In addition to Aidan turning four …
Bill Medley is 67 today. Medley is the Righteous Brother with the deep voice. It was he who sang the opening verse in the great, great classic “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” It was the late Bobby Hatfield, the tenor, who generally took the lead on Righteous Brother songs.
Hall of Fame ballplayers Duke Snider and Joe Morgan were born on this date — Snider is 81, Morgan 64. When I think of Morgan I think of an interview during a World Series in the early 1970s. Howard Cossell asked Morgan, “What does it feel like to know you are the best person in the world at what you do?”
Unfortunately for Joe — and us — he’s not the best person in the world at what he does now, which is comment during baseball broadcasts.
Roger Angell, the wonderful writer known foremost for his essays on baseball in The New Yorker — at which he has often been the best in the world at what he did — is 87 today.
It’s the birthday of Roger Angell, … born in New York City (1920), who went to baseball games with his father as a kid and got to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs. He grew up reading the sports sections of four newspapers. His mother, Katherine White, was an editor at The New Yorker. Angell took a job as fiction editor there in 1956, and in 1962 he began writing about baseball. Angell said, “[Baseball is] perfect for a writer, so full of specifics. … One trap in writing about baseball is excessive nostalgia. I think it may be because we all came to the game through our fathers and at a time when we were children and everything in the world seemed good. But the quality of most experience is not confined to when we were young. Tomorrow I could see the best game I’ll ever see.” His most recent book is a collection of personal essays, Let Me Finish, which came out last year (2006).
Adam West, TV’s Batman, is 77. David McCallum, TV’s Illya Kuryakin, is 74. Randolph Mantooth of Emergency is 62.
Trisha Yearwood is 43.
The Mary Tyler Show debuted on this date 37 years ago.
210 years ago today (1777) Continental soldiers under General Horatio Gates defeated the British at Saratoga, New York. A second battle was fought at Saratoga on October 17, 1777. American victory in the battles turned the war in the colonists favor and helped persuade the French to recognize American independence and provide military assistance.
You know, when the Other Righteous Bro died of a cocaine overdose, or accumulation, Bill claimed he never knew. I don’t care about coke, but how could one of your supposedly closest people not know something like that? I’ve been around, good times and bad. Both at the same time. I never bought it, and I think that there was a loneliness going on there. Lost that lovin’ feelin.