Calendar for March 6th, 2013

2001: Discovery Day (Guam)

2001: Mothering Sunday

2001: Town Meeting Day (Vermont)

Born 1475: Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (painter & sculptor)

1521: Guam discovered by Ferdinand Magellan

Born 1806: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poet)

1819: U.S. Supreme Court handed down landmark McCulloch v. Maryland decision

1834: The city of Toronto, Canada, incorporated; William Lyon Mackenzie was its first mayor

Died 1836: Davy Crockett and James Bowie (died defending the Alamo)

1836: After a 13-day siege, the Texas fort, the Alamo, was recaptured by Mexican general Santa Anna

1853: Verdi's opera La Traviata premiered in Venice, Italy

Born 1870: Oscar Straus (composer)

1886: First U.S. magazine for nurses published

Died 1888: Louisa May Alcott (author)

1896: Charles Brady King drove the first automobile on the streets of Detroit, Michigan

1899: Aspirin was patented on behalf of Friedrich Bayer & Co.

1902: Congress established a permanent Census Office (later, U.S. Bureau of the Census)

Born 1906: Lou Costello (comedian)

1912: The first use of dirigibles in warfare took place in an Italian action against the Turks in Tripoli

Born 1923: Ed McMahon (TV personality)

Born 1924: Sarah Caldwell (conductor)

Born 1928: Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (author)

1930: Clarence Birdseye's first frozen food appeared in grocery stores in Springfield, MA

Died 1932: John Philip Sousa (band leader, conductor, & composer)

1933: A nationwide bank holiday declared by President Franklin Roosevelt went into effect to help save the nation's faltering banking system

Born 1936: Marion Barry (politician)

Born 1937: Valentina Tereshkova (cosmonaut)

1944: In an Allied air offensive, over 600 planes bombed Berlin (WW II)

Born 1947: David Gilmour (musician)

Born 1947: Rob Reiner (actor & director)

1955: Comedienne Phyllis Diller made her debut in San Francisco at the Purple Onion nightclub

1957: Ghana declared an independent nation

Born 1968: Moira Kelly (actress)

1970: Notre Dame star Austin Carr scored single-game NCAA basketball playoff record 61 points as the Irish beat Ohio University 112-82 in an NCAA tournament game

Born 1972: Shaquille O'Neal (basketball player)

1981: CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite retired after 19 years. His final words: "I'll be away on assignment, and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night!"

1983: The U.S. Football League began its first season

Died 1986: Georgia O'Keeffe (painter)

1986: Soviet spacecraft, Vega I, entered the atmosphere of Halley's Comet and sent back pictures of the comet's icy nucleus

Died 2004: Frances Dee (film star of the 1930s and 40s)

2005: A 5.4 earthquake shook Riviere-du-Loup, 250 miles northeast of Montreal

Died 2005: Hans Bethe (nuclear physicist whose calculations explained how stars shine and laid the foundation for development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs)

Died 2006: Kirby Puckett (baseball player)

2007: A 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia

2009: NASA launched a spacecraft as part of the Kepler Mission project in order to find habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy