Month: October 2008

It’s Halloween and the birthday

… of Astronaut Michael Collins. Collins was the guy on board the Apollo while Armstrong and Aldrin played on the moon.

… of Dan Rather. His frequency is 77.

… of David Ogden Stiers. Major Winchester is 66.

… of Jane Pauley. She’s 58.

It’s also the birthday of Michael (Bonanza/Little House on the Prairie) Landon, who was born in 1936 and died in 1991, and John Candy, born in 1950. Candy died in 1994.

The great jazz and blues singer and film actress Ethel Waters was born on this date in 1896.

Later, in the 1930s, Waters found the mainstream of popular music, including jazz and congenial, and brought to it a combination of tragedy (in Harold Arlen’s Stormy Weather, 1933) and comedy (in H. I. Marshall’s You Can’t Stop Me From Loving You, 1931) which, in its range, was unsurpassed by any other popular singer. …

Waters was the first black entertainer to move successfully from the vaudeville and nightclub circuits to what blacks called “the white time” (the West Indian Bert Williams had done this earlier in the Ziegfield Follies — but in blackface). Her vocal resources were adequate though unexceptional, but this shortcoming was mitigated by an innate theatrical flair that enabled her to project the character and situation of every song she performed. (PBS – JAZZ A Film By Ken Burns)

Ms. Waters was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar in 1949 for her part in “Pinky.” Such was the segregation in film and television at that time that Waters next played the title role in “Beulah” an early fifties situation comedy. Beulah was a domestic for a white family. Waters was succeeded in the role by Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel, then Louise Beavers, and finally Amanda Randolph.

Ethel Waters died in 1977.

Ehrich Weiss, better known to us as Harry Houdini, died on this date — Halloween — in 1926.

But during a stay in Montreal in October, Houdini was assaulted by a young man in his dressing room. The stomach blows — which he had invited as a test of his legendary strength — aggravated a case of appendicitis, and he soon became seriously ill. In a final display of stamina and willpower, Houdini performed the next day and again in Detroit. His appendix was removed on October 25th, but the delay had allowed an infection to set in, and he died in Detroit on Halloween.

Source: The American Experience, which has a brief biography.

Nevada became the 36th state on this date in 1864, just in time to cast two electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln.

Nevada was admitted to the Union as the 36th state on this date in 1864.

In Spanish “nevada” means snow-capped.
The Nevada state bird: Mountain Bluebird
State animal: Desert Bighorn Sheep
State reptile: Desert Tortoise
Nevada is the seventh largest state: 110,540 square miles. It has 17 counties.

Today is the birthday

… of Robert Caro, born on this date in 1936. The Writer’s Almanac (2005) tells us about Caro, including this:

Since 1974, Caro has been working on a four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. He says he picked Johnson to write about because he wanted to write about political power, and he believes Lyndon Johnson was the most masterful getter and user of political power in the 20th century. For his research on Johnson, Caro has gone through 34 million documents at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, and he has conducted more than 1,000 interviews. He lived in Johnson’s hometown for three years so that he could get to know the people there well enough that they would open up to him. He also tracked down every living member of Johnson’s grammar school class.

Caro eventually uncovered the fact that Johnson had committed an unprecedented series of lies, manipulations, and vote tampering on his way to becoming a United States Senator. But what fascinated Caro was the fact that a politician who would commit such crimes in order to get power could still use that power for good. He points out that, when Johnson got into office, he became the greatest advocate for civil rights of any politician since Abraham Lincoln.

Caro’s third volume Master of the Senate won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

… of Rudolfo Anaya, 71.

[B]orn in Pastura, New Mexico, in 1937. He grew up in the village of Santa Rosa, and he grew up speaking only Spanish, listening to folktales while he helped his family harvest. He went to college, then he taught middle school and high school. And in the evenings, he started to write a book, a fictionalized account of life in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. He couldn’t get it published, but finally, in 1972, he found a small press in California, and it became a classic: Bless Me, Última.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, 69 today.

… of Otis Williams of the Temptations, 67 today.

… of Henry Winkler. The Fonz, is 63.

… of Timothy B. Schmit, of the Eagles is 61. Before the Eagles, he was in Poco.

… of Terry “The Toad.” Charles Martin Smith is 55 today.

Ezra Pound was born in Halley, Idaho, on this date in 1885.

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. . . . His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry–stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

Poets.org

José Manuel Gallegos was born in Abiquiú, Nuevo México, on this date in 1815.

His people were Hispanos, descendants of early Spanish settlers, and Gallegos went on to become New Mexico’s first delegate to the U.S. Congress.

Raised during the Mexican revolution, Gallegos was surrounded by republican ideals during his formative years of education with the Franciscan missionaries in Taos and Durango. Ordained a Catholic priest at age 25, Gallegos readily added political tasks to his clerical responsibilities. He became pastor of San Felipe de Neri church in La Villa de Albuquerque, as well as one of the nineteen “electors,” men who chose Nuevo México’s deputy to the Mexican Congress.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded the Southwest, from Texas to California, to the United States. Nuevo México became the U.S. territory of New Mexico, and Gallegos was elected to its first Territorial Council. He won the election for delegate to the U.S. Congress in 1853, the second Hispanic Congressional Representative in U.S. history. Thirty-one years had elapsed since Joseph Marion Hernández, from the territory of Florida, had become the first Hispanic in Congress in 1822.

Suspended from the priesthood for refusing to accept the authority of French religious superior, Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (who became the subject of Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop), Gallegos put increasing energy into his political life. Subsequently, he was elected to the New Mexico Territorial House of Representatives, served as treasurer of the territory, and was superintendent of New Mexico Indian affairs. Gallegos returned to the U.S. House of Representatives for a second term in 1871.

— Library of Congress