It’s the birthday

… of Bill Keane. The artist and creator of Family Circus is 83.

… of Diahann Carroll. The actress is 70. She was once married to singer Vic Damone and once engaged to Sidney Poitier and later to David Frost. Ms. Carroll was nominated for an Oscar for best actress for Claudine. Her TV sitcom “Julia” was the first to star an African-American woman.

… of Edward P. Jones. The author of the Pulitizer Prize winning novel The Known World is 55. A great book.

… of Grant Hill. The basketball player, high school classmate of Emily, official second daughter of NewMexiKen, is 33.

… of Kate Winslett. The actress is 30. She’s been nominated for the best actress and best supporting actress Oscar twice each.

… of Ray Kroc, developer of the McDonald’s empire, who was born on this date in 1902.

But by 1941, “I felt it was time I was on my own,” Mr. Kroc once recalled, and he became the exclusive sales agent for a machine that could prepare five milkshakes at a time.

Then, in 1954, Mr. Kroc heard about Richard and Maurice McDonald, the owners of a fast-food emporium in San Bernadino, Calif., that was using several of his mixers. As a milkshake specialist, Mr. Kroc later explained, “I had to see what kind of an operation was making 40 at one time.”

…

Mr. Kroc talked to the McDonald brothers about opening franchise outlets patterned on their restaurant, which sold hamburgers for 15 cents, french fries for 10 cents and milkshakes for 20 cents.

Eventually, the McDonalds and Mr. Kroc worked out a deal whereby he was to give them a small percentage of the gross of his operation. In due course the first of Mr. Kroc’s restaurants was opened in Des Plaines, another Chicago suburb, long famous as the site of an annual Methodist encampment.

Business proved excellent, and Mr. Kroc soon set about opening other restaurants. The second and third, both in California, opened later in 1955; in five years there were 228, and in 1961 he bought out the McDonald brothers.

Source: Kroc obituary in 1984 from The New York Times

And it’s the birthday of NewMexiKen’s mother; she would have been 80 today. In the month before she died in 1974, Mom made some cuttings of a spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum). Those cuttings (and their descendants) still grow in NewMexiKen’s living room more than 31 years later. I’m not sure what I believe about an afterlife, but I know what I believe about the spirit in those plants.