Rapid Robert is 90 today.
Combining an overpowering fastball with a devastating curve, both of which appeared out of a deceptively high leg kick, Bob Feller dominated the American League in the 1940s. Rapid Robert led the league in wins six times and in strikeouts seven over his 18-year career. He pitched three no-hitters and still holds the major league record, along with Nolan Ryan, of 12 one-hitters.
The winningest pitcher in Cleveland Indians history, his career totals — a 266-162 record and 2,581 strikeouts — would have been considerably higher but for the almost four seasons he spent in the Navy during World War II.
As a teenager appearing in his first exhibition game against major leaguers he was so impressive that Dizzy Dean, when asked to take a photograph with the youngster, responded. “Why ask me? Ask that kid if he’ll pose with me.”
Feller’s fastball was so potent and his curve so unbalancing that he became the featured player in 1940s newsreels demonstrating that a thrown baseball could travel faster than a motorcycle and could be made to curve
Michael Dukakis is 75.
Remember the movie “To Sir, With Love”? Lulu, the red-headed singer is 60 today.
Roseanne Barr is 56 today.
Her family was Jewish, but her parents supported the family by selling crucifixes door to door. When she was three, she hit her head on the dining room table, and her face became paralyzed. Her mom called a rabbi, but Roseanne wasn’t healed. So her mom called the Mormon missionaries, and Roseanne got better. Her Jewish mom took it as a sign that Roseanne should be raised Mormon. Her dad was an atheist, and he was fine with that. Her dad loved comedy shows on television. Whenever a comedian appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, her dad would jump up and yell, “Comedian!” and everyone in the family would rush to the TV. When she was 15, Roseanne ran out into the street and purposefully let herself get hit by a car. She was knocked unconscious, and when she came to, she was placed in a psychiatric ward. She spent eight months there, and she said that it was a very good and valuable experience.
She met a man who drove a garbage truck, and they got married and moved into a trailer. She raised three kids, and on the side she wrote comedy routines. After auditioning for six minutes, she got hired at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Her jokes were about being a mom and a housewife and about the incompetence of the male species. About husbands who couldn’t find their own socks, she said, “They think the uterus is a tracking device.”
And, “As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I’ve done my job.”
And, “The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.”
And, “Women complain about PMS, but I think of it as the only time of the month when I can be myself.”
Kate Capshaw is 55. So is Dennis Miller, who will probably change back to liberal after tomorrow.
Photographer Walker Evans was born on November 3rd in 1903.
[B]orn in St. Louis, Missouri (1903), [Evans] wanted to be a writer but suffered from terrible writer’s block. He said, “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word.” He felt like a failure until one day he picked up a camera and realized that with a camera he didn’t have to create things, he could just capture them. The popular photography of the day was highly stylized, so Evans decided to go in the opposite direction, to take pictures of ordinary, unpretentious things. He said, “If the thing is there, why there it is.”
Evans photographed storefronts and signs with marquee lights, blurred views from speeding trains, old office furniture, and common tools. He took pictures of people in the New York City subways with a camera hidden in his winter coat. He especially loved photographing bedrooms: farmers’ bedrooms, bohemian bedrooms, middle-class bedrooms. He’d photograph what people had on their dressers and in their dresser drawers. In 1933, Evans was given the first one-man photographic exhibition by the new Museum of Modern Art.
In the summer of 1936, he collaborated with the journalist James Agee on a book about tenant farmers Greensboro, Alabama, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which included Evans’s photographs of the Burroughs family, the Fields family, and the Tingle family at work on their farms and in their homes. Those photos are among the most famous images of the Great Depression.
Walker Evans said, “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Sputnik 2 was launched 51 years ago today. On board was the first animal in space, the dog Laika.
And 62 years ago today Franklin Roosevelt beat Alfred Landon. Landon carried two states, Maine and Vermont.