Vin Scully is 80 today. Scully started doing Dodger’s broadcasts in Brooklyn in 1950. His current contract runs through the 2008 season.
Diane Ladd is 65. Ladd has appeared in more than 100 films and television programs and has been nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar three times including her portrayal of Flo in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Garry Shandling is 58.
Don Cheadle is 43. Cheadle was, of course, nominated for the best actor Oscar for his performance in Hotel Rwanda.
Louisa May Alcott was born on this date in 1832. Garrison Keillor has this interesting background on The Writer’s Almanac back in 2003.
It’s the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), but brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the Transcendentalists, of which her father was one. She’s remembered now for Little Women (1869), which she found tedious to write. In her journal she wrote, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” She much preferred writing lurid, Gothic stories, about women who sold their souls to the devil, and governesses who looked sweet and innocent by day but who ruined the souls of little children by night. She published these stories under several different pen names. Her publishers offered her more money if she would agree to publish under her own name, but she could not bring herself to embarrass her father and his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wrote to a friend, “To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety.”
The Library of Congress’s Today in History has a lot about Alcott.