The first Mickey Mouse comic strip was published by King Features Syndicate
and first appeared in The New York Mirror, as a daily on Monday, January 13,
1930. They were scripted by Disney himself for the first few weeks with assistant
Win Smith as the inker. Smith was succeeded by Floyd Gottfredson who drew the
strip for 45 years until his retirement.
Floyd Guttfredson
Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse
The United States issued its first commemorative stamp on January 2, 1893, the
$1 Columbian Exposition issue, "Isabella pledging her jewels", one of a set of 16 commemoratives issued to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher
Columbus’s arrival in the New World in 1492.
Robert LeRoy Ripley (December 25, 1890 – May 27, 1949)
Cartoonist, and armature anthropologist Robert Ripley first called his cartoon
feature, originally involving sports feats, Champs and Chumps, and it premiered
on December 19, 1918, in the New York Globe (above). He began adding items not related to sports, and in October 1919 he changed the title to Believe It or Not. When
the Globe folded in 1923, Ripley moved to the New York Evening Post. The popular franchise was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television,
a chain of museums, and a book series.
August 1, 2003
Portrait of legendary Lost Squadron in front of #28, the lead plane of "Flight
19" that supposedly vanished into the Bermuda Triangle shortly after WWII.
Flight 19 was the designation of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared
on Wednesday, December 5, 1945 during a Navy-authorized navigation training flight from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, Florida. All 14 airmen on the flight were lost,
as were all 13 crew members of a PMB Mariner flying boat assumed to have exploded
in mid-air while searching for the flight.
Navy investigators could not determine the cause for the loss of Flight 19 but, said the aircraft may have become disoriented and ditched in rough seas after running out of fuel. In the last decade, the search for remains of the squadron has been expanded
to include an area farther east, into the Atlantic Ocean with no results. The lost flight remains one of the great aviation legends of all time and was featured in the 1977
Steven Spielberg science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
