nusual intensity blamed on global warming. They continued for two weeks until rainfall helped extinguish them, by which time the town of Paradise had been destroyed. An estimated 82 people were known to have died but a further 699 remained missing.
7/10/2003, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger won the election with 48% of the vote to become Governor (‘Governator’) of California, beating the incumbent Democrat, Gray Davis.
17/4/1993, Two Los Angeles policemen were convicted of beating up Rodney King.
12/9/1992. A Los Angeles traffic warden ticketed a Cadillac without noticing that the driver inside was dead. He had been shot in the back of the head 13 hours earlier.
30/4/1992. In April and May, Los Angeles saw the worst rioting in the US for more than 25 years. The racial unrest began after 4 policemen were acquitted of assaulting a Black motorist, Rodney King, despite TV footage showing him being kicked and beaten. The trial had been held in a white area of town and the jury did not include a single Black person. In the riots, over 50 were killed, 4,000 injured, and four days of looting and arson saw 12,000 arrests and over US$ 1 billion of damage. 10,000 troops and National guardsmen had to be drafted in to restore order. There were also smaller riots in other US cities such as Atlanta and Las Vegas.
17/1/1989. A gunman shot five children dead and injured 39 others at a Californian school playground.
6/6/1978, Californians approved Proposition 13 – a proposal to cut property taxes by 60%.
22/9/1975. The US President, Gerald Ford, survived a second assassination attempt in 17 days, when a woman, Sara Jane Moore, fired at him as he left a hotel in San Francisco. On 5/9/1975 Lynette Fromme had attempted an assassination but had been thwarted by a Secret Service agent. On 15/1/1976 Ms Moore was sentenced to life imprisonment.
5/9/1975, Lynette Fromme, a Charles Manson (cult leader and killer) follower, made an assassination attempt on US President Ford, in Sacramento.
27/10/1972, The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, USA, was created.
5/2/1969. The Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, declared a state of ‘extreme emergency’ at the university campus at Berkeley after violent struggles there between students and police.
2/1/1967. Ronald Reagan sworn in as Governor of California.
29/8/1966. The Beatles gave their last live concert performance in Candlestick Park, San Francisco.
14/7/1965, US politician Adlai Ewing Stevenson, born 5/2/1900 in Los Angeles, California, died suddenly.
20/1/1965, American disc jockey Alan Freed died in California. He created the phrase ‘Rock’n’Roll’.
29/8/1958, Michael Jackson, pop star, was born in Gary, Indiana.
17/7/1955. Walt Disney’s Disneyland was opened in Anaheim, California.
30/7/1947, Arnold Schwarzenneger, star of the Terminator films and Governor of California 2003-11, was born.
28/3/1943, The Russian-American composer, Sergei Rachmaninov, died in Beverley Hills, California.
31/5/1930, Clint Eastwood, American actor and film director, was born in San Francisco.
5/8/1926. Houdini, the famous escapologist and magician, survived for 1 ½ hours in a bronze coffin in a hotel swimming pool in Los Angeles.
1/6/1926, Marilyn Monroe, American film actress, was born in Los Angeles, California, as Norma Jean Baker.
18/8/1917, Caspar Weinberger, US Republican politician and Secretary of Defence for Ronald Reagan, was born in San Francisco.
9/1/1913. Birth of Richard Nixon at Yorba Linda, California. Nixon was the 37th President of the US.
8/6/1912. In Los Angeles, Carl Lemmie founded Universal Studios.
10/3/1910. D W Griffith made the first Hollywood film. He discovered an obscure location near Los Angeles called Hollywood where the light was very good, for shooting the film Old California; the film industry then took off rapidly here.
27/2/1902, John Steinbeck, American author and Nobel Prize Winner who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, was born in Salinas, California.
11/11/1885, George Patton, US military commander in World War Two, was born in San Gabriel, California.
1/8/1873. The first street cab