Month: April 2008

Today we celebrate the birthday

. . . of Jane Withers, 82. Withers earned her first fame as an 8-year-old playing the spoiled, doll-ripping, tricycle-riding brat who terrorized sweet, wonderful little Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes.

. . . of Herbie Hancock. He’s 68 today.

. . . of Clarence ‘Lumpy’ Rutherford. Actor Frank Bank of Leave It to Beaver is 66.

. . . of Ed O’Neill. He’s 62. O’Neill was nominated for two Golden Globes for playing shoe salesman Al Bundy on Married … with Children.

. . . of David Letterman. He’s 61, but a part of him seemingly never left the 8th grade.

. . . of Tom Clancy. He’s 61.

He was an insurance salesman, and he was doing well for himself, but he’d always wanted to be a writer. He had spent all his spare time reading magazines about military technology, such as Combat Fleets of the World and A Guide to the Soviet Navy, and one day he began to wonder what would happen if a Soviet submarine tried to defect to the United States. That became the basis for his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984).

Instead of focusing on the interactions between his characters, Clancy focused more on the technology. He described the soviet submarine in intricate detail, the way it moved and maneuvered, and all its weaponry and hardware. Since he didn’t think the novel would appeal to a mass audience, he published it with a small military publishing house called the Naval Institute Press. But the book got passed around among officers and generals, and eventually made its way to Ronald Reagan, who said he loved it. That endorsement from the president helped turn The Hunt for Red October into a huge best-seller.

The Writer’s Almanac

. . . of Scott Turow. He’s 59. He wanted to be a writer but went to law school so he’d have a day job. His first novel was Presumed Innocent, published in 1987.

. . . of David Cassidy. Once a teen heart throb, he’s now 58.

. . . of Andy Garcia. He’s 52. Garcia was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in The Godfather: Part III.

. . . of Vince Gill. He’s 51.

. . . of Claire Danes, 29.

The photographer Imogen Cunningham was born on this date in 1883.

Ethel Kennedy is 80 today.

Joel Grey is 76.

Louise Lasser — remember Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (No? Neither do I.) Anyway, Louise is 69 today.

Columnist and author Ellen Goodman is 67.

And Joss Stone is 21, old enough to buy shoes.

It was on this date in 1945 that American troops entered Buchenwald, second only to Auschwitz in its horrors.

Many of the soldiers who entered Buchenwald on this day had been fighting in World War II since D-Day. They had participated some of the bloodiest battles in history. But nothing they’d seen prepared them for what they saw at Buchenwald. Several of the soldiers carried Kodak cameras, and so they took photographs of the surviving prisoners and the dead, so that people would believe what they had seen. Their photographs showed human beings so emaciated that they could barely walk, and victims’ bodies were stacked around the camp like piles of wood.

Sergeant Fred Friendly, who would go on to work as a CBS producer, wrote to his mother, “I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this.”

One of the reporters who covered the liberation of Buchenwald was Edward R. Murrow. He was so disturbed by what he saw that he couldn’t write about it for days, and let a subordinate break the story.

One of the children liberated at the camp that day was a teenager named Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier, and his father had recently died in the camp. He saw American jeeps rolling into the camps, and he later wrote, “I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame. … We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn’t have the strength. We were too weak to even applaud him.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Today we celebrate the birthday

… of Harry Morgan. Colonel Sherman Potter is 93. IMDb lists 159 credits for Morgan. If you’d like to see him as a relatively young actor, check out the 1943 classic “The Ox-Bow Incident.” Morgan was Henry Fonda’s sidekick. Great, great film.

You may not know the name Verna Felton, but you know the voice. She was the character actress heard in many Disney animations — a matriarchical elephant in Dumbo, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp. She also appeared with Harry Morgan in an early fifties sitcom December Bride — and its 1960 spinoff Pete and Gladys. She died in 1966, but Morgan kept Felton’s photo on Sherman Potter’s desk on the M*A*S*H set to portray Mrs. Potter. Says a lot about both of them, doesn’t it?

… of Max von Sydow, 79.

… of Omar Sharif. Dr. Zhivago is 76. Sharif was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia.

… of John Madden. He’s 72.

… of Don Meredith. He’s 70. “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”

… of Paul Theroux (rhymes with through). He’s 67.

It’s the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, “I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal.” He said the Peace Corps was a kind of “Howard Johnson’s on the main drag to maturity.”

The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).

The Writer’s Almanac

… of Steven Seagal. He’s 57. No Oscar nominations for Seagal, but he has been nominated for several Razzies and won once.

… of Anne Lamott. She’s 54.

It’s the birthday of novelist and essayist Anne Lamott, born in San Francisco, California (1954). In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).

She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn’t have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-thirties, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent, and that became her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993). It was her first best-seller.

The Writer’s Almanac

… of Mandy Moore, 24.

The Pulitizer Prize winning author David Halberstam should have been 74 today.

One of America’s most successful authors, David Halberstam began his career as a journalist in the 1950s, first as a reporter for The Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi and later for the Nashville Tennessean. In 1960 he joined The New York Times and shortly thereafter was assigned to the paper’s bureau in Saigon. Halberstam was among a small group of reporters there who began to question the official optimism about the growing war in Vietnam. Halberstam’s work from Vietnam so rankled official Washington that President Kennedy once asked the publisher of The New York Times to transfer Halberstam to another bureau. In 1964, at age 30, Halberstam earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam. His best-selling book, The Best and The Brightest, chronicles America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Reporting America at War | PBS

And Joseph Pulitzer himself was born in Budapest, Hungary, on this date in 1847.

He came to this country, moved to New York City and bought The New York World newspaper. He said, “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic — dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse potentates — devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World; that will expose all fraud and sham; fight all public evils and abuses; that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity.” With his profits, he endowed the Columbia School of Journalism as well as the annual Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, literature, drama, music.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media