… of D.J. Fontana, Elvis Presley’s drummer for 14 years, is 79.

… of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s 77.

… of Judd Hirsch. He’s 75.

… of Beach Boy Mike Love. He’s 69. Love is the cousin of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.

Subsequently, the band has intermittently released new albums and toured like clockwork every summer while making headlines for various extracurricular mishaps: the accidental drowning death of Dennis Wilson in 1983; the legal battles over Brian’s conservatorship between elements in the Beach Boys’ camp and his control-oriented (and since-deposed) psychologist, Eugene Landy; and Mike Love’s lawsuit against Brian, wherein he claimed to have coauthored certain Beach Boys songs credited to Brian alone. Burdened by these and myriad other subplots, the Beach Boys at time seemed to be rock and roll’s longest-running soap opera. At the same time, they’ve been responsible for some of the most perfect harmonies and gorgeous melodies in rock and roll history, and it is for this vast accumulation of timeless music for which they will ultimately be remembered and celebrated.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Sylvester Stewart. He’s 67.

Sly and the Family Stone took the Sixties ideal of a generation coming together and turned it into deeply groove-driven music. Rock’s first integrated, multi-gender band became funky Pied Pipers to the Woodstock Generation, synthesizing rock, soul, R&B, funk and psychedelia into danceable, message-laden, high-energy music. In promoting their gospel of tolerance and celebration of differences, Sly and the Family Stone brought disparate audiences together during the latter half of the Sixties. The group’s greatest triumph came at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. During their unforgettable nighttime set, leader Sly Stone initiated a fevered call-and-response with the audience of 400,000 during an electrifying version of “I Want to Take You Higher.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Ry Cooder. He’s 63.

… of Fabio. He’s 49.

… of Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. He’s 38.

… of Eva Longoria Parker, desperate at turning 35.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S., was born on this date in 1767.

Jones has 79 Grammy nominations and 27 wins to his credit. He produced “Thriller,” which has sold more than 100 million copies.

Caine has six Oscar nominations and two wins, both for best supporting actor — Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules. His first best actor nomination was for Alfie in 1967; his most recent for The Quiet American 36 years later.

Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1879. The following is from his New York Times obituary in 1955.

In 1904, Albert Einstein, then an obscure young man of 25, could be seen daily in the late afternoon wheeling a baby carriage on the streets of Bern, Switzerland, halting now and then, unmindful of the traffic around him, to scribble down some mathematical symbols in a notebook that shared the carriage with his infant son, also named Albert.

Out of those symbols came the most explosive ideas in the age-old strivings of man to fathom the mystery of his universe. Out of them, incidentally, came the atomic bomb, which, viewed from the long-range perspective of mankind’s intellectual and spiritual history may turn out, Einstein fervently hoped, to have been just a minor by-product.

With those symbols Dr. Einstein was building his theory of relativity. In that baby carriage with his infant son was Dr. Einstein’s universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe, in which the conventional universe–existing in absolute three-dimensional space and in absolute three-dimensional time of past, present and future–vanished into a mere subjective shadow.

Dr. Einstein was then building his universe in his spare time, on the completion of his day’s routine work as a humble, $600-a-year examiner in the Government Patent Office in Bern.

A few months later, in 1905, the entries in the notebook were published in four epoch-making scientific papers. In the first he described a method for determining molecular dimensions. In the second he explained the photo-electric effect, the basis of electronics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. In the third, he presented a molecular kinetic theory of heat. The fourth and last paper that year, entitled “Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” a short article of thirty-one pages, was the first presentation of what became known as the Special Relativity Theory.

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Mike Stoller. He’s 77.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock and roll songs: “Hound Dog” (originally cut by Big Mama Thornton in 1953 and covered by Elvis Presley three years later), “Love Potion No. 9″ (the Clovers), “Kansas City” (Wilbert Harrison), “On Broadway” (the Drifters), “Ruby Baby” (Dion) and “Stand By Me” (Ben E. King). Their vast catalog includes virtually every major hit by the Coasters (e.g., “Searchin’,” “Young Blood,” “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak” and “Poison Ivy”). They also worked their magic on Elvis Presley, writing “Jailhouse Rock,” “Treat Me Nice” and “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)” specifically for him. All totaled, Presley recorded more than 20 Leiber and Stoller songs.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Leiber wrote the lyrics. Stoller wrote the music.

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Neil Sedaka. He’s 71.

