August 5, 1962— Actress Marilyn Monroe found dead at age 36 of apparent self-inflicted drug overdose. She was born on June 1, 1926 in Los Angeles as Norma Jean Mortenson. She was married to baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio (1954) and Pulitzer winning playwright Arthur Miller (1956-60). Her films include Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Prince and the Show Girl, Some Like It Hot, Let's Make Love, and The Misfits. Alta Vista shows over 75,000 web pages on Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Links: Quotes, Films, Photos, U.S. Stamp, Obituary, More Links.

August 5, 1966— Beatles release their songs Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby in Great Britain. Their film Yellow Submarine was released on July 17, 1968. This animated psychedelic film brings the Beatles to Pepperland to fight the Blue Meanies. It seems the Blue Meanies have taken over, and it's up to the Beatles to help Fred return music and happiness to Pepperland. Although the film Yellow Submarine had very little input from the Beatles, they do contribute several songs, and make a personal appearance at the end of the film.
Film Summary of Yellow Submarine, Film Review from Salon,
Hidden Stories Behind Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine Animation

August 5, 1984— Joan Benoit wins first women's Olympic marathon championship in 2:24:52 at Los Angeles. Benoit's dream to become a professional skiier ended when she broke a leg on a slalom course at age 15. In 1979 Benoit set a course and American record at 2:35:15 for Boston Marathon. On April 18, 1983, Benoit's 2:22:43 Boston Marathon set a new course, American, and world record. Benoit's knee gave out while training just five weeks before the 1984 Olympic trails. Two weeks after arthroscopic surgery she qualified for the 1984 Olympic team. Leaving the competition behind at three miles, she won the inaugural women's Olympic Marathon. Benoit's 2:21:21 is still the record for the Chicago Marathon (1985). She was the winner of the 1985 Sullivan Award. In 1998 Joan Benoit Samuelson was inducted into the National Distance Running Hall of Fame. Benoit Biography

August 5: Born on this day— 1540 Joseph Justus Scaliger, Agen, Italy, Dutch philologist and historian 1623 Pietro Antonio Cesti, Arezzo, Italy, Italian composer 1737 Antonio Franconi, Italian impresario 1749 Thomas Lynch, South Carolina, signer of Declaration of Independence 1802 Niels Henrik Abel, Frindoe, Norway, mathematician 1811 Ambrose Thomas, Metz, France, French composer 1850 Guy de Maupassant, French writer (The Necklace, Pierre et Jean, Notre Coeur) 1876 Mary R. Beard, historian (Woman as a Force in History) 1880 Ruth Sawyer, Boston, Mass., children's writer, story teller (Roller Skates) 1889 Conrad Aiken, Savannah, Georgia, poet (Pulitzer Prize 1929) 1890 Erich Kleiber, Austrian conductor (NBC Symphony 1945-1946) 1903 Rensis Likert, psychologist (attitude scaling & industrial psychology) 1906 John Huston, film director (Maltese Falcon, African Queen) 1906 Wassily Leontief, Russian-born American economist (Nobel laureate 1973) 1908 Harold Holdt, Australian prime minister (1966-1967) 1911 Robert Taylor, actor (Camille, Death Valley Days) 1914 David Brian, actor (Pocketful of Miracles, The Immortal) 1914 Anita Colby, first supermodel, actress (Cover Girl, China Passage) 1926 Sidney Omarr, Philadelphia, astrologer & author (My World of Astrology) 1930 Neil Armstrong, NASA astronaut (first to walk on the moon) 1934 Wendell Berry, poet, novelist, essayist (Landscape of Harmony) 1935 John Saxon, Brooklyn, NY, film actor (The Cardinal, Enter the Dragon) 1940 Roman Gabriel, football quarterback (LA Rams, Philadelphia Eagles) 1946 Loni Anderson, St. Paul, Minnesota, actress (WKRP in Cincinnati) 1962 Patrick Ewing, Kingston, Jamaica, basketball player (New York Knicks) 1968 John Olerud, Seattle, baseball player (1993 American League batting champ) Cathy Abrams, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, chemist, archaeologist, teacher

