ON THIS DAY

FROM THE DAILY MAIL ARCHIVE

MARCH 13, 1969

WHO will be the first man on the Moon? The question is agitating everyone in Houston from the top Apollo planner, General Sam Phillips, downwards. Local newsmen are tipping Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, the pilot of the lunar bug. But will the commander of the Apollo mission in July, Neil Armstrong, let his number two have the glory?

MARCH 13, 1974

TWO illegitimate children won the first round of their battle for a share of Pablo Picasso’s £20 million fortune. A court in Grasse, southern France, granted them legal recognition as the painter’s offspring. Claude, 23, and his sister, Paloma, 24, are the children of Francoise Gilot, who was for many years Picasso’s mistress and model.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

NEIL SEDAKA, 81. The U. S. singersongwriter and classically trained pianist has a street named after him in his home district of Brooklyn, New York. Sedaka, who has had hits with Breaking Up Is Hard to Do and Stairway To Heaven, wrote oh! Carol about his ex-girlfriend, fellow songwriter Carole king. Her husband, the lyricist Gerry Goffin, wrote a riposte called oh! Neil, which was unsuccessful in the charts. CANDI STATON, 80. The U.S. disco diva, whose first name is Canzetta, has had hits with Young Hearts Run Free and You Got The Love (which was first recorded for a documentary about a man who weighed 64 stone). Staton, who has married six times, says of past abusive relationships: ‘Tina Turner has nothing on me. oh gosh, she only had one Ike! I had four of them.’

BORN ON THIS DAY

LAFAYETTE RONALD HUBBARD (19111986). The U.S. founder of the Church of Scientology, best known as L. Ron Hubbard, started out as a science-fiction writer. He said he was a ‘hopeless cripple’ after World War II, but had healed himself through the principles of Dianetics, his 1950 book. DANIEL LAMBERT (1770-1809). The animal breeder from Leicester was, according to the oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘the most corpulent man of his time in England’. He enjoyed walking, swimming and hunting, but by 1793 weighed 32 stone. He died weighing more than 52 stone and it took 20 men to lower his coffin into the grave.

ON MARCH 13...

IN 1965, Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds. IN 1996, Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children and their teacher at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland.

WORD WIZARDRY

GUESS THE DEFINITION: Bubo (early 14th century)

A) The inflamed swelling of a lymph gland. B) The boy’s game of progressive leapfrog. C) A scarecrow made of rags. Answer below

PHRASE EXPLAINED

Plead the fifth: Meaning that someone chooses not to answer a question in a legal case for fear of incriminating him or herself as they invoke one’s Fifth Amendment; from the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1790.