Singer, songwriter, and pianist Neil Sedaka enjoyed two distinct periods of commercial success in two slightly different styles of pop music: first, as a teen pop star in the late ’50s and early ’60s, then as a singer of more mature pop/rock in the 1970s. In both phases, Sedaka, a classically trained pianist, composed the music for his hits, which he sang in a boyish tenor. And throughout, even when his performing career was at a low ebb, he served as a songwriter for other artists, resulting in a string of hits year in and year out, whether recorded by him or someone else. For himself, he wrote eight U.S. Top Ten pop hits, including the chart-toppers “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Bad Blood.” The most successful cover of one of his compositions was Captain & Tennille’s recording of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” another number one.

All Music

… of William H. Macy. He’s 60. Macy was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for his performance in Fargo.

Percival Lowell was born March 13th in 1855. Lowell is credited with the discovery of Pluto, but Pluto isn’t even mentioned in his obituary. The foremost “discovery” of Professor Lowell’s career concerned Mars. The following is an excerpt from his obituary in 1916:

The great controversy among astronomers, in which he played a leading part, began in 1907 after his announcement that the observations made by his astronomical station, the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell had put the theory forward tentatively as early as 1895. Many eminent astronomers in this country and Europe accepted his conclusions of 1907 as unassailable. Others were skeptical. Professor Lowell continued from year to year to produce fresh evidence in favor of his theory by his observations at Flagstaff, where is located the best astronomical plant in the world for the observation of Mars.

Professor Lowell’s theory begins with the demonstration that the primary requisites for human life exist on the planet–water, heat, and atmosphere. His positive proof of the existence of human life on Mars is the network of lines which mark certain areas of the planet’s face, indicating the digging of artificial canals, which would require an intelligence and engineering skill as great or greater than that possessed by the inhabitants of this earth.

The New York Times

Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 of the “Get Smart” TV series, is 77.

James Taylor is 62 today. He’s seen a lot of fire and he’s seen a lot of rain by now.

Liza Minnelli is 64.

Jon Provost is 60. Who? Timmy on Lassie.

Courtney B. Vance is 50.

Dave Eggers is 40.

While he was in college at the University of Illinois, his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.

Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, “On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There’s a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started.”

Eggers had to drop out of college to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to San Francisco, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents’ deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called their publication Might Magazine, because the liked the fact that the word “might” conveyed both strength and hesitation. The magazine developed a cult following for the way it satirized the magazine format. Each issue included an erroneous table of contents, irrelevant footnotes, and fictional error retractions. In one issue, they wrote, “On page 111, in our ‘Religious News Round-up,’ we reported that Jesus Christ was a deranged, filthy protohippy. In fact, Jesus Christ was the son of God. We regret the error.” To raise money for the magazine, they sold the contents of their recycle bins to readers.

Excerpt above from The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

If you have never read Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, stop what you’re doing, get a copy and read it. NOW!

I’ve also been told that Eggers new book, Zeitoun is a must read.

Jean-Louise Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on this date in 1922.

The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they’d fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.

The Writer’s Almanac

The above is an excerpt. Click the link for a better look at how the book was created.

Ralph Abernathy was born on this date in 1926. Abernathy was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend and associate and assumed leadership of the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when King was killed in 1968. Abernathy was with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis that day. This photo of the two was taken in 1961.

Lawrence Welk was born in North Dakota on this date in 1903. He died in 1992.

One of television’s most enduring musical series, The Lawrence Welk Show, was first seen on network TV as a summer replacement program in 1955. Although the critics were not impressed, Mr. Welk’s show went on to last an astonishing 27 years. His format was simple: easy-listening music, what he referred to as “champagne music,” and a “family” of wholesome musicians, singers, and dancers.

The show ran on ABC for the first 16 years and was known in the early years as The Dodge Dancing Party. ABC canceled the show in 1971, not because of lack of popularity, but because it was “too old” to please advertisers. ABC’s cancellation did little to stop Welk, who lined up more than 200 independent stations for a successful syndicated network of his own.
. . .

There were many show favorites throughout the years including the Lennon Sisters, who were brought to his attention by his son Lawrence Jr. who was dating Dianne Lennon in 1955. Other favorites included the Champagne Ladies (Alice Lon and Norma Zimmer); accordionist Myron Floren, who was also the assistant conductor; singer-pianist Larry Hooper; singers Joe Feeney and Guy Hovis; violinist Aladdin; dancers Bobby Burgess and Barbara Boylan; and Welk’s daughter-in-law, Tanya Falan Welk.

Most of the regulars stayed with the show for years, but a few moved on–or who were told to move on by Mr. Welk. In 1959, for example, Welk fired Champagne Lady Alice Lon for “showing too much knee” on camera. After receiving thousands of protest letters for his actions, he attempted to have Alice return, but she refused.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams was born on March 11, 1952. He died from a heart attack in 2001.

