Daily Calendar for Friday, March 6, 2026
Daily Calendar
View daily calendar information including holidays, advice, and daily features.
Friday, March 6, 2026
Born
- Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (painter & sculptor) –
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poet) –
- Oscar Straus (composer) –
- Lou Costello (comedian) –
- Ed McMahon (TV personality) –
- Sarah Caldwell (conductor) –
- Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (author) –
- Marion Barry (politician) –
- Valentina Tereshkova (cosmonaut) –
- David Gilmour (musician) –
- Rob Reiner (actor & director) –
- Connie Britton (actress) –
- Moira Kelly (actress) –
- Shaquille O'Neal (basketball player) –
Died
- Davy Crockett and James Bowie (died defending the Alamo) –
- Louisa May Alcott (author) –
- John Philip Sousa (band leader, conductor, & composer) –
- Georgia O'Keeffe (painter) –
- Frances Dee (film star of the 1930s and 40s) –
- Hans Bethe (nuclear physicist whose calculations explained how stars shine and laid the foundation for development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs) –
- Kirby Puckett (baseball player) –
- Nancy Reagan (U.S. First Lady) –
Events
- Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet reached Guam –
- First machine patent issued in North America was granted to Joseph Jenckes of Massachusetts –
- U.S. Supreme Court handed down landmark McCulloch v. Maryland decision –
- The city of Toronto, Canada, incorporated; William Lyon Mackenzie was its first mayor –
- After a 13-day siege, the Texas fort, the Alamo, was recaptured by Mexican general Santa Anna –
- Verdi’s opera La Traviata premiered in Venice, Italy –
- First U.S. magazine for nurses published –
- Charles Brady King drove the first automobile on the streets of Detroit, Michigan –
- Aspirin was patented on behalf of Friedrich Bayer & Co. –
- Congress established a permanent Census Office (later, U.S. Bureau of the Census) –
- Nora Stanton Blatch became the first woman to be elected to the American Society of Civil Engineers –
- The first use of dirigibles in warfare took place in an Italian action against the Turks in Tripoli –
- Clarence Birdseye’s first frozen food appeared in grocery stores in Springfield, MA –
- A nationwide bank holiday declared by President Franklin Roosevelt went into effect to help save the nation’s faltering banking system –
- In an Allied air offensive, over 600 planes bombed Berlin (WW II) –
- Comedienne Phyllis Diller made her debut in San Francisco at the Purple Onion nightclub –
- Ghana declared an independent nation –
- 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 –
- 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! –
- The U.S. Football League began its first season –
- Soviet spacecraft, Vega I, entered the atmosphere of Halley’s Comet and sent back pictures of the comet’s icy nucleus –
- A 5.4 earthquake shook Riviere-du-Loup, 250 miles northeast of Montreal –
- A 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia –
- NASA launched a spacecraft as part of the Kepler Mission project in order to find habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy –
Weather
- 4 inches of snow fell in 24 hours in the Florida panhandle, as recorded at the Experiment Station at the University of Florida’s West Florida Research and Education Center in Milton. –
- Sixteen tornadoes in Illinois and Indiana –
- Twenty-eight cities in the north-central United States reported record high temperatures. Pickstown, South Dakota, led the country with 83F, and Saint Cloud, Minnesota, registered 71F, beating its previous record by 21 degrees. –
- More than 90% of Lake Superior was covered with ice due to long stretches of unusually cold weather. –