Karol Józef Wojtyła, was born to Emilia and Karol Wojtyla in Wadlowice, Poland.
St. Pope John Paul II's parents at the time of their wedding. They are both presently candidates for sainthood.
He'd become St. John Paul II the Great, the most influential Pope of the second half of the 20th Century.
His early life was hard, in a country where life itself was hard. His mother, who was a school teacher, died when he was 8 years old. His deeply religious father was first an NCO, prior to his birth, in the Austro Hungarian Army and then a Captain in the Polish Army. Upon his wife's death he worked close to home so that he could care for his young child.
His father died of a heart attack Polish in 1941. His eldest brother, with whom he was close, died of scarlet fever after attended to scarlet fever victims in the early 1930s. Upon his father's death he was the only immediately surviving member of the family.
He entered the seminary secretly during World War Two, the Germans had closed them in Poland, and was ordained in Soviet occupied Poland in 1946.
He ultimately rose to become Pope in 1978, and occupied that position until his death in 2005. Since that time he has had two successors, with the first perhaps ironically being German, thereby creating the odd situation of a Pope who lived under German occupation during World War Two being succeeded by one who had briefly been in the German armed forces (anti aircraft gun crewman) as a very young man at the end of the war.
The National Horse Show was going on in Washington D.C.
General Pershing's personal mounts Entered in the National Capitol Horse Show which opened today. On the left is Col. John G. Quekemeyer with "Jeff" and on the Right Lt. W.J. Cunningham with "John Bunny".
Col. John G. Quekemeyer and Lt. James H. Cunningham taking the jumps on Princess and Dandy, at the National Capitol Horse Show. These two hunters were presented by the English Government to General Pershings Staff and are entered with the string of A.E.F. Horses.
And Man O War, who had not run in the Kentucky Derby, won the Preakness.
Another event involving a lot of horses was the Battle of Hamdh, which occurred on this day in 1920. The battle pitted the Ikhwan, the putative National Guard of Saudi Arabia, against Kuwaiti forces. The distribution of manpower was lopsided in favor of the Saudis. It was part of the Kuwait-Najd War.
The event was part of the Saudi effort to annex Kuwait and impose a strict religious regime upon them. The Kuwaitis lost the battle after six days, but ultimately the British would intervene and end the war. Kuwait was a British protectorate at the time. Prior to that the Saudis attempted to dictate a peace requiring the eviction of Shias, adoption of Wahhabism, declare the Turks to be heretics, ban smoking, ban prostitution, and destroy the American missionary hospital in Kuwait. The peace was imposed by the British in 1922 and it did not include those provisions, but Kuwait, which was not allowed to participate in the discussions, lost more than 2/3s of its territory.