Joyce Van Patten is 76, Mickey Gilley is 74 and Charles Gibson is 67.

Juliette Binoche is 46. Sigh.

Webster, that is Emmanuel Lewis, is 39.

Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, was born on March 9th in 1934.

Until the morning of April 12, 1961, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was no better known than any of the other 1,200 or so Gagarins living in the Moscow area.

But that morning, Yuri Gagarin, then 27 years old, sat cramped in the cockpit of a Vostok space capsule as it was launched from a pad at Baykonur, in Kazakhstan.

At 9:07 A.M., the capsule went into orbit around the earth and Yuri Gagarin became the world’s first man in space. His flight represented an epochal scientific and technological achievement for the Russians.

In both the Soviet Union and the West, it was realized that Cosmonaut Gagarin had begun a new chapter in history, one in which man had dared cross the threshold of the universe.

The New York Times

Gagarin died in an aircraft accident in 1968.

It’s also Natalie’s birthday. Happy birthday, Natalie.

When he was in high school, his English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Ever since he took that class, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work and has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.

He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about the geology of America, Annals of the Former World (1998).

In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Reportedly McPhee almost never writes more than one single-spaced page a day. It adds up. He’s published more than two dozen books.

Micky Dolenz of the Monkees is 65 today.

Baseball hall-of-famer Jim Rice is 57.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born on this date in 1841. Three times wounded in the Civil War, Holmes survived to become a prominent legal scholar, Chief Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932. He is considered one of the greatest of the Supreme Court justices.

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States, Baer v. United States, 249 U.S. 52 (1919).

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting, Abrams et al. v. United States, 250 U.S. 630 (1919).

Other than maybe, the fact that Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz is 39 today.

Oh, and Jenna Fischer is 36.

It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell received patent No. 174,465 for the telephone. He filed for his patent on the same day as a Chicago electrician named Elisha Gray filed for a patent on basically the same device. Bell only beat Gray by two hours.

It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly. Darrow based the game on an earlier game called “The Landlord’s Game,” which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie to teach people about the evils of capitalism.

It was on this day in 1917 that the Victor Talking Machine Company released the first jazz record in American history. There were various terms for this new music. It was called “ratty music,” “gut-bucket music,” and “hot music.” Historians aren’t sure how it came to be called jazz, but it’s believed that the word may have come from a West African word for speeding things up. It was also a slang term for sex.

The first band to record jazz was The Original Dixieland Jass Band, an all-white group led by an Italian-American cornetist from New Orleans.

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She has said that her writing has at its core “the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed-blood person.” As she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, she learned the stories and culture of the Laguna people from her great-grandmother and other female relatives. After receiving her B. A. in English at the University of New Mexico, she enrolled in the University of New Mexico law school but completed only three semesters before deciding that writing and storytelling, not law, were the means by which she could best promote justice. She married John Silko in 1970. Prior to the writing of Ceremony, she published a series of short stories, including “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” She also authored a volume of poetry, Laguna Woman: Poems, for which she received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry.

In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wrote Ceremony. Initially conceived as a comic story abut a mother’s attempts to keep her son, a war veteran, away from alcohol, Ceremony gradually transformed into an intricate meditation on mental disturbance, despair, and the power of stories and traditional culture as the keys to self-awareness and, eventually, emotional healing. Having battled depression herself while composing her novel, Silko was later to call her book “a ceremony for staying sane.” Silko has followed the critical success of Ceremony with a series of other novels, including Storyteller, Almanac for the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement of Ceremony that first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.

Penguin Reading Guides

Ceremony is required reading.

It’s also the birthday

… of actor Dean Stockwell. He’s 74. IMDb lists 190 credits for Stockwell, going back to 1945. He received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination in 1989 for Married to the Mob.

… of Penn Jillette. Penn of Penn & Teller has hit the double nickel.

… of Eva Mendes. She’s 36.

Patsy Cline died in a plane crash on this date in 1963. She was 30. John Belushi was found dead from a drug overdose on this date in 1982. He was 33.

He was 19, had just finished his freshman year of college, and was looking for a summer job with an ad agency or a TV station. He searched all over Baltimore and couldn’t find anything, but someone at a rock ‘n’ roll station knew someone at NPR’s headquarters in Washington and gave Ira a phone number and said, “They’re kind of a new organization, so call.”

He managed to talk his way into an internship despite the fact he’d never once listened to public radio. He started out as a tape cutter and as a desk assistant, graduated from Brown University, and continued working for public radio as newscast writer, editor, producer of All Things Considered, reporter, and substitute host.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Jean Harlow was born on this date in 1911. She was in 36 films before her death at age 26.

