More on Charles De Gaulle in English.
A more comprehensive site in French.
De Gaulle's New York Times Obituary
on November 11, 1970.






June 1, 1946—
Assault wins Belmont Stakes and the 7th Triple Crown. It stumbled at the start and trailed at the opening. But his jockey Warren Mehrtens steadily allowed Assault to reach contention. Trailing Natchez by two lengths in midstretch, Assault exploded past him in the final 200 yards, winning by three lengths.
More on Assault's career record.




June 1, 1926— Marilyn Monroe born 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, The Prince and the Show Girl, Some Like It Hot, Let's Make Love, and The Misfits. Alta Vista shows over 299,370 web pages on Marilyn Monroe, while Google lists 1,230,000 Marilyn Links: Quotes, Dante, Films, Photos, U.S. Stamp, Obituary, and More Links.

June 1: Born on this day— 1793 Henry Francis Lyte, Scottish clergyman (wrote hymn "Abide with Me") 1801 Brigham Young, Whitingham, VT, Mormon religious leader & visionary 1804 Mikhail Glinka, Russian composer 1861 William Wilfred Campbell, Ontario, Canadian poet (Lake Lyrics) 1878 John Masefield, British poet laureate (Salt-Water Ballads) 1890 Frank Morgan, actor (The Wizard of Oz, The Great Ziegfeld) 1898 Molly Picon, Yiddish actress (Fiddler on the Roof) 1907 Frank Whittle, inventor of jet engine 1921 Nelson Riddle, Oradell, NJ, musical conductor (Batman, Frank Sinatra) 1926 Andy Griffith, Mount Airy NC, actor (Andy Griffith Show, Matlock) 1926 Marilyn Monroe, Los Angeles, actress (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) 1934 Pat Boone, Florida, singer & actor (April Love, Love Letters In the Sand) 1935 Reverend Ike, SC, evangelist minister 1937 Morgan Freeman actor (Driving Mrs Daisy) 1939 Cleavon Little, Chickasha, OK, actor (Blazing Saddles) 1943 Richard Goode, Bronx, concert pianist (1980 Avery Fisher Award) 1945 Frederica von Stade, Somerville, NJ, opera singer 1947 Ron Wood, rock guitarist (Faces, Jeff Beck Group, Rolling Stones) 1950 Graham Russell, singer (Air Supply) 1955 Chiyonofuji, sumo wrestler 1974 Alanis Morrissette, Ottawa, Canada, singer (4 Grammy Awards, 1996)

June 1: Events on this day— 1621 British settlement of New Plymouth is granted a Royal Patent 1638 First earthquake recorded in U.S. at Plymouth, Massachusetts 1792 Kentucky admitted as 15th U.S. state 1796 Tennessee admitted as 16th U.S. state 1809 Samulel T. Coleridge publishes journal The Friend that ends March 15, 1810 1813 Captain John Lawrence utters Navy motto: "Don't give up the ship" 1843 Sojourner Truth leaves New York to begin her career as antislavery activist 1845 Homing pigeon completes 11,000 kilometers trip (Namibia-London) in 55 days 1861 First skirmish in the Civil War, Fairfax Court House, Virginia 1862 General Lee assumes command after Joe Johnston is injured at Seven Pines 1868 James Buchanan, 15th U.S. President, dies near Lancaster, Pennsylvania 1869 Thomas Edison patents Voting Machine 1888 California gets its first seismograph 1888 Lick Observatory transferred to the Regents of University of California 1898 Trans-Mississippi International Exposition opens in Omaha, Nebraska 1898 George Bernard Shaw marries Charlotte Payne-Townsend in London at age 41 1905 Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition opens in Portland, Oregon 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition opens in Seattle 1915 First Zeppelin air raid over England 1925 Lou Gehrig replaces Wally Pipp of Yankees         (first of record 2130 consecutive games) 1933 Century of Progress World's Fair opens in Chicago 1937 Bill Dietrich of Chicago White Sox no-hits St Louis Browns 8-0 1938 Superman Comics by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster makes its debut 1943 Actor Leslie Howard dies in plane shot down by Germans         flying from Lisbon to London 1946 Assault wins Belmont Stakes and the Triple Crown 1949 First magazine on microfilm offered to subscribers (Newsweek) 1957 Don Bowden becomes first U.S. runner to break the 4-minute mile 1958 Charles de Gaulle becomes Premier of France (5th Republic) 1959 Constitution of Tunisia promulgated (National Day) 1959 Wilbert Harrison's "Kansas City" tops music charts 1959 Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans" tops music charts 1960 Willem Elsschot, Flemish novelist ("Will-o'-the-wisp")         & poet dies in Antwerp, Belgium 1965 Arno Penzias & Robert Wilson of Bell Labs detect cosmic background radiation 1966 George Harrison is impressed by Ravi Shankar's concert in London 1967 Beatles release Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in US & goes gold 1968 Helen Keller, blind & deaf author-lecturer, dies at 87 in Westport, Connecticut 1968 Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs Robinson" hits #1 in music record charts 1970 Russian's Soyuz 9 launched into Earth orbit for 18 days 1971 Ed Sullivan's final television show 1973 Paul McCartney & Wings release "Live & Let Die" 1975 Nolan Ryan of California Angels pitches 4th no-hitter to beat Baltimore Orioles 1-0 1980 Ted Turner's Cable News Network begins broadcasting 1983 Irene Cara's "Flashdance: What a Feeling" tops music charts 1990 Dow Jones Avg hits a record high of 2,900.97 1991 Mount Pinatubo erupts for first time in 600 years in the Phillipines

