Rapid Robert is 89 today.
Combining an overpowering fastball with a devastating curve, both of which appeared out of a deceptively high leg kick, Bob Feller dominated the American League in the 1940s. Rapid Robert led the league in wins six times and in strikeouts seven over his 18-year career. He pitched three no-hitters and still holds the major league record, along with Nolan Ryan, of 12 one-hitters.
The winningest pitcher in Cleveland Indians history, his career totals — a 266-162 record and 2,581 strikeouts — would have been considerably higher but for the almost four seasons he spent in the Navy during World War II.
As a teenager appearing in his first exhibition game against major leaguers he was so impressive that Dizzy Dean, when asked to take a photograph with the youngster, responded. “Why ask me? Ask that kid if he’ll pose with me.”
Feller’s fastball was so potent and his curve so unbalancing that he became the featured player in 1940s newsreels demonstrating that a thrown baseball could travel faster than a motorcycle and could be made to curve
Michael Dukakis is 74.
Roseanne Barr hits the double-nickel today.
Kate Capshaw is 54.
Photographer Walker Evans was born on November 3rd in 1903.
[B]orn in St. Louis, Missouri (1903), [Evans] wanted to be a writer but suffered from terrible writer’s block. He said, “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word.” He felt like a failure until one day he picked up a camera and realized that with a camera he didn’t have to create things, he could just capture them. The popular photography of the day was highly stylized, so Evans decided to go in the opposite direction, to take pictures of ordinary, unpretentious things. He said, “If the thing is there, why there it is.”
Evans photographed storefronts and signs with marquee lights, blurred views from speeding trains, old office furniture, and common tools. He took pictures of people in the New York City subways with a camera hidden in his winter coat. He especially loved photographing bedrooms: farmers’ bedrooms, bohemian bedrooms, middle-class bedrooms. He’d photograph what people had on their dressers and in their dresser drawers. In 1933, Evans was given the first one-man photographic exhibition by the new Museum of Modern Art.
In the summer of 1936, he collaborated with the journalist James Agee on a book about tenant farmers Greensboro, Alabama, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which included Evans’s photographs of the Burroughs family, the Fields family, and the Tingle family at work on their farms and in their homes. Those photos are among the most famous images of the Great Depression.
Walker Evans said, “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Sputnik 2 was launched 50 years ago today. On board was the first animal in space, the dog Laika.
And 61 years ago today Franklin Roosevelt beat Alfred Landon. Landon carried two states, Maine and Vermont.