Jean displayed talent in both her sensual and comedic performances, but she initially captivated fans with her trendsetting platinum blonde hair. As she gained fame, peroxide sales in the United States skyrocketed. Botched attempts to look like Jean forced thousands of women to cut their hair. Hollywood producers of the past had consistently cast dark-haired women to play the parts of vixens, but Jean emerged as the first star to incorporate the platinum blonde look into her acting.

The Official Site of Jean Harlow

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on this date in 1847. His family moved to Canada when he was 22 and he himself to Boston at age 24 to become a professor at Boston University. He was a teacher of the deaf and and his experiments with electrically reproducing speech lead to the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell lived to see the telephonic instrument over which he talked a distance of twenty feet in 1876 used, with improvements, for the transmission of speech across the continent, and more than that, for the transmission of speech across the Atlantic and from Washington to Honolulu without wires. The little instrument he patented less than fifty years ago, scorned then as a joke, was when he died the basis for 13,000,000 telephones used in every civilized country in the world. The Bell basic patent, the famed No. 174,465, which he received on his twenty-ninth birthday and which was sustained in a historic court fight, has been called the most valuable patent ever issued.

Although the inventor of many contrivances which he regarded with as much tenderness and to which he attached as much importance as the telephone, a business world which he confessed he was often unable to understand made it assured that he would go down in history as the man who made the telephone. He was an inventor of the gramophone, and for nearly twenty years was engaged in aeronautics. Associated with Glenn H. Curtiss and others, whose names are now known wherever airplanes fly, he pinned his faith in the efficacy for aviation of the tetrahedral cell, which never achieved the success he saw for it in aviation, but as a by-product of his study he established an important new principle in architecture.

The New York Times (1922)

“I can’t read him because he’s such a bad writer,” Irving said of Wolfe. When Solomon added that “Bonfire of the Vanities” author Wolfe is “having a war” with Updike and Mailer, Irving dismissed the notion out of hand: “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”

Irving described Wolfe’s novels as “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction … He’s a journalist … he can’t create a character. He can’t create a situation.”

Salon Books

Author John Irving is 68 today.

Reached through his publisher, Wolfe responded in writing. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” he asked about Irving. “Because he, like Updike and Mailer, has panicked. All three have seen the handwriting on the wall, and it reads: ‘A Man in Full.’”

If the literary trio don’t embrace “full-blooded realism,” Wolfe warns, “then their reputations are finished.” He also offers Irving some additional literary advice: “Irving needs to get up off his bottom and leave that farm in Vermont or wherever it is he stays and start living again. It wouldn’t be that hard. All he’d have to do is get out and take a deep breath and talk to people and see things and rediscover the fabulous and wonderfully bizarre country around him: America.”

Salon Books

Mikhail Gorbachev is 79.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Lou Reed is 68.

The influence of the Velvet Underground on rock greatly exceeds their sales figures and chart numbers. They are one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, laying the groundwork in the Sixties for many tangents rock music would take in ensuing decades. Yet just two of their four original studio albums ever even made Billboard’s Top 200, and that pair – The Velvet Underground and Nico (#171) and White Light/White Heat (#199) – only barely did so. If ever a band was “ahead of its time,” it was the Velvet Underground. Brian Eno, cofounder of Roxy Music and producer of U2 and others, put it best when he said that although the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, everyone who bought one went on to form a band. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., Roxy Music and Sonic Youth have all cited the Velvet Underground as a major influence.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Jon Bon Jovi, New Jersey’s second most famous rock-and-roller, is 48.

Daniel Craig is 42.

Chris Martin of Coldplay is 33.

Ben Roethlisberger is 28. Reggie Bush is 25.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) was born 106 years ago today.

A big study came out in the 1950s called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” It was by an Austrian immigrant to the U.S., an education specialist who argued that the Dick and Jane primers being used to teach reading in grade school classrooms across America were boring and, worse, not an effective method for teaching reading. He called them “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers,” which went “through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading ‘Look, look’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Come, come’ or ‘See the funny, funny animal.’”

A publisher at Random House thought that maybe a guy named Dr. Seuss, who’d published a few not-well-known but very imaginative children’s books, might be able to write a book that would be really good for teaching kids how to read. A publisher invited Dr. Seuss to dinner and said, “Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!”

Dr. Seuss spent nine months composing The Cat in the Hat. It uses just 220 different words and is 1,702 words long. He was a meticulous reviser, and he once said: “Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.”

