On this Day...
• In 1973, Lyndon
Baines Johnson died at the
LBJ Ranch, a 360-acre spread near his birthplace in Johnson City,
Texas. The 64-year-old janitor, fruit picker, and U.S. president had smoked three packs a day, and his death was the result of his third heart attack. Dead on arrival at the hospital, he left an estimated fortune of $20 million – much of which had been amassed by his industrious wife Lady Bird. Though a strange-looking man himself – six feet three inches tall heavy-jowled and bigeared – he was often concerned with how other people looked. “Never,” he once said, “trust a man whose eyes are too close to his nose.”
• In 1901,
Queen Victoria died aged 81, in the arms of her grandson,
Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.
She’d been the longest lived and longest reigning of all British monarchs.
She was also the first British monarch to be photographed, use an elevator, make a phone call, be recorded on gramophone record, travel on a train, appear in a film, use a one-piece flushing toilet, and live regularly in Buckingham Palace. To one of her numerous son-in-laws her dying was like “a great three decker ship sinking… she kept rallying and going down.” James Pope Hennessy called her “an amiable field mouse,” but the last word should go to Henry James, who said, “She’s more of a man than I expected.”