… of Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward. She is 77 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times. Woodward and Paul Newman have been married 49 years.
… of two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor. She is 75 today. Miss Taylor won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).
… of Ralph Nader. He’s 73.
… of Chelsea Clinton. She’s 27, which means she was 12 when her father was elected president.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on this date in 1807.
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.
He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter’s voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his haul, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,–rejoicing,–sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, “who observers believe influenced American life more than any of his colleagues in modern time,” was born on this date in 1886. The Constitution was his bible.
“Where’s my Constitution?” Justice Black asked, ruffling through his pockets and spreading out the papers on his desk.
“I always keep my Constitution in my coat pocket. What could have happened to it? Have you got one on you?” he asked of a visitor a few years ago.
“You ought to keep one on you all the time,” he said, buzzing for his secretary. “Where’s my Constitution?”
The woman searched his desk drawers and scanned the library shelves in the spacious Supreme Court chambers, but found no Constitution.
“I like to read what it says. I like to read the words of the Constitution,” Justice Black said in a slight Southern drawl, after dispatching the secretary to fetch one. “I’m a literalist, I admit it. It’s a bad word these days, I know, but that’s what I am.”
Shortly, the Constitution was delivered. Hugo LaFayette Black, then 81 years old and completing his 30th year on the United States Supreme Court, laid it tenderly on his lap and opened it to the Bill of Rights.
“Now,” he said with a warm smile, “now let’s see what it says.”
Perhaps as well as anything else, the incident illustrated what formed Chief Justice Earl Warren called the “unflagging devotion” of Mr. Black to the Constitution of the United States.
Perhaps no other man in the history of the Court so revered the Constitution as a source of the free and good life. Few articulated so lucidly, simply and forcefully a philosophy of the 18th- century document. Less than a handful had the impact on constitutional law and the quality of the nation as this self-described “backward country fellow” from Clay County, Alabama.
“I believe that our Constitution,” Justice Black once said, “with its absolute guarantee of individual rights, is the best hope for the aspirations of freedom which men share everywhere.”
John Steinbeck was born on this date in 1902.
Among the masters of modern American literature who have already been awarded this Prize – from Sinclair Lewis to Ernest Hemingway – Steinbeck more than holds his own, independent in position and achievement. There is in him a strain of grim humour which, to some extent, redeems his often cruel and crude motif. His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, to the misfits and the distressed; he likes to contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical craving for money. But in him we find the American temperament also in his great feeling for nature, for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains, and the ocean coasts, all an inexhaustible source of inspiration to Steinbeck in the midst of, and beyond, the world of human beings.
The Swedish Academy’s reason for awarding the prize to John Steinbeck reads, “for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humour and a keen social perception.”
“I know this—a man got to do what he got to do.”