July 6 - McCartney and Lennon

On July 6, 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney met a fellow novice guitar player named John Lennon, age 17, who was the leader of a skiffle and rock-and-roll band called The Quarrymen he had put together the year before in Liverpool, England. The band was playing a gig at a church garden fête, and McCartney demonstrated to Lennon how he tuned his guitar (which he played left-handed), then he sang a few songs, including a Little Richard medley. The band invited McCartney to join soon afterward as a rhythm guitarist. In August 1960 the band renamed itself the Beatles. Exactly seven years after this meeting, on July 6, 1964, the Beatles’ first movie, “A Hard Day’s Night,” premiered in London at the frenzied onset of what had become “Beatlemania.” Filmed in black-and-white and loaded with 10 hit songs, it was an unashamed exploitation movie designed to cash in on a musical craze, but it received mostly positive reviews. It has since been praised by film critic Roger Ebert, who called it "one of the great life-affirming landmarks of the movies."

July 5 - SPAM

On July 5, 1937, Hormel Foods of Austin, Minnesota, launched SPAM, a processed meat product in a can. It had been tried out in 1936 with little success as “Hormel Spiced Ham,” but a naming contest solved that problem. SPAM’s main ingredients are cooked pork shoulder meat, salt and water (with a preservative). The cooling of meat stock forms its gelatinous glaze, or aspic. Hormel wanted to make use of pork shoulder, which was thrown away because it’s too fatty for ham but not fatty enough for bacon. Near the end of the Depression, SPAM became popular at 10 cents a can, and it was a staple for American GIs overseas in World War II. Today it is very high in both saturated fat and sodium. It has acquired some unflattering “backronyms,” including "Something Posing As Meat" and "Spare Parts Animal Meat." The official website claims SPAM lasts forever in a sealed can ("it's like meat with a pause button"). It’s absurdly popular in Hawaii. And more cans of SPAM have been sold – now approaching 10 billion – than there are people on Earth.

July 4 - The Declaration of Independence

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, a convention of delegates from the 13 American colonies that had started meeting in Philadelphia in mid-1775, voted to adopt a formal Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, with which the colonies were at war. In May, revolutionaries in the Congress, led by John Adams of Massachusetts, had started gathering support for breaking ties with Britain and forming a confederation of states. In June, the Congress formed a “Committee of Five” to draft a statement declaring those intentions. The statement, which was essential to international relations while at war, was written quickly by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia in the next 17 days. Congress changed some wording and deleted nearly a fourth of the text, notably a passage critical of the slave trade. Jefferson resented the edits. The Congress approved a resolution of independence on July 2. (The formal explanation was adopted on July 4.) In a letter to his wife, Adams predicted that July 2 would become a great American holiday.

July 3 - The Battle of Gettysburg

150 years ago: On July 3, 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg ended after three days of costly, horrific fighting. It was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the “high water mark” of Confederate efforts to invade the North. A chance encounter between a Confederate division and three Union cavalry brigades at the crossroads town of Gettysburg, PA, only 75 miles northwest of Washington, DC, led to the epic clash of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Gen George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. The third day of fighting was finalized by the disastrous “Pickett’s charge” at Cemetery Ridge, during which thousands of Confederate soldiers were mowed down by Union artillery and musketry. Lee’s forces were turned back and remained on the defensive for the rest of the war. Of the more than 46,000 casualties incurred on both sides, nearly 8,000 soldiers were killed at Gettysburg. More than 37,500 rifles were left on the battlefield, and at least 3,000 horses lay dead. The Confederate wagon train of wounded sent back to Virginia was 17 miles long.

July 2 - Amelia Earhart Disappears

On July 2, 1937, aviatrix Amelia Earhart and navigator Frederick Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in a Lockheed Electra aircraft, never to be seen again. The flight was the last portion of her attempt to fly around the world at the equator. Earhart had achieved lasting fame for her presence on a transatlantic flight in 1928, and for the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight by a woman in 1932, a feat she had timed to occur on the fifth anniversary of Lindbergh’s flight. Her 29,000-mile flight around the world had begun in Miami and had advanced to New Guinea, east of Malaysia. From there, she headed for a tiny coral island, Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii, for refueling. A nearby Coast Guard cutter, Itasca, lost all radio contact with Earhart on the morning of July 2. Recent explorations have claimed to have found evidence of the plane on another Pacific island. But it is likely that Amelia, who had a deeply uneasy relationship with aviation instruments, was lost in the skies, and lost to the ages.

