Doris Day celebrates her birthday - the correct one - with a party for pooches

Last year was a big year for Doris Day.

Sure, the singer and actress and animal activist turned 95. 

But 2017 almost marked another milestone for America's original girl-next-door. 

That's when Day – and the rest of the world – learned exactly the year the "Whatever Will Be Will Be (Que Sera)" singer was born in Cincinnati. 

After years of confusing and contradictory reports on her age, the Associated Press determined that Doris May Kappelhoff, her pre-fame name, was born April 3, 1922, in Cincinnati.

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"I've always said that age is just a number and I have never paid much attention to birthdays, but it's great to finally know how old I really am!" Day said in a statement in 2017.

That discovery also means that this Tuesday marks, well, the first Day birthday when we all know exactly how many candles to put on the cake. 

According to People, Day celebrated this year with an all-weekend bash of bingo and concerts in her adopted hometown of Carmel-by-the-sea, California. 

The events raised funds for the Doris Day Animal Foundation. 

Ninety-six years ago, Day was born in Evanston. Her father was a music teacher, her mother a hausfrau or a housewife. 

She took dance lessons at Hessler’s in Mount Adams. She went to movies at the Albee Theater with her mother.

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“My roots in Cincinnati go very deep,” Day wrote in her in her autobiography, “Doris Day: Her Own Story,” as told to A.E. Hotchner.

 “I didn’t leave there wanting to escape to someplace better. I only left because the tide of events washed me away.”

As teenagers, Day and her dance partner Jerry Doherty performed all over town. She also sang on on the radio program “Carlin’s Carnival” and at Charlie Yee’s Shanghai Inn restaurant.

“I could have happily lived my entire life in Cincinnati, married to a proper Cincinnatian, living in a big old Victorian house, raising a brood of offspring, but preordination … had other plans for me,” said Day in her autobiography.

In 1939, bandleader Barney Rapp signed Day as a singer to replace his pregnant wife at his club, the Sign of the Drum on Reading Road.

Kappelhoff was too long for the marquee, he said. How about Doris Day because of the song “Day After Day?”

She never liked the moniker.

Her friends still call her Clara.

But Doris Day is the name that topped the charts in the 1940s and 1950s, with hits like "Sentimental Journey." (She would go on to record some 600 tunes.)

That's the name on the posters for "The Man Who Knew Too Much, "Move Over, Darling" and all those other 1950s and '60s classics that made her one of the most bankable movie stars of all time.

It's also the name on an Academy Award nomination for "Pillow Talk," a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

That's the name of our dog park, and on a street in Downtown, near theaters and concert venues today.

But that's not the Doris we first met 96 years ago. 

So, Happy Birthday, to Cincinnati's Doris.

Doris May Kappelhoff.

Jeff Suess and the Associated Press contributed to this article.

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