… of Ross Perot. He’s 77.
… of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. She’s 46. The group includes her two brothers, Michael and Peter, and bassist Alan Anton. All are from Montreal.
… of Tobey Maguire. He’s 32.
Helen Keller was born on June 27 in 1880. The following is from her obituary in The New York Times when she died in 1968.
For the first 18 months of her life Helen Keller was a normal infant who cooed and cried, learned to recognize the voices of her father and mother and took joy in looking at their faces and at objects about her home. “Then” as she recalled later, “came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby.”
The illness, perhaps scarlet fever, vanished as quickly as it struck, but it erased not only the child’s vision and hearing but also, as a result, her powers of articulate speech.
Her life thereafter, as a girl and as a woman, became a triumph over crushing adversity and shattering affliction. In time, Miss Keller learned to circumvent her blindness, deafness and muteness; she could “see” and “hear” with exceptional acuity; she even learned to talk passably and to dance in time to a fox trot or a waltz. Her remarkable mind unfolded, and she was in and of the world, a full and happy participant in life.
What set Miss Keller apart was that no similarly afflicted person before had done more than acquire the simplest skills.
But she was graduated from Radcliffe; she became an artful and subtle writer; she led a vigorous life; she developed into a crusading humanitarian who espoused Socialism; and she energized movements that revolutionized help for the blind and the deaf.
i know no one in my homestate of alabama who has much of a clue about helen keller’s fierce, unwavering, and radical politics, though her ‘story’ appears there in every child’s history textbook which features notable alabamians. i think it is probably this amazing black-out which allowed her to be included on that state’s 2003 coin in the u.s. mint’s quarter series.
Don’t forget Captain Kangaroo! (Actually, I think he may have been mentioned on NMK in years past.)
Oh my, I am mailing the birthdays in when I miss Bob Keeshan. Not only was he Captain Kangaroo, and really, really good at it for more than 30 years, he was Clarabell the clown before that, one of my true favorites! Keeshan was born on June 27 in 1927. He died in 2004.
Keeshan was a Marine during WWII but was too young to see action (he enlisted at age 18 in 1945). There’s an urban legend that he served on Iwo Jima.