Mike Nichols is 77 today. Nichols has been nominated for four best director Oscars, winning for “The Graduate.”
Sally Field is 62. Field has won two best actress Oscars (because the Academy really likes her); one for “Norma Rae” and the other for “Places in the Heart.”
Glenn Frey of The Eagles is 60.
Blues singer Rory Block is 59. So is jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.
California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, is 53.
Ethan Hawke is 38. Hawke has been nominated for two Oscars, one for supporting actor, “Training Day,” and one for co-writing, “Before Sunset.”
Thandie Newton is 36. Miss Newton’s mother is Zimbawbean, her father English.
New Yorker founder Harold Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, on November 6, 1892.
Walter “Big Train” Johnson was born 121 years ago today. Johnson was one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame — along with Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson and Wagner.
There were no sophisticated measuring devices in the early 1900s, but Walter Johnson’s fastball was considered to be in a class by itself. Using a sweeping sidearm delivery, the Big Train fanned 3,508 over a brilliant 21-year career with the Washington Senators, and his 110 shutouts are more than any pitcher. Despite hurling for losing teams most of his career, he won 417 games – second only to Cy Young on the all-time list – and enjoyed 10 successive seasons of 20 or more victories.
James Naismith was born on this date in 1861. He’s the guy that created basketball and for whom the basketball hall-of-fame is named — and basketball’s most prestigious trophies. Dr. James Naismith’s 13 Original Rules of Basketball.
John Philip Sousa was born on November 6, 1854.
Sousa said a march ‘should make a man with a wooden leg step out’, and his surely did. However, he was no mere maker of marches, but an exceptionally inventive composer of over two hundred works, including symphonic poems, suites, songs and operettas created for both orchestra and for band. John Philip Sousa personified the innocent energy of turn-of-the-century America and he represented America across the globe. His American tours first brought classical music to hundreds of towns.
Abraham Lincoln was elected president on this date in 1860.