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Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977)

On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock music festival opened on a patch of
farmland in White Lake, a hamlet in the upstate New York town of Bethel.

Promoters John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and Michael Lang originally envisioned the festival as a way to raise funds to build a recording
studio and rock-and-roll retreat near the town of Woodstock, New York. The longtime artists’ colony was already a home base for Bob Dylan and other musicians. Despite their relative inexperience, the young promoters
managed to sign a roster of top acts, including the Jefferson Airplane, the
Who, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, Jimi
Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many more.

Plans for the festival were on the verge of foundering, however, after both Woodstock and the nearby town of Wallkill denied permission to hold the
event. Dairy farmer Max Yasgur came to the rescue at the last minute,
giving the promoters access to his 600 acres of land in Bethel, some 50
miles from Woodstock. The event attracted an audience of more than
400.00.

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Stephen Glenn Martin is 74  years old today.

Actor, comedian, writer, filmmaker, and musician. Steve Martin came to
public notice in the 1960s as a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour, and later as a frequent guest on The Tonight Show. In the 1970s,
Martin performed his offbeat, comedy routines before packed houses on
national tours. Since the 1980s, having branched away from comedy,
Martin has become a successful actor, as well as an author, playwright,
pianist, and banjo player, eventually earning him Emmy, Grammy, and
American Comedy awards, among other honors.

In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Martin at sixth place in a list of the 100
greatest stand-up comics. He was awarded an Honorary Academy Award
at the Academy’s 5th Annual Governors Awards in 2013.

The Jerk (1979)

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)

On this day in 1973, the nostalgic teenage coming-of-age movie
American Graffiti, directed and co-written by George Lucas,
opened in theaters across the U.S. Set in California in the
summer of 1962, American Graffiti was nominated for five
Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture,
and helped launch the big-screen careers of Richard Dreyfuss
and Harrison Ford, as well as the former child actor and future
Oscar-winning filmmaker Ron Howard. The film’s success
enabled Lucas to get his next movie made, the mega-hit Star
Wars (1977).

Wolfman Jack (Robert Weston Smith) appears as the D.J. 

Harrison Ford

Richard (Dick) Wagstaff Clark (November 30, 1929 – April 18, 2012)

Television, rock and roll and teenagers. In the late 1950s, when television and
rock and roll were new and when the biggest generation in American history
was just about to enter its teens, it took a bit of originality to see the potential power in this now-obvious combination. The man who saw that potential more clearly than any other was a 26-year-old native of upstate New York named
Dick Clark, who transformed himself and a local Philadelphia television
program into two of the most culturally significant forces of the early rock-
and-roll era. His iconic show, American Bandstand, began broadcasting
nationally on this day in 1957, beaming images of clean-cut, average
teenagers dancing to the not-so-clean-cut Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta
Shakin’ Goin’ On” to 67 ABC affiliates across the nation.

The show that evolved into American Bandstand began on Philadephia’s
WFIL-TV in 1952, a few years before the popular ascension of rock and
roll. Hosted by local radio personality Bob Horn (below).

Donald Loyd "Bob" Horn
(February 20, 1916 – July 31, 1966)