June 17th

Barry Manilow is 65. He was born Barry Alan Pincus, but raised by his mother and grandparents named Manilow. Some sources say he is 62.

Thomas Haden Church is 47. Church was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for Sideways.

Greg Kinnear is 45. Kinnear was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for As Good As It Gets. Kinnear is a graduate of The University of Arizona (1985).

Venus Williams is 28.

EscherM.C. Escher was born on June 17th in 1898.

Ralph Bellamy was born on June 17th in 1904. Bellamy was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for The Awful Truth in 1937. He received an Honorary Oscar in 1987. Bellamy starred in an early TV series, Man Against Crime.

John Hersey was born on June 17th in 1914. Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1945 for A Bell for Adano but is perhaps better known for Hiroshima.

After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, he was one of the first Western reporters to arrive and document the aftermath. In his reporting, he deciding to write about how individual persons were affected, and he focused his stories on the lives of six people in Hiroshima at the time of the explosion: a minister, a seamstress who had been widowed, two doctors, a minister, a Catholic priest, and a young factory worker.

The editor of The New Yorker decided to devote the last issue in August of 1946 to Hersey’s articles. Later, the collected articles appeared in book form, Hiroshima, published in 1946.

The Writer’s Almanac