… of Barbara Walters. She’s 80. Damn, that’s old enough to be on 60 Minutes.
… of SecDef Robert Gates. He’s 66.
… of Michael Douglas. He’s 65. And of Mrs. Douglas. Catherine Zeta-Jones is 40 today.
… of Cheryl Tiegs. She’s 62.
… Anson Williams of “Happy Days.” He’s 60.
… of Mark Hamill. Luke is 58.
… of Heather Locklear. She’s 48.
… of Scottie Pippen. He’s 44.
… of Will Smith. The Man-in-Black is 41.
… of Matt Hasselbeck, 34. Hasselbeck’s broken rib probably cost me a loss in Fantasy Football last weekend.
The Shakespeare of sportswriters was born on this date 104 years ago. That’s Red Smith. Here he is on the 1951 World Series (after the Giants’ miraculous playoff win to be there):
Magic and sorcery and incantation and spells had taken the Giants to the championship of the National League and put them into the World Series … But you don’t beat the Yankees with a witch’s broomstick. Not the Yankees, when there’s hard money to be won.
And on sports fans:
I’ve always had the notion that people go to spectator sports to have fun and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again.
And: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein.”
William Faulkner was born on this date 112 years ago.
He liked to get up early, eat a breakfast of eggs and broiled steak and lots of coffee, and then take his tobacco and pipe and go to his study. He took off the doorknob and carried it inside with him. There he wrote his novels by hand on large sheets of paper, and then typed them out with two fingers on an old Underwood portable. He was prolific this way — in a four-year span, he published some of his best novels: Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932). In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in literature.
The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (There’s more.)
Shel Silverstein was born on September 25th in 1930. He died in 1999. Glenn Gould was born on September 25th in 1932. He died in 1982.