It’s the birthday of crime novelist James Ellroy, born in Los Angeles, California (1948). He is best known for his “LA Quartet,” a series of four novels that attempt to depict the criminal history of Los Angeles from the 1940s through the 1950s. The first book in the series was Black Dahlia (1987).
Patricia Heaton of ”Everybody Loves Raymond” is 49 today.
Sonny and Cher’s daughter Chastity is 38.
Famed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne was born on this date in 1888. He died in a plane crash at age 43 in 1931.
As a player and captain of the 1913 Notre Dame team, the first to ever beat the Army, Rockne began his shaping of football’s destinies by bringing the forward pass suddenly and dramatically into the front of the game. Army that season had scheduled Notre Dame as a “breather” game on its schedule. Only a small crowd turned out, and they stood amazed as Notre Dame defeated Army, 35 to 13. Gus Dorais, now coach at Detroit, threw seventeen passes in that game and thirteen were completed, and a great majority of these went to the short, chunky end, Knute Rockne.
The forward pass had been more or less of a haphazard thing until that time. The success of this Western team with it amazed the football world. Dorais and Rockne remained behind at West Point for a few days after that game to show the Army how it was done. One of the results of that was the famous Pritchard to Merrillat combination of Army teams.
The U.S. Constitution went into effect on this date in 1789.