about parents, boys, growing up and mosquitoes.

25. The Day Butterfly Center in Pine Mountain, GA opened, 1988.
    

26. The St. Looouis Browns beat the New York Yankees inthe shortest 9-inning American League baseball game, 1926. It lasted 55 minutes.
    

27. 100-meter runner Ben Johnson became the first gold medalist disqualified from the Olympics for illegal drug use, 1988.
    

28. * It was on this day in 1066 that William the Conqueror of Normandy arrived on British soil. He defeated the British in the Battle of Hastings, and on Christmas day he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abby. One of the most important consequences of the Norman conquest of England was its effect on the English language. At the time, the British were speaking a combination of Saxon and Old Norse. The Normans spoke French. Over time, the languages blended, and the result was that English became a language incredibly rich in synonyms. Because the French speakers were aristocrats, the French words often became the fancy words for things. The Normans gave us "mansion"; the Saxons gave us "house." The Normans gave us "beef"; the Saxons gave us, "cow." The English language has gone on accepting additions to its vocabulary ever since the Norman invasion, and it now contains more than a million words, making it one of the most diverse languages on Earth. Writers have been arguing for hundreds of years about whether this is a good thing. Walt Whitman said, "The English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all." On the other hand, the critic Cyril Connelly wrote, "The English language is like a broad river ... being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck." And the poet Derek Walcott, who grew up in a British colony in the West Indies, said, "The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
    * Chinese philosopher Confucius was born, 551 B.C.
    * It's the birthday of cartoonist Al Capp, born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Connecticut (1909). He's the creator of the cartoon strip L'il Abner, about a hillbilly named Abner Yokum who lived in the fictional town of Dogpatch, Kentucky. The strip ran from 1934 to 1977. It's been called the greatest cartoon strip of all time. John Steinbeck once said that Al Capp was one of the greatest living writers in the world and should receive the Nobel Prize. The strip was so popular that when Capp wrote about an imaginary tradition called Sadie Hawkins Day, on which an eligible male is forced to marry any woman who catches him, high schools across America started having Sadie Hawkins Dances.

29. The U.S. Mint issued shuttle coins to commenmorate the launch of the shuttle Discover, 1988. The coins were designed by children.
    

30. Samuel Slocum patented the stapler, 1841. He called it a "machine for sticking pins into paper."

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