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Topics Related to This Day in North Carolina History
On July 11, 1979, Boone celebrated “Windmill Day” with a street festival to dedicate NASA’s Mod-1, the world’s largest megawatt industrial windmill on Howard’s Knob.
On July 11, 1879, private detective, bootlegger and all-around con man Gaston Means was born in Concord.The son a prominent lawyer, Means attended UNC and worked as a schoolteacher and traveling salesman before moving to New York to work as a private detective in 1911. For the next 20 years, Means was involved in a variety of dubious activities from stealing money from a widow to advancing the German government’s interests in the U.S. while the country was still neutral during World War I.
On July 10, 1920, broadcaster David Brinkley was born in Wilmington.Brinkley got his start in 1938 as a reporter with the Wilmington Morning Star. After serving briefly in the Army, Brinkley was hired by the NBC radio network as a news writer partly for his knack for “writing for the ear.” In 1956, he was paired with Chet Huntley to cover the Republican and Democratic national conventions.
July 10, 1930, Otto Wood made his final escape from Central Prison.
On July 9, 1945, Foster McKenzie III, known to punk music fans as Root Boy Slim, was born to a fishmonger in Asheville.The family moved to Washington D.C. while McKenzie was still a boy. He was in and out of private academies, including the Sidwell Friends School, throughout his youth before being accepted at Yale University. While studying in New Haven, McKenzie formed his first band, Prince La La and the Midnight Creepers.
On July 8, 1979, members of the communist Greensboro Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO) protested a screening of the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation held by the Ku Klux Klan at the town hall of small Rowan County town of China Grove.The Greensboro communist group opposed the Klan because it divided working people by their race, thereby, in their view, distracting them from the struggle for workers’ rights. When the WVO learned of the screening, they immediately began to organize a protest march.
John Romulus Brinkley rose to fame in 1922 with his development of an operation whereby the sex glands of goats were transplanted into the bodies of impotent men.
On July 7, 1863, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation to create the Home Guard.