June 1: Quotes on this day— My round of thank-you visits was not without pleasure and profit; I was shown several things which I had neglected. Cavaliere Venuti even let me see some hidden treasures. I took another reverent look at his priceless, though mutilated, Ulysses, and together we paid a farewell visit to the porcelain works, where I lingered over the Hercules and the beautiful Campanian vases. He was most affectionate when we parted, and said that he only wished I did not have to leave him so soon. My banker, too, at whose house I arrived just at dinnertime, would not let me go. This would have been all very well if my thoughts had not been running on lava all the time. I was still settling bills, packing and doing this and that when night began to fall, and I hurried to the Molo to watch the lights and their trembling reflections in the agitated sea, the full moon in all its glory, the flying sparks of the volcano and, above all, the lava, which had not been there two nights ago, moving on its fiery, relentless way. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Italian Journey,      June 1, 1737 Evening (Naples) Lover of the muses, you who vow to their cult your purest blood, ask these learned divinities to give you back that lively eye sparkling with youth, that lightness of an untroubled mind. These chaste sisters have been worse than courtesans to you. Their perfidious delights are more illusory than the cup of pleasure. It is your soul that has unnerved your senses, your twenty-five years without youthfulness, your fervor with strength. Your imagination embraces everything, and you haven't memory of a common shopkeeper. The true wisdom of the philosopher ought to consist in enjoying everythin. Yet we apply ourselves to dissecting and destroying everything that is good in itself, that has virtue, albeit the virtue there is in mere illusions. Nature gives us this life like a toy to a weak child. We want to see how it all works; we break everything. There remains in our hands and before our eyes, stupid and opened too late, the sterile wreckage, fragments that will not again make a whole. The good is so simple. — Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), Journal, Tuesday, June 1, 1824 On opening the window of the studio in the morning, always with this same misty weather, I am as if intoxicated with the odor exhaled by all this verdure, drenched with raindrops, and with all these flowers, bent over and ravaged, but still beautiful. Of what pleasures is the city man not deprived, the miserable employee or lawyer who breathes no other odor than that of dusty papers or of the mud of that miserable Paris! What compensation for the peasant, for the man of the fields! What perfume there is in this damp earth and in these trees! That strong odor of the woods, how penetrating it is, and how immediately it awakens gracious and pure memories, memories of one's earliest youth and of eelings which belong to the depth of the soul! O beloved scenes where once I saw you, dear people whom I am to see no more, beloved days that delghted me and that are gone! How many times has the sight of this verdure and this delightful odor of the woods awakened memories which are the asylum, the blessed refuge to which the spirit takes wings, so as to withdraw from daily cares! This affection which consoles me and which alone gives my heart a movement like that of the past, for how long a time will fate let me keep it? — Eugene Delacroix, Journal, Wednesday, June 1, 1853 The man who mistakes his profession, the Scholar who takes his subject from dictation & not from his heart, should know that he has lost as much as he seems to have gained... Societies as well as individuals are bubbles. But Nature cannot be cheated. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can impart life, & though we burst we can only be valued as we make ourselves valuable. — Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journal, June 1, 1835 Evening— To the Lee place, the moon about full. The sounds I hear by the bridge: the midsummer frog, the nighthawk, crickets, the peetweet, the hum of dor-bugs, and the whip-poor-will. The boys are coming home from fishing, for the river is down at last. The moving clouds are the drama of the moonlight nights, and never-failing entertainment of nightly travellers. You can never foretell the fate of the moon— whether she will prevail over or be obscured by the clouds half an hour hence. The traveller's sympathy with the moon makes the drama of the shifting clouds