November 6th

Mike Nichols is 76 today. Nichols has been nominated for four best director Oscars, winning for “The Graduate.”

Sally Field is 61. Field has won two best actress Oscars (because the Academy really likes her); one for “Norma Rae” and the other for “Places in the Heart.”

Glenn Frey of The Eagles is 59.

California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, is 52.

Ethan Hawke is 37. Hawke has been nominated for two Oscars, one for supporting actor, “Training Day,” and one for co-writing, “Before Sunset.”

New Yorker founder Harold Ross was born on November 6, 1892.

It’s the birthday of Harold Ross, born in Aspen, Colorado (1892), who founded The New Yorker magazine. He was gap-toothed, his hair was always a mess, and he spoke with a Western twang. He had never finished high school, and people sometimes joked that he’d only read one book in his life. But he had actually started out as a migratory newspaperman, traveling the country and filing hundreds of stories from California and Brooklyn and New Orleans and Panama. He later said of that period in his life, “If I stayed anywhere more than two weeks, I thought I was in a rut.”

He settled in New York after serving in World War I, at a time when the city was suddenly filling up with smart, interesting people in their late twenties, and it occurred to him that there was no national magazine being written for this new generation. All the popular magazines at the time were either too intellectual or too middlebrow. Ross wanted to create a magazine that was funny and entertaining and unpretentious, and the result was The New Yorker, which came out February 21, 1925.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Walter “Big Train” Johnson was born 120 years ago today. Johnson was one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame — along with Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson and Wagner.

There were no sophisticated measuring devices in the early 1900s, but Walter Johnson’s fastball was considered to be in a class by itself. Using a sweeping sidearm delivery, the Big Train fanned 3,508 over a brilliant 21-year career with the Washington Senators, and his 110 shutouts are more than any pitcher. Despite hurling for losing teams most of his career, he won 417 games – second only to Cy Young on the all-time list – and enjoyed 10 successive seasons of 20 or more victories.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

James Naismith was born on this date in 1861. He’s the guy that created basketball and for whom the basketball hall-of-fame is named — and basketball’s most prestigious trophies. Dr. James Naismith’s 13 Original Rules of Basketball.

John Philip Sousa was born on November 6, 1854.

Sousa said a march ‘should make a man with a wooden leg step out’, and his surely did. However, he was no mere maker of marches, but an exceptionally inventive composer of over two hundred works, including symphonic poems, suites, songs and operettas created for both orchestra and for band. John Philip Sousa personified the innocent energy of turn-of-the-century America and he represented America across the globe. His American tours first brought classical music to hundreds of towns.

Naxos.com

Abraham Lincoln was elected president on this date in 1860.