… of Nathanael Greene, born on this date in 1742. Greene was a major general in the American army during the Revolutionary War and was the primary architect of American success in the south.
… of Ernest Thayer, author of the baseball poem Casey at the Bat. Thayer was born on this date in 1863, attended Harvard where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon along with William Randolph Hearst. Hearst offered Thayer a job writing poems for the San Francisco Examiner and “Casey” was published in the Examiner in 1888.
… of Ralph Bunche, born on this date in 1904.
Like his world, Dr. Bunche was a man of many faces and talents, full of paradox and struggle. By training and temperament, he was an ideal international civil servant, a black man of learning and experience open to men and ideas of all shades.
At the United Nations, he had been a key diplomat for more than two decades since his triumphal success in negotiating the difficult 1949 armistice between the new state of Israel and the Arab states.
As the architect of the Palestine accord, he won the Nobel Peace Prize of 1950.
Source: The New York Times obituary for Bunche, 1971.
… of Gary Edward “Garrison” Keillor, born in Anoka (not Lake Wobegon), Minnesota, 67 years ago today.
… of Steve Martin, born in Waco, Texas (but grew up near Disneyland), 64 years ago today. “Well, EXCUSE me.”
… of Newman. Actor Wayne Knight is 54 today.
… of Oscar winner Charlize Theron, born in South Africa, 34 years ago today.