interesting. — Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Journal, June 1, 1852 I am a man of 30 with wrinkles on my forehead and lines on my face that make me look 40 and my hands are full of furrows— yet when Father looks at me through his spectacles he sees me as a little boy (1 1/2 years ago Father wrote to me, "You are in your first youth"). And that is said with the tuppence-worth of profundity I have heard so often before. — Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo, The Hague, June 1, 1882 I must tell you that I sometimes long very much to see the Louvre and the Luxembourg again, and that sooner or later I shall have to study the technique and colour of Millet, Delacroix, Corot and others. But it is not immediately urgent; I think the more I work, the greater use it will be to me when it happens someday. But it is a fact that one needs both nature and pictures. It is especially that question of the colour scale in which they are painted, and the breaking and juxtaposition of the colours, which preoccupies me daily. — Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo,Nuenen, June 1, 1885 Ascension Day— Whistler retrospective. Panthéon (Puvis de Chavannes), walked across the Bois de Boulogne to Saint-Cloud. Back on the Seine. At night, to the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt: Il Barbiere di Seviglia in Italian. — Paul Klee (1879-1940), Diaries, June 1, 1905 Monsieur: The book I am writing, Ulysses, has so exhausted me (I have been working at it for six years already) that I intend to take a short holiday. I shall not fail to send you something for your review when this labour to which I have condemned myself allows me a little respite. — James Joyce (1879-1940), Letter to Henry Davray,      2 June 1920 (via Sanità 2, III, Trieste, Italy) June. Luxembourg Gardens: A Sunday morning full of wind and sunlight. Over the large pool the wind splatters the waters of the fountain; the tiny sailboats on the windswept water and the swallows around the huge trees. Two youths discussing: "You who believe in human dignity." Prologue: "Love..."                 "Knowledge..."                 "It's the same word." Although in daylight the flights of birds always seem aimless, in the evening they always seem to have found a destination. They are flying toward something. Thus it is perhaps in the evening of life... Is there an evening of life? Van Gogh struck by a thought of Renan: "Forget oneself; achieve great things, reach nobility and go beyond the vulgarity in which the existence of most individuals stagnates." "If one continues loving sincerely what is truly worthy of love and does not waste one's love on insignificant things and meaningless things and colorless things, gradually one will get more light and become stronger." "If one perfects oneself in a single thing and understands it fully, one achieves in addition understanding and knowledge of many other things." "I am a faithful sort of person in my faithlessness." "If I make landscapes, there will always be a hint of faces in them." He quotes Doré's remark: "I have the patience of an ox." "I cannot readily, in life and in painting too, get along without God, but I cannot, when ill, get along without something that is greater than I, which is my life, the power of creation." Van Gogh's long groping until the age of 27 before finding his way and discovering that he is a painter. — Albert Camus (1913-1960), Notebooks, June 1943

June 1, 1938—
Superman Comics debuts.

Visit Jamie Corville's web site:
History of Superhero Comic Books

John Masefield (1878-1967)

Born on June 1, 1878,
in Ledbury, Herefordshire, UK.
Masefield was England's
15th poet laureate (1930-67),
and best known for his
"Salt-Water Ballads" (1902).

ROADWAYS

One road leads to London,
One road runs to Wales,
My road leads me seawards
To the white dipping sails.

One road leads to the river,
As it goes singing slow;
My road leads to shipping,
Where the bronzed sailors go.

Leads me, lures me, calls me
To salt green tossing sea;
A road without earth's road-dust
Is the right road for me.

A wet road heaving, shining,
And wild with seagulls' cries,
A mad salt sea-wind blowing
The salt stray in my eyes.

My road calls me, lures me
West, east, south, and north;
Most roads lead men homewards,
My road leads me forth

To add more miles to the tally
Of grey miles left behind,
In quest of that one beauty
God put me here to find.

— John Masefield, Poems (1951)

More Masefield's poems:
"Her Heart" & "Being Her Friend"
Complete Sonnets (1915)