●     January is Clean Up Your Computer Month

(I don’t think my Trash Can is large enough!)

●     Financial Wellness Month

●     National Get Organized Month

●     National Mentoring Month

●     National Volunteer Blood Donor Month

JANUARY 1

CLASSIC COUNTRY #1 SONG OF THE DAY

1964 – Love's Gonna Live Here - Buck Owens

1974 – If We Make It Through December - Merle Haggard

1984 – Houston (Means I'm One Day Closer to You) - Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers

1994 - I Don't Call Him Daddy - Doug Supernaw

NOTEWORTHY EVENTS

New Year’s Day

First Foot Day (I like this one! In Scottish, Northern English, and Manx folklore, the first-foot is the first person to enter the home of a household on New Year's Day and is seen as a bringer of good fortune for the coming year.)

EVENTS

1751 - New Year’s Day has been observed on this day in most English-speaking countries since 1751 when the British calendar act was passed. Before that, folks wished everyone a Happy New Year on March 25, to coincide, approximately, with the beginning of Spring.

1836 - The Wisconsin Territory was formed by an act of the Michigan Legislature. Wisconsin was successively part of the original Northwest Territory (1788-1800), Indiana Territory (1800-1809), Illinois Territory (1809-1818), and Michigan Territory (1818-1836) before it became a territory in its own right (1836-1848). The first census was taken in August 1836 and found only 11,683 non-Indian residents between Lake Michigan and the Dakotas. Over the next decade the Indian tribes in Wisconsin ceded land to the state, the US government surveyed it, and farmers from eastern states and emigrants from Europe swarmed onto it eagerly in search of a better life. The population exploded from 11,683 in 1836 to 155,277 in 1846.

1863 - President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It called for the freeing of slaves in the rebelling states. No slaves were actually freed since the Confederate states ignored it, and it didn’t apply to the slaves of Union States. News of the proclamation did not reach Texas until “Juneteenth”, June 19, 1865.

1892 - Ellis Island opened this day to begin the processing of what would amount to more than 20 million immigrants to the US. Ellis Island is now a museum.

1915 - Aspirin was made available for the first time in tablet form. The pills were manufactured by Bayer pharmaceuticals in Germany.

1946 - ENIAC, the first US computer, was assembled by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. It was built at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It weighed over 60,000 pounds and contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. A staff of six technicians replaced about 2000 of the tubes each month. Many of ENIAC’s first tasks were for military purposes, such as calculating ballistic firing tables and designing atomic weapons. It had to be reprogrammed for each task.

1959 - Johnny Cash played a free concert for the inmates of San Quentin Prison, California. One of the audience members was 19-year-old Merle Haggard, who was in the midst of a 15-year sentence (he served three years) for Grand Theft Auto and armed robbery.

1963 - Loretta Lynn released her debut studio album Loretta Lynn Sings on Decca Records. The album featured Lynn's first top 10 Country hit, Success which was released the previous year.

1966 - Effective on this day, all US cigarette packages began carrying the health warning - Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.

1967 - In his annual New Year’s column of predictions, Criswell wrote that there would be a one-week war with Egypt and Russia against Israel. War broke out in the Mideast that June: The Arab-Israeli 6-Day War. His column also stated that actress Jayne Mansfield would die in that year. She did.

1968 - Criswell predicted that a black civil rights leader would be assassinated before October. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in April.

1972 - Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was adopted worldwide. UTC is determined from six primary atomic clocks that are coordinated by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures located in France.

1979 - The Office of Personnel Management was established. It administers a merit system for federal employees. OPM has requested $461,764,000 in discretionary resources for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024.

1986 - The Uniform Marital Property Act took effect. This law states that there is equal ownership of any assets acquired during the course of a marriage. Wisconsin was the first state to enact such legislation.

1987 - The Dishonor List of Banished Words and Phrases was issued (as it is every year) by Lake Superior State University, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The 1987 list included the phrase, “The patient did not fulfill his wellness potential.” Simply put, he died. The #1 banished word is an acronym, GOAT, meaning “Greatest of All Time.” “Applied to everyone and everything from athletes to chicken wings,” an objector declared. “How can anyone or anything be the GOAT, anyway?”

2010 - Shania Twain carried the Olympic Torch through her hometown in Windsor, Ontario, as part of the 2010 Winter Olympics torch relay.

2014 - The manufacture and importing of the common 40-watt and 60-watt general service incandescent lamps was ended in the US under the deadline specified in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. It required better energy efficiency, so that they would be replaced by compact fluorescent, halogen, or LED lamps producing more lumens of light per watt of consumption.

BIRTHDAYS

1925 - Stymie Beard (actor, the derby-wearing Little Rascal. He appeared in 36 Our Gang films. His trademark hat was a gift from Stan Laurel. He also played Monte in the TV series Good Times.)