It was on this day in 1944 that Lt JG George Bush got his plane shot out from under him. He was flying a TBM Avenger, assigned to the carrier USS San Jacinto in the North Pacific. The aircraft was hit as he started his bombing run on a Japanese radio station, but he was able to drop his payload and fly back over the ocean before having to bail out. Once in the water, he inflated a rubber raft as a Japanese boat raced to capture him. A fellow pilot sank the enemy by strafing it, and the submarine Finback picked the future President up a few hours later.
Speaking of Presidents named Bush…it was on this day in 2005 that George W. Bush made the now-infamous comment “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” to the head of FEMA, Micheal Brown, while looking over the damage caused from Hurricane Katrina. Brown would resign from the agency less than two weeks later due to complaints about his handling of the emergency.
There are two events that Wiki says are the earliest things that happened on this day in 44 BC: “Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion” and “Cicero launches the first of his Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. He will make 14 of them over the following months.” They also take note of two events in 1998 as being the most recent: “Swissair Flight 111 crashes near Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia. All 229 people on board are killed” and “The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Jean Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide.”
A couple other other things that also took place on this day are:
1789 – The US Department of the Treasury is established. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary, would be sworn into office nine days later.
1971 – Lenny Hart, a former manager for the Grateful Dead as well as the father of the percussionist, is arrested. He had disappeared the year before with over $100,000 of the bands money.
Wishes for a happy birthday go out to MC Chris, Cynthia Watros, Salma Hayek, Keanu Reeves, Terry Bradshaw, Guy Laliberté, and Michael Gray.