Three-time Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio is 34 today.
Calista Flockhart is 44.
Demi Moore is 46.
Stanley Tucci is 48.
Jonathan Winters is 83.
The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922.
He was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and was forced to work in a Dresden factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He slept in a meat locker three stories underground, and that was the only reason he survived the firebombing on the night of February 13, 1945, when British and American bombers ignited a firestorm that killed almost all the city’s inhabitants in two hours. When they walked outside, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were just about the only living people in the city. They were then forced by the Germans to help clean up the bodies.
Vonnegut spent the next two decades writing science fiction, but he knew he wanted to write about his experiences in Dresden, and finally did in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who believes that he experiences the events of his life out of order, including his service during World War II, the firebombing of Dresden, and his kidnapping by aliens. He decides there is no such thing as time, and everything has already happened, so there’s really nothing to worry about.
George Patton was born on November 11, 1885. From his New York Times obituary in 1945:
Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
His great soldierly qualities were matched by one of the most colorful personalities of his period. About him countless legends clustered–some true, some untrue, but all testifying to the firm hold he had upon the imaginations of his men. He went into action with two pearl-handled revolvers in holsters on his hips. He was the master of an unprintable brand of eloquence, yet at times he coined phrases that will live in the American Army’s traditions.
“We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again,” he told his troops before the initial landings in North Africa, thereby summarizing the military creed that won victory after victory along the long road that led from Casablanca to the heart of Germany.
Ironic that a piece about true and untrue legends of Patton would speak of his “pearl-handled” revolvers, since the revolvers were ivory handled. Patton hated it when people described them as pearl, attributing pearl handles to pimps.
Patton’s revolvers are, by the way, on display at the Patton Museum at Ft. Knox, just down the road from Louisville, where I live and gamble on horses.