August 5: Events on this day— 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland as the first English colony in North America 1775 First Spanish ship San Carlos enters San Francisco Bay 1837 First ascent of Mount Marcy, highest peak in Adirondack, New York (5344 ft) 1850 Herman Melville meets Nathaniel Hawthorne at a literary picnic in New Hampshire 1858 Cyrus Field completes first transatlantic telegraph cable 1858 Julia Archibald Holmes became the first woman to reach Pike's Peak's summit, Colorado 1861 U.S. government levied an income tax for the first time 1864 Admiral David Farragut: "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" in Battle of Mobile Bay 1884 Cornerstone for Statue of Liberty laid on Bedloe's Island, New York City Harbor 1891 First Traveler Cheques issued by American Express 1914 First traffic light installed (Euclid Ave & East 105th Street, Cleveland) 1923 First American to swim the English Channel (Henry Sullivan) 1924 Harold Gray's comic strip "Little Orphan Annie" made its debut 1936 Jesse Owens wins his third Olympic gold medal in Berlin, running 200-meters in 20.7 seconds 1940 John Whitehead of St. Louis Brown no-hits Detroit Tigers 4-0 in 6 innings 1945 Atom Bomb dropped on Hiroshima from B-29 bomber Enola Gay (8:16 am, Aug 6th in Japan) 1957 "American Bandstand" hosted by Dick Clark goes on network ABC-TV 1960 Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) gains independence from France 1962 First quasar (3C 273) located by Cyril Hazard in the constellation Virgo by radio 1962 Actress Marilyn Monroe found dead at age 36 of apparent self-inflicted drug overdose 1963 United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union sign nuclear test ban treaty in Moscow 1964 Beatles record "Leave My Kitten Alone" 1964 US begins bombing North Vietnam 1966 Martin Luther King Jr stoned during Chicago march 1966 Beatles release "Revolver" album in U.S. 1966 Beatles release "Yellow Submarine" & "Eleanor Rigby" in Britain 1966 Saul Sternberg's "High Speed Scanning in Human Memory" published in Science 1969 U.S. space probe Mariner 7 flies by Mars, sending back scientific data & photos 1972 Moody Blues release "Nights in White Satin" 1973 Phil Niekro of Atlanta Braves no-hits San Diego Padres 9-0 1984 Joan Benoit (US) wins first Olympic marathon for women (2:24:52) 1984 Actor Richard Burton dies in Geneva, Switzerland, at the age of 58 1985 Chicago White Sox Tom Seaver wins his 300 games (beating Yankees at Yankee Stadium) 1986 Ingrid Kristiansen of Norway sets the 5k woman's record (14:37.33)

