ROSS SIMPSON

The Great Chicago Fire was a large destructive fire that burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871. It killed up to 300 people,
destroyed roughly 3.3 square miles of Chicago, Illinois, and left more than
100,000 residents homeless. The fire started at about 9:00 p.m. on October 8,
in or around a small barn belonging to the O’Leary family. The shed next to
the barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire, but city officials
never determined the exact cause of the blaze. There has, however, been
much speculation over the years.

In Poland on this day in 1982, all labor organizations were banned
including Solidarity.  
        
       

On this day in 1970, Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the
Nobel Prize for literature.

The Novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
4-book Set (Cancer Ward, August 1914,
the First Circle, One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovitch.

Donald James Larsen (New York Yankees) pitched the first
perfect game in the history of the World Series on this day
in 1956.

Donald James Larsen turned 88 on August 7.

(AP) – Bob Dylan finally has his hands on his Nobel Literature diploma and
medal.

Klas Ostergren, a member of the Swedish Academy, said the 75-year-old
American singer-songwriter received his award during a small gathering
Saturday afternoon at a hotel next to the conference center where Dylan
was performing a concert later that night.

Ostergren told The Associated Press that the ceremony was a small, intimate
event in line with the singer’s wishes, with just academy members and a
member of Dylan’s staff attending.

                                       Nobel Medal for Literature.

JOHN BELMONT

In 1958 the first domestic passenger jet flight took place in the U.S.
when 111 passengers flew from New York to Miami on a National
Airlines Boeing 707.

ROSS SIMPSON

John Marwood Cleese is 77 today. He once studied Law at
Cambridge.

2001

Alfred Bernhard Nobel (October 21, 1833 – December 10, 1896)

Swedish chemist, engineer, and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel used his
fortune posthumously to institute the Nobel Prizes. In his lifetime he issued
350 patents internationally and established 90 armaments factories. He grew
up wealthy after his father invented modern plywood and filed his first patent
himself in 1857, for a gas meter. While studying explosives, a shed he was
using for the preparation of nitroglycerin, exploded at a factory in Heleneborg, 
Stockholm and killed five people, including his younger brother Emil.