JULY 6^TH

1942: Anne Frank’s family goes into hiding. The Nazis invaded and occupied the Netherlands beginning in 1940, and by 1942 their persecution of Dutch Jews was being committed in earnest. As a result of the persecution, Anne’s family had originally planned to go underground on July sixteenth, but when Anne’s sister Margot received an order to report to a work camp, they moved their plans up. Anne and her family concealed themselves in a secret apartment behind a bookcase in the building where her father worked for almost two years, during which time Anne kept her now-famous diary. The family was betrayed and arrested in August 1944.

JULY 7^TH

1846: The United States annexes California. Commander J.D. Sloat of the U.S. Navy hoisted the American flag in Monterrey, California, after a Mexican garrison stationed there surrendered to his troops.

1928: The best thing since . . . Sliced bread goes on sale for the first time in Chillicothe, Missouri. The Chillicothe Baking Company had acquired the first automatic bread-slicing machine, invented by Otto Frederick Rogwedder, earlier that year. His machine not only sliced the loaf of bread but also wrapped it. His friend, frank Bench, was a baker at the Chillicothe Baking Company, and bought the first machine Rogwedder ever sold. Bench installed the machine at the company and began marketing sliced bread in the local community. It was a hit; sliced bread was widely popular, and Rogwedder sold his machine to other bakeries around the country. In 1930, the Continental Baking Company rolled out Wonder Bread, the first sliced bread to be sold nationwide.

JULY 9^TH

1893: The first open-heart surgery. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the operation successfully, and without using anesthesia, at the Provident Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.

1922: Johnny Weissmuller breaks the minute. Weissmuller, an American swimmer, was the first person to swim the 100-yard freestyle in less than a minute. He went on to set more than fifty world records and win five Olympic gold medals for swimming. He later played Tarzan in motion pictures.

1941: Enigma is broken. British cryptologists had labored for months to break the German military code. The Germans used a sophisticated computing machine to produce the code. The codebreakers, working in secrecy at Bletchley Park, were led by Alan Turing, who invented a machine of his own to break the code. That machine was the forerunner of modern computers.