October 10 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on October 10

• Giuseppe Verdi (1813)

  Italian composer known for operas including Rigoletto, La Traviata, and Aida.

• Thelonious Monk (1917)

  American jazz pianist and composer known for his distinctive, angular improvisational style and compositions including 'Round Midnight.'

• David Lee Roth (1954)

  American singer, longtime frontman of the rock band Van Halen.

• Mario Lopez (1973)

  American actor and television host known for Saved by the Bell.

This Day in History

• 1911 — The Wuchang Uprising began in China, the armed rebellion that triggered the Xinhai Revolution and led within months to the collapse of the Qing dynasty.

• 1964 — The Summer Olympics opened in Tokyo, the first Olympic Games held in Asia.

• 1973 — U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned amid a corruption scandal, becoming only the second vice president in American history to resign from office.

What October 10 Says About You

China still marks October 10 as a national holiday, Double Ten Day, commemorating the 1911 Wuchang Uprising that began on this date and, within a matter of months, brought down the Qing dynasty after more than two and a half centuries of imperial rule — one of the most consequential single-day sparks in modern political history, and one still publicly observed well over a century later. Giuseppe Verdi, born on this date in 1813, spent a career writing operas that regularly built toward exactly this kind of dramatic turning point, a single decisive act reshaping everything that follows, which makes for an unusually apt echo between a composer's dramatic instincts and his own birthday's real-world history. Tokyo opened the Summer Olympics on this date in 1964, the first Olympic Games ever held in Asia, a moment of genuine national reintroduction for a country rebuilding its global standing less than two decades after the end of World War II. In American politics, October 10 carries its own quieter reckoning: Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 amid a corruption scandal unrelated to Watergate, becoming only the second vice president in U.S. history to leave office early, a resignation that gets overshadowed today by the presidential scandal unfolding around it at the same time. Thelonious Monk, born on this date in 1917, built a musical reputation on deliberately unresolved tension, chords that refused to land where a listener expected — a sensibility that, oddly enough, suits a date whose real history keeps producing sudden, destabilizing turns of fortune for empires, vice presidents, and Olympic host cities alike. Libra claims this birthday too, and the two digits of the 10th collapse down to numerology's day number 1 — leadership, fresh starts, an echo of January 1's reading landing on a very different date entirely. That reading fits both the Wuchang Uprising, which launched an entirely new form of Chinese government, and the Tokyo Olympics, which marked a genuine new beginning for the host nation on the world stage. October's birthstone opal, prized for the way its internal color seems to shift and reorganize itself depending on the light, mirrors a date whose real history is fundamentally about old orders reorganizing into new ones. Neither marigold nor cosmos carries a direct thematic tie here, though the marigold's long association in some cultures with remembrance suits a date that keeps marking the end of one era and the uncertain start of the next. David Lee Roth, after his initial run with Van Halen ended, trained and worked as a New York City emergency medical technician for a period in the early 1990s, an unusually grounded second act for a performer known for his theatrical stage persona. Thelonious Monk's earliest recordings as a bandleader were released under the title Genius of Modern Music, a phrase that captured how quickly critics recognized his unconventional style even when wider commercial audiences were slower to embrace it.