Today is the birthday
… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Art Garfunkel, 67. Bridge Over Troubled Water
… of Sam Shepard. He’s 65. An inductee as a playwright into the Theatre Hall of Fame, Shepard was also nominated for the best actor Oscar for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.
… of Peter Noone (Herman of Herman’s Hermits). He’s 61. No, Peter isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter
… of Bill Walton, 56. He’s in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
… of football hall-of-famer Kellen Winslow. He’s 51.
… of Bryan Adams, 49.
… of Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton, 48.
… of Tatum O’Neal, 45. Miss O’Neal won the best supporting actress Oscar at age 10 for Paper Moon.
Vivien Leigh (who died at age 53) was born on this date in 1913. Miss Leigh was voted best actress twice — for Katie Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (opposite Clark Gable) and for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (opposite Marlon Brando).
Leonard Franklin Slye was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1911. As Roy Rogers he’s an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the only person to be elected twice — as the King of the Cowboys and as a founder of the Sons of the Pioneers (“Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water“). Rogers died in 1998.
The journalist Ida Tarbell was born on this date in 1857.
By the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller Sr. had finished building his oil empire. For over 30 years, he had applied his uncanny shrewdness, thorough intelligence, and patient vision to the creation of an industrial organization without parallel in the world. The new century found him facing his most formidable rival ever–not another businessman, but a 45-year-old woman determined to prove that Standard Oil had never played fair. The result, Ida Tarbell’s magazine series “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” would not only change the history of journalism, but also the fate of Rockefeller’s empire, shaken by the powerful pen of its most implacable observer.
. . .
“The History of the Standard Oil Company” would be hailed as a landmark in the history of investigative journalism, as well as the most comprehensive study of the building of Rockefeller’s oil empire. In 1999 it was listed number five among the top 100 works of twentieth-century American journalism. …
Eugene V. Debs was born on November 5th in 1855.
Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890’s in which he was jailed, and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and social security — all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.
My father sang “Cool Water” to me when I was a baby, and I still know the lyrics and the melody. The Marty Robbins version, though, from his “gunfighter” phase.