Quotes on this day: August 5 If you read much at a time you have a better sight of the plan & connexion of the book but you have less lively attention. If you read little, fine things catch your eye & you read accurately but all proportion & ulterior purpose are at an end. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, August 5, 1835 A man should behave himself as a guest of Nature but not as a drone. God never cants. And the charm of Plutarch & Plato & Thucydides for me I believe, is that there I get ethics without cant. I am struck with the splendor of the sentences I meet in books, especially in Plutarch taken from Pindar, Plato, & Heraclitus, these three. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, August 5, 1837 Sphere Music— Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music— pure, unmixed music— in which no wail mingles. — Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1838 Moon half full. I sit beside Hubbard's Grove... When the moon is on the increase and half full, it is already in mid-heavens at sunset, so that there is no marked twilight intervening. I hear the whip-poor-will at a distance, but they are few of late... As the twilight deepens and the moonlight is more and more bright, I begin to distinguish myself, who I am and where; as my walls contract, I become more collected and composed, and sensible of my own existence, as when a lamp is brought into a dark apartment and I see who the company are. With the coolness and the mild silvery light, I recover some sanity, my thoughts are more distinct, moderated, and tempered. Reflection is more possible while the day goes by. The intense light of the sun unfits me for meditation, makes me wander in my thought; my life is too diffuse and dissipated; routine succeeds and prevails over us; the trivial has greater power then, and most at noonday, the most trivial hour of the twenty-four. I am sobered by the moonlight. I bethink myself. It is like a cup of cold water to a thirsty man. The moonlight is more favorable to meditation than sunlight. The sun lights this world from without, shines in at a window, but the moon is like a lamp within an apartment. It shines for us. The stars themselves make a more visible, and hence a nearer and more domestic roof at night. Nature broods us, and has not left our germs of thought to be hatched by the sun. We feel her heat and see her body darkening over us. Our thoughts are not dissipated, but come back to us like an echo. The different kinds of moonlight are infinite. This is not a night for contrasts of light and shade, but a faint diffused light in which there is light enough to travel, and that is all. What an entertainment for the traveller, this incessant motion apparently of the moon traversing the clouds! Whether you sit or stand, it is always preparing new developments for you... You all alone, the moon all alone, overcoming with incessant victory whole squadrons of clouds above the forests and the lakes and rivers and the mountains. You cannot always calculate which one the moon will undertake next. I see a solitary firefly over the woods. The moon wading through clouds; though she is eclipsed by this one, I see her shining on a more distant but lower one. The entrance into Hubbard's Wood above the spring, coming from the hill, is like the entrance to a cave; but when you are within, there are some streaks of light on the edge of the path. All these leaves so still, none whispering, no birds in motion,— how can I be else than still and thoughtful? — Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1851, 7:30 pm It is to be noted that every original talent shows the same phases in its development as art in general goes through in its various evolutions, to wit: timidity and dryness at the beginning, and breadth or negligence as to details at the end... How singular this law is! What occurs here, occurs in everything. I might be lead to infer that every object is in itself a complete world. Man, it has been said, is a little world. Not only is he in his unity a complete whole, with an ensemble of laws consistent with those of the great whole, but even a part of an object is a species of complete unity; thus a branch detached from a tree presents the conditions of the tree in its entirety... Plant the branch of a poplar tree, and soon it will become a poplar... At this moment, I am writing alongside a big anthill, partly the result of small accidents in the surface of the ground at the foot of a tree, and partly due to the patient work of the ants; there are slopes, and parts that overhang and form little gorges, through which the inhabitants go back and forth with a busy air, like the little people of a little country, which the imagination can magnify in a moment. At Dieppe I noticed the same thing in the rocks at the water level which the sea covers at every tide; among them I saw gulfs, arms of the sea, frowning peaks suspended above abysses, valleys which by their windings divided up a whole country that showed the accidents we observe about us. The same thing is true as to the waves of the sea, which are divided, themselves, into little waves, again subdividing, and individually presenting the same accidents of light and the same drawing... Just after this observation, in the same sketchbook, are notes on certain phenomena which repeat themselves in extremely different objects, such as the designs that the sea engraves in the sand and that recall the stripes on tigers. — Eugene Delacroix, Journal, August 5, 1854 I can neither play piquet nor billiards nor do I know how to pay attentions to people nor how to work after nature nor simply how to be agreeable to society. I think I weighed a bit heavily on them and that they had thought I was more resourceful. — Edgar Degas, Letter to Bartholomé, Paris, August 5, 1882 Retrospect on the artistic beginnings of the past three years. Whatever in these diaries is unclear, confused, and undeveloped seems hardly as repellent, or as ridiculous even, as the first attempts to translate these circumstances into art. A diary is simply not art, but a temporal accomplishment. One thing, however, I must grant myself: the will to attain the authentic was there. Else I might have been content, as a tolerable sketcher of nudes... The very fact that the whole man at times fell very low in the course of these three years made him eager for and capable of purification. Many projects are witnesses to this. In the end, the need for absolute form is not lacking either. Herewith equilibrium begins to establish itself. That my bethrothal should coincide in time with this state is perfectly logical. — Paul Klee, Diaries of Paul Klee: 1898-1918, Bern, August 5, 1901 Hemingway says that before 1927 all his stories were returned by editors "with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, contes." Thus only a few years ago even Hemingway with all his clarity was considered unprintable. What happened in the few years since? "Ulysses" which was considered difficult reading is now hailed as a classic and everyone understands it. Even "Finnegan's Wake" is beginning to be understood. By the same tokenk and in its time, "Sister Carrie" sat for years in a publishing house because it was considered unprintable. By the same token, and in its time, I believe, "On the Road" because its new vision roughs against the grain of established ideas is going to be considered unprintable for awhile to come... To label it incoherent is not only a semantic mistake but an act of cowardice and intellectual death. Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse. The masses catch up to the incomprehensible; incoherent finds its way to an intelligently typewritten page. In exchange for this compliment, your calling "On the Road" a "thoroughly incoherent mess," what am I to do, mail you an I.O.U. for $250 and the contract?... This is what will happen: "On the Road" will be published by someone else, with a few changes and omissions and additions, and it will gain its due recognition, in time, as the first or one of the first modern prose books in America; not merely a "novel," which is after all a European form; and its publisher will be proud to have it on his list because it will live... I didn't write "On the Road" to be malicious, I wrote it with joy in my heart, and a conviction that somewhere along the line somebody will see it without the present-day goggles on and realize the freedom of expression that still lies ahead... I wish I could make felt the thousands of hours of anxiety and hard work that have gone into the past year since our contractual association began. Multiply that by 12 years, when I started writing; and always without enough money to live like other people, never sufficient clothes, and on the road actual starvation... You might as well ask Michelangelo to cut David down to livingroom size for all you're going to get out of me in this "revision" when I have a thousand books to write... Without the first installment of the advance it is a physical impossibility to do any revising work on this controversial manuscript. Please let me know what you intend to do as quickly as possible. I should like to get "On the Road" on the road to its eventual publisher. Yours bitterly, — Jack Kerouac, Letter to Carl Solomon, August 5, 1952 (Rocky Mount, N.C.)       Selected Letters: 1940-1956,       Ed. Ann Charters, Viking, NY, 1995, pp. 376-377 I don't know how to measure happiness. The issue is happiness, there is no other issue, or no other issue one has a right to think about for other people, to think about politically, but I don't know how to measure happiness. — George Oppen, Letter to June Oppen Degnan, August 5, 1970 Just this greets me this morning; just this, its own remark; just this, there is no other; just this, the sound of one hand clapping— the sound, that is, of One Taste. The subtle and casual can be so overwhelmingly numinous and holy; One Taste is so pitifully obvious and simple. — Ken Wilber, One Taste: The Journals of Ken Wilber, August 5, 1998       Shambhala, Boston, 1999, pp. 186-187 You are dearest to my heart. I can't tell you all the love I have for you. You are my treasure, my shining star. My love for you is true love. Your residence is at the Homestead Care Home, but my residence is in your heart. — Tsien Chung Chou, Letter to Yvonne Liu Chou, August 5, 2000       (Dad wrote to Mom a week after his 98th birthday)