July 1 - ZIP Code

50 years ago: On July 1, 1963, the United States Postal Service launched its ZIP code system for all U.S. mail. It was non-mandatory at first. Two-letter state abbreviations (in capital letters) were introduced at the same time. “ZIP” is an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan, chosen to indicate that mail would travel faster and more efficiently with the use of five-digit codes. The system was also partly designed to accommodate magazine mailing labels. A three-digit ZIP code had been proposed in the 1940s by a postal employee, Robert Moon, and the old U.S. Post Office had used two-digit zone codes for large cities since 1944. But by the early 1960s an expanded, automated system was needed to deal with suburbanization and increasing onslaughts of mail. The USPS launched a broad marketing program with the friendly “Mr. Zip” icon based partly on concerns that Americans were being asked to memorize more numbers (including longer phone numbers) than ever before. Today the U.S. has more than 42,000 ZIP Codes for dwindling mail volumes.

June 30 - The Chevrolet Corvette

60 years ago: The first Chevrolet Corvette was driven off a General Motors assembly line in Flint, Michigan, on June 30, 1953, six months after it was shown as a concept car. The sleek, low-slung convertible with a lightweight fiberglass body was the first truly American sports car. The production Corvette’s price of $3,513 made it much costlier than the simple, $2,000 roadster envisioned by famed GM auto designer Harley Earl. All 1953 models were white with red interiors and black canvas tops. Sporting rocket-like rear fenders with fins, vertical grille teeth and sunken headlights covered by mesh stone guards, the car was both unique and gimmicky. Its V-6 engine was responsive, but sports-car fans objected to an automatic transmission. It had clip-in side curtains instead of roll-up windows, and no exterior door handles (you had to reach inside for the door release). None of the 300 cars was sold by dealers. Corvettes were made available to the public only after a St. Louis factory had been ramped up in 1954.

June 29 - George Ellery Hale

Astronomer George Ellery Hale was born on June 29, 1868, into a wealthy Chicago family. As a teenager he began studying the Sun, and as an undergraduate at MIT he invented an instrument to study key features on the Sun. At the University of Chicago in the 1890s, he established the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, which still houses the world's largest refracting telescope used for astronomy. In 1904 he founded the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, CA, one of whose reflecting telescopes (named after Hale) is among the most notable in astronomy. He encouraged research in galactic and extragalactic astronomy as well as solar and stellar astrophysics. At Mount Wilson he hired Edwin Hubble, who calculated that the universe is expanding. In 1928 he built the massive 200-inch Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory (called the “Cathedral of Astronomy”), which was the world’s largest reflecting telescope for more than four decades and was the first to explore the furthest reaches of the known universe.

June 28 - Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler, British author of innovative spy novels, was born on June 28, 1909, in London, to a family of entertainers. Though he studied engineering, he was working as a fantasy-prone advertising copywriter when he started writing a new kind of spy thriller in the 1930s, featuring ordinary but appealing characters who suddenly find themselves enmeshed in sinister situations. A Coffin for Dimitrios(1939) was made into a film noir classic in 1944. Five earlier novels were The Dark Frontier (1936), which foresaw the atomic bomb; Background to Danger (1937); Cause for Alarm (1938); Epitaph for a Spy (1938); and Journey into Fear (1940), also made into a movie. He wrote the screenplay for the movie version of “A Night to Remember” (1958), and his 1962 thriller, The Light of Day, was filmed as the movie “Topkapi.” Considered a master of surprising tales of international intrigue and espionage, Ambler was a major influence on John le Carré and Graham Greene, who called him the greatest writer of suspense novels.

June 27 - Juan Trippe

Commercial aviation pioneer Juan “Terry” Trippe was born on June 27, 1899, to a wealthy New York family. Despite his first name, he had no significant Hispanic connections (he was named for an aunt, Juanita). After training as a Navy pilot during World War I and graduating from Yale, he started up Long Island Airways as an air-taxi service for New York’s rich and powerful. In 1927 he created Florida-based Aviation Corporation of the Americas as an air mail and passenger service between Key West and Havana, Cuba. This airline would become Pan American Airways, the unofficial U.S. flag carrier, known as Pan Am. Trippe’s Pan Am expanded via overseas air routes and government contracts during World War II. In the 1950s, he coaxed Boeing Aircraft into building and delivering the all-new Boeing 707 jet, and in 1965 he asked for and received the first “jumbo jet,” the Boeing 747, which Pan Am identified as a “Clipper” in names and call signs. Trippe is credited with the rise of mass air travel beginning in the 1960s.