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Singer-songwriter John Denver, known for his folksy, sentimental style and quivering tenor, was born in Roswell, New Mexico. By the time he reached university, he had lived in Tucson, Arizona, Montgomery, Alabama, and Fort Worth, Texas, as his stern military father, a captain in the Air Force, moved the family from posting to posting. Before he reached high school, his grandmother gave him a vintage 1910 acoustic Gibson guitar. At Texas Tech University, where he began studying architecture, he played with the “Alpine Trio,” before dropping out in 1963/64 to head for Los Angeles. After singing with various groups there, he won an audition to replace the leader of the New York-based Chad Mitchell trio in 1967. The group recorded one of his songs, “Babe, I Hate To Go,” that Milt Okun, their producer, renamed “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and brought to another of his clients, “Peter, Paul and Mary.” In 1969, that version hit no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. RCA Victor then signed “John Denver,” the professional name he adopted, and his career took off. He went solo and was a commercial success all through the 1970s, writing and performing such hits as “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” and “Rocky Mountain High.” In 1974, Colorado, where he then resided, named him state poet laureate. The next year the Country Music Association named him “Entertainer of the Year.” In the 1980s and 1990s, his enthusiasm turned toward environmental awareness, wilderness and wildlife conservation, the African AIDS crisis, world hunger, homelessness and poverty. He co-founded the Hunger Project and the Windstar Foundation for Sustainable Living; he also gave numerous benefit concerts and donations, and his songs reflected his activism. President Carter (for whom he had campaigned in 1976) named him to the President’s Commission on World and Domestic Hunger. He was invited to compose and sing the theme song “The Gold and Beyond,” for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. In 1985 he toured Russia, giving concerts benefiting the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. In 1992, he also toured China. Ronald Reagan, whom he had criticized, awarded him the Presidential World without Hunger Award in 1987. Other awards followed, like the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame (1996), but most were posthumous; he died when the Rutan Long-EZ experimental plane he was flying crashed into Monterey Bay. He had become an aviation fan after his father had taught him to fly, and he had a collection of antique biplanes. During his career, Denver recorded 14 gold and 8 platinum albums. These included 300 songs of which he had himself written 200. The album “John Denver’s Greatest Hits,” released in 1973, has sold more than 10 million copies.

Italian composer Luigi Denza was born in Castellamare di Stabia near Naples, the son of an amateur musician and friend of Rossini. He studied composition at the Naples Conservatorio de Musica San Pietro a Maiella, with Saverio Mercadente; Mercadante’s pupil Paolo Serrao taught him harmony and counterpoint. Among his classmates was Giorgio Tosti, who was also to become a famous songwriter. Denza became a sub-professor at the conservatory in 1866. He also composed both songs and works for the mandolin and guitar. In 1876, his four-act opera “Wallenstein” (with a libretto by A. Bruner), based on the Schiller play, was performed at the Teatro Mercadante in Naples. His best-known song was “Funiculi, funicula,” a song with a tarantella rhythm and lyrics by journalist Giuseppe “Peppino” Turco, composed in 1880 in celebration of the new funicular on Mt. Vesuvius. The song sold a million copies within a year. Teen-age composer Johann Strauss unwittingly used it in a symphony, thinking it was just a Neapolitan folksong, but was successfully sued by Denza, who held the copyright. In 1884, he moved to London, and it is there that he wrote most of his almost 500 songs, many of them sung by stars like Enrico Caruso, Mario Lanza, and Luciano Pavarotti. He was a director of the London Academy of Music and in 1898 became a professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He lived in London for 40 years, until the end of his life.

Orville Adelbert Derby was born on July 23, 1851, in Kellogsville, Cayuga, New York.

He was an American geologist and geographer who worked in Brazil. He studied geology at the Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., graduating in 1873. While a student, he was invited in 1870 by his professor Charles Frederick Hartt (1840–1878) to follow him in a study-travel to Brazil. After his graduation, Derby accepted a post of assistant professor at Cornell and briefly substituted for Hartt during another travel to Brazil in 1874. The same year, he defended his doctoral thesis on the carboniferous brachiopoda in the Amazon. In 1875, he travelled to Brazil on another Geological Commission of the Empire of Brazil and in 1877, he decided to accept a post at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. He also became a member and director of the Geographic and Geological Commission of São Paulo (1886-1904). Derby founded the first Botanical Gardens in São Paulo ("Horto Botânico"). In 1906, he was nominated to the Brazilian Geographic and Geological Survey. He worked in many domains of the geological sciences, such as mineralogy, economic geology, physical geography, cartography, petrography, meteorology, archeology, and paleontology. From 1873 to 1915 he published 173 papers on the geology of Brazil. He was also the publisher of one of the first geological maps of Brazil in 1915.

He led a solitary existence, living mostly in hotel rooms where he committed suicide on November 27, 1914 or 1915, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

He was a Belgian entomologist.

Scientist and feminist pioneer, Carrie Derick grew up in Clarenceville, in Ontario’s Missisiquoi region. She was a was a stellar student in high school, studied at the McGill Normal School (a teacher-training institution), and enrolled in the McGill Faculty of Arts soon after the university opened to women. After graduating from the natural sciences program with first class honors and the Logan Gold Medal, she earned a master’s degree from McGill as a protégé of Professor David Penhallow. She then became the first woman to be hired on staff by McGill; she began as a full time “demonstrator” in the department of botany, a part-time job she had held for several years while studying, but at the insistence of Penhallow and the influential Donald A. Smith, chancellor of McGill, was given a post as “lecturer.” In 1901 she began a leave of absence to study abroad at universities in Munich, Berlin, and Bonn; however, even though she had completed the requirements back in Canada in 1906, the University of Bonn would not grant her a doctorate because of her gender. After eight years at McGill as a lecturer without a raise or promotion, she complained and was made an assistant professor in 1904. She filled in unofficially as head professor and chair of the department when Penhallow became sick in 1909, but an outsider was hired to replace him when he died the next year. She then received the first full professorship given to a Canadian woman, professor of morphological botany, a title that was changed after 17 years to professor of comparative botany and genetics. She retired in 1929, becoming Canada’s first professor emerita (as opposed to emeritus), and devoted her energies to activism on behalf of women’s rights; she served as president of the Montreal Suffrage Association, and in 1913 contributed a “General Report on Women’s Work” to the report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Training and Technical Education. She wrote many articles on both science and women’s rights and filled leadership positions at numerous organizations and volunteer associations.