Going out in a beer-can casket

Bill Bramanti will love Pabst Blue Ribbon eternally, and he's got the custom-made beer-can casket to prove it. "I actually fit, because I got in here," said Bramanti of South Chicago Heights, Ill.

The 67-year-old Glenwood village administrator doesn't plan on needing it anytime soon, though. He threw a party Saturday for friends and filled his silver coffin — designed in Pabst's colors of red, white and blue — with ice and his favorite brew.

Passages

Former Spanish Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, 82, who presided during his country's rocky transition from the fascist dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco to liberal democracy, died Saturday, his family said.

Today in History

1818: Political philosopher Karl Marx was born in Prussia.

1821: Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, died in exile on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic.

1925: John Scopes was arrested in Tennessee for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution.

1945: In the only fatal attack of its kind during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing the pregnant wife of a minister and five children.

1958: The Arkansas Gazette received the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis; James Agee was posthumously honored for his novel "A Death in the Family."

1961: Astronaut Alan Shepard became America's first space traveler as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Today's Birthdays

Comedian-actor Michael Palin, 65. Actor John Rhys-Davies, 64. Actor Roger Rees, 64. Rock correspondent Kurt Loder, 63. NBC News anchor Brian Williams, 49. Actress Tina Yothers, 35. Actress Danielle Fishel, 27. R&B singer Chris Brown, 19.

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