Today is August 30th

On this day in history in 1972, Cameron Diaz was born in San Diego, California. She has starred in several recent films, most notably, the “Shrek” movies as well as “There’s Something About Mary”. Her first feature film was “The Mask” starring Jim Carrey in 1994.

Also, on this date in the year 2003, Charles Dennis Buchinksy passed away of pneumonia in Los Angeles at the age of 82. We know him better as actor Charles Bronson.

And finally...

Our story today starts in Wisconsin, A girl named Flora Haines was born there in1855. Seventeen years later, that’s right, at the age of 17, she graduated from Lincoln University in Illinois. After college, she then moved to California to begin writing for various Western Magazines and San Francisco newspapers. She was a woman who placed very high value on education, independence, work ethic, religion and equal rights. Now, keep in mind, this was a woman living in the late 1800’s. Needless to say, she was WAY before her time.

During her many years in California, she was married twice and had three children, all of them boys. But, through it all, she was always writing! She wrote books, newspaper articles, magazine feature stories, anything and everything. She just wrote.

Her first marriage produced one child named Victor. As any teacher will tell you, this is a very time consuming job. But through it all, Flora was always writing more books. In1895 she even wrote a book entitled “A Ceramic Study: A chapter in the history of a half a dozen dinner plates”. This was a book about how she had six dinner plates custom made for her by the Staffordshire Potteries in England with step-by-step instructions. Another of her books was titled “The Dictionary of Given Names”. Another called “Horses in America”. The subject didn’t matter, just so she was writing.

As was mentioned before, her oldest son, Victor was an automotive engineer and quite interested in flying. So inspired by his literary mother, Victor too would soon try his hand at penmanship. Soon after the Wright Brothers took flight, Victor would write two books about airplanes.

In their downtown San Francisco garage, they soon produced their very first plane. It was a two-seated seaplane with a single pontoon. They called the plane “The Model G”. Why“ Model G” for their very first plane? They figured that the implication of there being Models “A” through “F” would help to instill buyer confidence. The naming of the plane was nothing more than a sales gimmick. You see, Lowg-head, spelled L-O-U-G-H-E-A-D, is actually pronounced Lockheed.

And so, due to a merger that occurred on this day, August 30thin 1995, a company started by two young ambitious brothers, raised by a well-educated, hard-working mother, is now known as Lockheed Martin.

…And those are just a few of the things that occurred on this day in history.