October 9 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on October 9

• Camille Saint-Saëns (1835)

  French composer known for works including 'The Carnival of the Animals' and 'Danse Macabre.'

• John Lennon (1940)

  English musician and songwriter, co-founder of the Beatles and later a solo artist known for songs including 'Imagine.'

• Jackson Browne (1948)

  American singer-songwriter known for albums including Late for the Sky and Running on Empty.

• Guillermo del Toro (1964)

  Mexican filmmaker known for Pan's Labyrinth and the Academy Award-winning The Shape of Water.

This Day in History

• 1888 — The Washington Monument officially opened to the public in Washington, D.C., more than three years after its dedication.

• 1967 — Revolutionary Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia after being captured by Bolivian forces the previous day.

• 2006 — North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test, drawing international condemnation and United Nations sanctions.

What October 9 Says About You

John Lennon spent much of his songwriting career imagining a world without borders or weapons, which makes it a genuinely strange coincidence that his birthday, October 9, is also the date North Korea chose in 2006 for its first nuclear weapons test — two entries in the historical record for the same calendar day that couldn't sit further apart in spirit. Lennon, born on this date in 1940, wrote 'Imagine' as a kind of deliberately simple thought experiment in peace; the 2006 test was a deliberately unsubtle demonstration of military capability, and the distance between those two things says something about how differently a single date can be claimed. This date's history runs further back than either of them: Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who had become a global symbol of armed left-wing insurgency, was executed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967, a day after his capture, turning him almost instantly into one of the 20th century's most reproduced political images. On a considerably less charged note, the Washington Monument officially opened to the public on this date in 1888, more than three years after its formal dedication, finally letting ordinary visitors climb the tallest structure in the world at that time. Guillermo del Toro, born October 9, 1964, has built a filmmaking career out of finding the humanity inside monstrous, unsettling shapes, a sensibility that fits a birthday shared with a revolutionary's execution and a peace anthem's author in equal measure. Libra governs this birthday, and the numerology reading for the 9th lands on day number 9 — compassion, idealism, a sense of closing out a cycle — which fits Guevara's death closing one violent chapter of Cold War history, and fits Lennon's idealism just as naturally, even if the two men arrived at very different conclusions about how change should happen. Jackson Browne, also born on this date in 1948, has spent decades writing thoughtful, socially engaged songs that split the difference between Lennon's idealism and a more grounded, weary realism. Opal, October's birthstone, has a reputation in folklore as a stone of intensified emotion, prone to amplifying whatever feeling already surrounds it — an image that suits a date whose history holds an assassinated Che Guevara, an idealistic Lennon anthem, and a nuclear test that alarmed the world, all inside the same 24 hours across different years. Marigold and cosmos offer little direct tie to any of this, though cosmos flowers are sometimes read in floriography as a symbol of order amid chaos — not a bad description of what people have tried, with mixed success, to bring to this particular date's history.