July 28, 1900 was shaping up to be an average summer day for lunch wagon owner and Danish immigrant Louis Lassen, who was serving sandwiches and other hot meals to factory workers in New Haven during their lunch breaks. Suddenly, a local businessman, Gary Widmore, rushed up to Lassen’s wagon and desperately asked for…
Tag: popular culture
July 25: New Haven-born Duo Tops the Charts with “an Oldie But a Goodie”
Today in 1970, an iconic pop music duo consisting of a New Haven-born brother and sister, experienced the first major breakthrough of their musical careers. They did so with a song that had previously been recorded by a host of other performers. The pair achieved “overnight stardom” (after a decade of effort) with their…
July 13: P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Performance Wasn’t on a Stage
Today in 1865, Connecticut’s Greatest Showman Phineas Taylor “P T” Barnum was as busy as ever – but not on a stage or in a tent. Rather, he was giving an impassioned speech in the Connecticut legislature, where he was serving his first of several terms as a state representative. The seasoned showbiz veteran…
June 15 Connecticut’s First Television Station
Today in 1948, Connecticut’s first television station WNHC-TV, Channel 6 (now WTNH Channel 8) began broadcasting in New Haven. The introduction of this new media to Connecticut was the brainchild of Aldo DeDomenicis, an Italian pasta-wholesaler who had previously found success buying radio time on Italian programs and selling that time as radio ads…
June 8: The Man Whose Songs the Soldiers Sang Dies in Hartford
Henry Clay Work, one of the most popular songwriters of the Civil War era, died today in 1884 at age 51, while in Hartford visiting his mother. Work, who composed such still-sung songs as “Marching Through Georgia” and “Kingdom Coming” (you know the tune), was born in Middletown in 1832 into an activist family…
May 12: She Won More Oscars Than Any Other Actor.
Meryl Streep won three. So did Daniel Day Lewis, Frances McDormand and Jack Nicholson. But though she never attended a prize show to accept any of them in person, this actor from Hartford, born today in 1907, won four Oscars for her film performances, more than any other actor. Katharine Hepburn, who retained close…
May 7: One of His 530 Patents Gave Us Instant Photography
For more than a century after practical photography was invented in 1839, all photographers had to wait to see the pictures they had taken until the images had gone through a lengthy, chemical developing process. The man who was to change all that, Edward Land, was born in Bridgeport today in 1909. Land, a…
May 4: Landscape Art for an Industrializing Country
Today in 1826, iconic American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church was born in Hartford. The internationally famed artist’s Connecticut roots ran deep: he was a direct descendant of one of the original English Puritans who settled Hartford with Rev. Thomas Hooker. His father, a prominent silversmith, also became a director of Hartford’s Aetna Insurance…
April 21: Rumors of His Death Were NOT Greatly Exaggerated
Today in 1910, Mark Twain, one of America’s most famous authors and Connecticut’s most famous residents, died at his home in Redding. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he grew up in Missouri and traveled extensively, working as a newspaper reporter and fiction writer, until settling with his family in 1871 in the wealthy “Nook Farm”…
April 18: The Punch That Killed
A popular pastime for millennia, amateur (or “Olympic-style”) boxing experienced a 20th-century renaissance in the United States, thanks to celebrity heavyweights like John L. Sullivan and the inclusion of the sport in the 1904 Olympic games. During the early 1900s, amateur boxing matches were common in Connecticut cities. One infamous example of an amateur…
March 22: Seeing Connecticut in a Completely Different Light
Today in 1816, master American artist and internationally acclaimed landscape painter John Frederick Kensett was born in Cheshire, Connecticut to Thomas Kensett, an English-born engraver, and Elizabeth Daggett Kensett, his Connecticut-born wife. Displaying an early aptitude for art, John was working in his father’s engraving studio by age 12, honing his keen eye for…
March 14: A Gem of a Man Known as the “King of Diamonds”
Few people did more to shape twentieth-century popular culture in Connecticut than the man they called “the King of Diamonds” – the jeweler and marketing genius Bill Savitt, who died today in 1995, at age 94. Savitt combined a P. T. Barnum-worthy sense of marketing possibilities with a passion for sports and philanthropy to…