Happy Birthday! 52 years young

Former Cuban President Fidel Castro is 85. Actor Pat Harrington is 82. Actress Gretchen Corbett is 64. High wire aerialist Philippe Petit is 62. Hockey Hall of Famer Bobby Clarke is 62. Actor Danny Bonaduce is 52. Actress Kathryn Fiore is 32.

On this date

In 1910, Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, died in London at age 90.

In 1960, the first two-way telephone conversation by satellite took place with the help of Echo 1. The Central African Republic became totally independent of French rule.

In 1961, Berlin was divided as East Germany sealed off the border between the city's eastern and western sectors and began building a wall that would stand for the next 28 years until it finally came down in 1989.

In 2010, former veteran NBC newsman Edwin Newman died in Oxford, England, at age 91.

100 years ago today

1911: Bullish on the Bulldog: "The Mack Brothers Motorcar Works, of Allentown, have received from the Fire Department of New York an order for eight heavy auto hook and ladder trucks, which are to cost, fully equipped, about $10,000 each. The New York Fire Department lately appropriated $1,000,000 for automobile fire apparatus."

^ Just want to bang on the drum all day: "We Won't Work, Will We?" is the name of "a camp at Carpentersville chosen by a party of a dozen South Siders — and they mean just what the name implies. They were reluctant to explain the meaning of 'W.W.W.W.W,' the sign on the tent, but in some way the name became known, and now they say they don't care who knows it."

50 years ago today

1961: If you build it, they will protest: Despite some residents' protests, the Franklin Township Committee approved an application to build a drag strip in the Oak Grove section of the township. Construction is expected to begin soon. "Mayor Charles Conover said that the drag strip might be attacked under the nuisance ordinance, but added that he felt the strip could not be proved a nuisance until it existed."

25 years ago today

1986: Link missing no more: "After more than 20 years of work and waiting, a 'missing link' of Interstate 78 opened today in Union County, completing a 63-mile stretch of the highway between Phillipsburg and the Holland Tunnel to New York City. Interstate78 was proposed in 1958 and its first sections opened in the 1960s. But construction of the last stretch in New Jersey became bogged down in a debate about how the road would affect the environmentally sensitive 2,000-acre Watchung Reservation. Construction on the final link, which cost $111 million to build, began in 1982."

Quote of the day

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence." — From the poem "Mending Wall" by American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963).

Almanac is compiled by Pete Brekus, Express-Times