June 3

Goodyear blimp pilot Jack Boettner lands the airship Pilgrim on the roof of the M. O Neil Co. roof in downtown Akron on June 20, 1928.

350 – Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, proclaims himself Roman Emperor, entering Rome at the head of a group of gladiators.
1083 – Henry IV of Germany storms Rome, capturing St Peter’s Cathedral
1098 – After 5-month siege in First Crusade, the Crusaders seize Antioch (now in modern Turkey)
1540 – Hernando de Soto crosses Appalachian Mountain, first European to do so
1620 – Construction of the oldest stone church in French North America, Notre-Dame-des-Anges, begins at Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
1851 – First baseball uniforms worn, NY Knickerbockers wear straw hat, white shirt & blue long trousers
1889 – The Canadian Pacific Railway is completed from coast to coast.
1925 – Goodyear airship “Pilgrim” makes its first flight with enclosed cabin.
The Goodyear Blimp was a small airship built in the United States in the mid-1920s. The first example, christened Pilgrim, was Goodyear’s first civil airship, and their
first airship to use helium as its lift gas. Originally intended for pleasure cruising, it soon found its value as a promotional vehicle as the first “Goodyear Blimp” in a line that has continued for over eighty years.
Pilgrim was retired on December 30th 1931, having completed 4,765 flights and having carried 5,355 passengers. In that time, she remained aloft for 2,880 hours and
covered 95,000 miles.  Her gondola is preserved in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.
1935 – Normandie‘s maiden voyage was on May 29th 1935.
Fifty thousand saw her off at Le Havre. She reached New York in four days, three hours and 14 minutes, taking away the Blue Riband from the Italian liner, Rex. Under the command of master Captain René Pugnet, her average speed was around 30 knots and on the eastbound crossing to France, she averaged over 30 knots, breaking records. An estimated 100,000 spectators lined New York Harbor forNormandie’s arrival.

1939 – Beer Barrel Polka hits #1 on the pop singles chart.
1946 – First bikini bathing suit displayed in Paris
The history of the bikini can be traced back to antiquity. Illustrations of Roman women wearing bikini-like garments during competitive athletic events have been found in several locations. The most famous of them is Villa Romana del Casale. French engineer Louis Réard introduced the modern bikini, modeled by Micheline Bernardini, in July 5, 1946, borrowing the name for his design from the Bikini Atoll, where post-war testing on the atomic bomb was happening.
1961 – John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev meet in Vienna
1970 – First artificial gene synthesized
1976 – US presented with oldest known copy of Magna Carta

1808 – Jefferson Davis,President of Confederate States of America (1861-5)
1864 – Ransom Eli Olds, auto (Oldsmobile) and truck (REO) manufacturer
1877 – Raoul Dufy, France, Fauvist painter
1906 – Josephine Baker, dancer/Parisian night club owner
1926 – Allen Ginsberg, Newark, New Jersey, American beat poet
1928 – Donald Judd, US, sculptor

1937 – Duke of Windsor weds Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson in France
Deaths
1924 – Franz Kafka, Czech writer (Trial, Amerika, Metamorphosis), dies at 40
1989 – Ruhollah Khomeini, Iranian ayatollah, dies at 89
2011 – Jack Kevorkian, American pathologist, right-to-die activist (b. 1928)