Today is the birthday, in 1910, of Bonnie Parker in Rowena, Texas. Her father, Charles Robert Parker (1884–1914), was a bricklayer who died when she was four years old. Her widowed mother, Emma (Krause) Parker (1885–1944), moved her family back to her parents’ home in Cement City, an industrial suburb in West Dallas where she worked as a seamstress.
Parker was a bright child who thrived on attention. She enjoyed performing on stage and dreamt of becoming an actress.[8] In her second year in high school, Parker met Roy Thornton (1908–1937). The couple dropped out of school and married on September 25, 1926, six days before her sixteenth birthday. Their marriage was marred by his frequent absences and brushes with the law and proved to be short-lived. They never divorced, but their paths never crossed again after January 1929. When she died, Parker was still wearing the wedding ring Thornton had given her.
She and and Clyde Chestnut “Champion” Barrow were an outlaw couple who roamed the Central United States with their criminal gang during the Great Depression, committing a series of criminal acts such as store robberies, bank robberies, kidnappings and murders between 1932 and 1934. The couple were particularly infamous for their bank robberies and multiple murders, although they preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations, and are believed to have murdered at least nine police officers and three civilians.
On May 23, 1934, the couple were ambushed and killed in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, by a law enforcement posse led by retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. She was 23.
Bonnie Parker, c. 1932–1933
Today is the birthday, in 1942, of Herb Fame, singer from the American vocal duo Peaches and Herb, who had the 1979 US No.1 & UK No.4 single ‘Reunited’. The song was a huge crossover smash, topping both the pop and soul charts. It spent four weeks at No.1 on both the R&B singles chart and the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1979 and sold over two million copies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMh3utpqfaY
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