It was on this day in 1940 that American folk singer and activist Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “This Land is Your Land.” In 1954 the first mass inoculation of the Salk vaccine against polio began at Arsenal Elementary School. It's also the birthday of novelist John Camp (1944), Baroque composer George Frideric Handel (1685), and Samuel Pepys (1633) the English diarist who recorded the 1660's in minute detail.