Within a year of publication, The Cat in the Hat was selling 12,000 copies a month; within five years, it had sold a million copies. Dr. Seuss has sold more books for Random House Publishing than any other writer in its history.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

When Geisel/Seuss was awarded an honorary degree from Princeton in 1985, the entire graduating class stood and recited Green Eggs and Ham.

Green Eggs and Ham is the third largest selling book in the English language — ever.

Green Eggs and Ham à la Sam-I-Am

1-2 tablespoons of butter or margarine
4 slices of ham
8 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
1-2 drops of green food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of pepper

To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re a part of the human race. There never was a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children—everybody. He had that rare ability. Somewhere he had said that he didn’t like to go on television, because he didn’t think his music could be represented well on a small screen, and he was probably right. Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry—who could have kicked the shit out of all of them—couldn’t be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight. He even said he hated pop songs, thought they were junk. I could identify with Harry in all kinds of ways. Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he’d be headlining the joint. You’ve got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally.

And Belafonte was about the best looking man on the planet too.

Ron Howard is 56 today. He’s been on TV and in the movies for more than 50 years and, of course, won an Oscar for best director for A Beautiful Mind. Howard has been married to Mrs. Howard since 1975 and is the older brother of TV and film character actor Ron Howard’s brother.

Today is also the birthday

… of Roger Daltrey. “Who?” you say. “Of The Who,” I say. He’s 66 and far too old for half-time shows.

… of Catherine Bach. “Who?” you say. “Daisy Duke of TV,” I say. She’s 56.

… of Oscar-winner and currently at least Penelope Cruz winner Javier Bardem. He’s 41.

… of Chris Webber, the basketball player who called timeout when his team had none left and down by just two points in the 1993 national championship game. That would be a technical foul. Two shoots. Both made. Down four. Oops. He’s 37 today.

Well-known Americans of the 20th century born on this date include band-leader Glenn Miller (1904), author Ralph Ellison (1914), poet Robert Lowell (1917), Mad magazine publisher William M. Gaines (1922) and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle (1926).

Also on March 1st, the Lindbergh infant son was kidnapped (1932), Richard Wright’s Native Son was published (1940), the Peace Corps was established (1961), Johnny Cash married June Carter (1968) and the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to execute an individual who had committed their crime before age 18 (Roper v. Simmons, 2005). They’ll reverse that one soon enough.

Lee, official brother of NewMexiKen, circumnavigator of the globe, Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker, and pretty darn good guitar player and woodworker celebrates his birthday today. Happy birthday, Brother.

… Gavin MacLeod. The captain of the Love Boat and Mary Tyler Moore’s wisecracking news writer is 79.

… Dean Smith. The hall-of-fame basketball coach is 79.

… Mario Andretti. He’s in the left lane with his blinker on at age 70.

… Bubba Smith. The football star turned actor is 65.

… Bernadette Lazzara, known to us as Bernadette Peters. The star of stage, screen and television (beginning at age 3) is 62 today. She’s won a Tony twice as Best Leading Actress in a Musical — “Song and Dance” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”

… Gilbert Gottfried, 55.

… John Turturro. The actor is 53.

… Colum McCann. The National Book Award winner for Let the Great World Spin is 45. According to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, “It’s a prize they’ve been giving out for 60 years, but he’s only the third non-American-born writer” to win. Click for more on McCann.

Linus Pauling was born on this date in 1901. Pauling won two Nobel Prizes.

Dr. Pauling received the prize for chemistry in 1954, as a result of his research into the nature of the chemical bond, the force that gives atoms the cohesiveness to form the molecules that in turn become the basis of all physical matter.

In 1962, at age 61, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The award’s citation acclaimed him for his work since 1946 “not only against the testing of nuclear weapons, not only against the spread of these armaments, not only against their very use, but against all warfare as a means of solving international conflicts.”

Dr. Pauling was also said to have provided powerful impetus to others in achieving what many came to regard as the medical discovery of the century. That was the determination of the structure of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the genetic material in all living organisms.

To those who eventually won the race to solve DNA, Dr. Pauling was seen at the time as the closest rival. Had he been the victor, he, no doubt, would have been the recipient of a third Nobel Prize.

The New York Times

Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward is 80 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times.

Two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor is 78 today. Miss Taylor won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Ralph Nader is 76.

Among others having a birthday today are Chelsea Clinton, 30, and Josh Groban, 29.

“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See?”

Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, born on this date in 1902.

“All I am doing is following what to me is the clear wording of the First Amendment that ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.’ As I have said innumerable times before, I simply believe that ‘no law’ means no law.”

Justice Hugo Black, born on this date in 1886.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,–
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born on this date in 1807.