Maude’s husband, Walter, is 86. That’s actor Bill Macy. He was recently a character named Whiskey Pete on My Name Is Earl.
The oldest (and sole surviving) Cartwright boy, Adam, is 80. That’s Pernell Roberts.
Dobie Gillis is 74. That’s actor Dwayne Hickman who played the high school chum of Maynard G. Krebs when he was 25 (and Bob Denver was 24).
Brooks Robinson is 71.
Known as The Human Vacuum Cleaner, Brooks Robinson established a standard of excellence for modern-day third basemen. He played 23 seasons for the Orioles, setting major league career records for games, putouts, assists, chances, double plays and fielding percentage. A clutch hitter, Robinson totaled 268 career home runs, at one time an American League record for third basemen. Robinson earned the league’s MVP Award in 1964 and the World Series MVP in 1970, when he hit .429 and made a collection of defensive gems.
Reggie Jackson is 62.
Reggie Jackson earned the nickname Mr. October for his World Series heroics with both the A’s and Yankees. In 27 Fall Classic games, he amassed 10 home runs – including four in consecutive at-bats – 24 RBI and a .357 batting average. As one of the game’s premier power hitters, he blasted 563 career round-trippers. A terrific player in the clutch and an intimidating cleanup hitter, Jackson compiled a lifetime slugging percentage of .490 and earned American League MVP honors in 1973.
George Strait is 56.
George Strait – Amarillo By Morning
Tina Fey is 38.
Frank Capra was born in Bisaquino, Sicily on this date in 1897.
For the next six years, he worked as everything from a prop man to a comedy writer. In 1928, he signed a contract with Columbia. Five years later he made his first big hit, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1933), for which he won the first of three Academy Awards for Best Director. In the next fifteen years he made a string of successful movies, most of them about a naïve and idealistic man from small-town America who goes up against greedy politicians and lawyers and journalists. Capra said the moral of his movies was: “A simple honest man, driven into a corner by predatory sophisticates, can, if he will, reach down into his God-given resources and come up with the necessary handfuls of courage, wit, and love to triumph over his environment.”
His movies were so distinctive and so influential that the word “Capraesque” has made it into the dictionary. The 2000 American Heritage Dictionary defined it as “of or evocative of the movies of Frank Capra, often promoting the positive social effects of individual acts of courage.”
His movies include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which was also about a small-town hero who battles corruption, but it was darker and more cynical than any of his earlier movies, and it didn’t do very well at the box office. For some reason, Capra didn’t renew its copyright in 1974, and it fell into the public domain. PBS was the first network to play it every year around Christmas. Other stations started picking it up, and now watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV is a holiday tradition for families across the country.