Today is the birthday
… of Gena Rowlands. She’s 78. Miss Rowlands has been nominated for the best actress Oscar twice — A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980).
… of Salman Rushdie. He’s 61.
When Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, most Western critics didn’t notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. In the book, Rushdie makes a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion, he names the whores in a Mecca brothel after the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and he suggests that the Koran is not the direct word of God. The book was banned in India the month after publication and then subsequently in other countries. It was also publicly burned. There were bomb threats called in to the publishing house. Translators of the work suffered assassination attempts; the Italian translator was wounded, the Japanese translator killed, and the fire set by Islamic extremists to the Turkish translator’s hotel left 40 people dead.
The above excerpted from The Writer’s Almanac, which has much more.
… of Phylicia Rashad. Clair Hanks Huxtable is 60. (Bill Cosby, Dr. Huxtable, is 11 years older.)
… of Kathleen Turner. She’s 54. Miss Turner was nominated for the best actress Oscar for Peggy Sue Got Married (1986).
… of Paula Abdul. She’s 46. A former Lakers cheerleader, Miss Abdul had six number one records 1988-1991. She topped the charts for 15 weeks altogether.
Lou Gehrig was born on June 19 in 1903.
Lou Gehrig teamed with Babe Ruth to form baseball’s most devastating hitting tandem ever. “The Iron Horse” had 13 consecutive seasons with both 100 runs scored and 100 RBI, averaging 139 runs and 148 RBI; set an American League mark with 184 RBI in 1931; hit a record 23 grand slams; and won the 1934 Triple Crown. His .361 batting average in seven World Series led the Yankees to six titles. A true gentleman and a tragic figure, Gehrig’s consecutive games played streak ended at 2,130 when he was felled by a disease that later carried his own name.
Gehrig died in 1941. As Christopher Moltisanti of The Sopranos puts it, “You ever think what a coincidence it is that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig’s disease?”
Moses Horwitz was born on June 19th 110 years ago. That’s the boss stooge, Moe Howard. “I’ll squeeze the cider out of your Adam’s apple.”
The Statue of Liberty arrived at Bedloe’s Island in New York harbor on June 19, 1885.
The statue is constructed of hand-shaped copper sheets, assembled on a framework of steel supports designed by engineers Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. For transit to America, the figure was broken down into 350 separate pieces and packed in 214 crates. The Statue of Liberty sits within the star-shaped walls of the former Fort Wood, rising to a height of 305 feet on a pedestal designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt.