It’s my birthday! Oh what a joyous day that was, the morn where I first drew breath! Oh, there was much rejoicing!
I can not tell you how much the whole Day Elvis Died Thing bugged me as a kid. It really bothered me that each year on my birthday, I’d see people having candlelight vigils outside Graceland. In high school, I even wrote a way-too-long play on the subject, in which a kid born on that day is declared The Trailer Park Messiah, against his will. Lay off, I was 16.
Why did this get under my skin so much? I have no idea. I don’t know why I cared about my birthday at all, since for a good chunk of my childhood my mom was a Jehovah’s Witness and we didn’t celebrate it. Or any other holidays. But that’s a tale for another time. Oh, we have stories to share!
So I thought I’d dig up some other meaningful events that happened on this date. I’ve done a very limited version of this before, looking back on how the Mets performed on my birthday throughout my lifetime. But apparently other things happen in life other than baseball, or so I’m told, and so here are some things that happened on August 16 throughout history, according to the obscure reference work Wikipedia.