January 17th is the birthday

… of Betty White. The character actress, who first appeared on television in 1949, and most famous now for The Golden Girls, is 85. Miss White has been nominated for 15 Emmy Awards, winning four times.

… of Eartha Kitt. Santa’s Baby is 80.

… of James Earl Jones. The voice of Darth Vader is 76. Jones has been in more than 130 films and appeared on more than 50 television programs. He was nominated for the 1971 best actor Oscar for The Great White Hope.

… of long-time baseball coach Don Zimmer, now 76.

… of Muhammad Ali. The Champ is 65.

… of Bangle Susanna Hoffs, now 48.

… of Jim Carrey. The actor is 45.

… of Kid Rock. He’s 36.

And it’s the birthday of Al Capone, born in Naples, Italy, in 1899. Here’s some of the background from his obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1947 at the age of 48.

Alphonse (Scarface) Capone, the fat boy from Brooklyn, was a Horatio Alger hero–underworld version. More than any other one man he represented, at the height of his power from 1925 through 1931, the debauchery of the “dry” era. He seized and held in thrall during that period the great city of Chicago and its suburbs.

Head of the cruelest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War I hand grenade.

His infamy made international legend. In France, for example, he was “The One Who Is Scarred.” He was the symbol of the ultimate in American lawlessness.

Capone won great wealth; how much, no one will ever know, except that the figure was fantastic. He remained immune from prosecution for his multitudinous murders (including the St. Valentine Day Massacre in 1929 when his gunners, dressed as policemen, trapped and killed eight of the Bugs Moran bootleg outfit in a Chicago garage), but was brought to book, finally, on the comparatively sissy charge of evasion of income taxes amounting to around $215,000.

For this, he was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison–serving first at Atlanta, then on The Rock, at Alcatraz–and was fined $50,000, with $20,000 additional for costs. With time out for good conduct, he finished this sentence in mid-January of 1939; but by then he was a slack- jawed paretic overcome by social disease, and paralytic to boot.