Mike Nichols is 78 today. Nichols has been nominated for four best director Oscars, winning for “The Graduate.”
Sally Field is 63. 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 61.
Blues singer Rory Block is 60. So is jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval.
California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, is 54.
Ethan Hawke is 39. Hawke has been nominated for two Oscars, one for supporting actor, “Training Day,” and one for co-writing, “Before Sunset.” Hawke has also published novels, including The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday.
Thandie Newton is 37. Miss Newton’s mother is Zimbawbean, her father English.
James Jones was born on November 6th in 1921.
He’s best known as the author of the military novel From Here to Eternity (1951). At the urging of his father, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1939. He was stationed in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He went on to fight in the battle of Guadalcanal, where he was wounded, earning the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. He kept a journal while he was in the Army, and when he got home from the war, he wrote a novel about the experience of disillusioned veterans. It was rejected by all the major publishing houses, but the editor Maxwell Perkins liked a particular scene from the novel and told him to expand it. He spent five years expanding that scene, and it became the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), the story of a soldier’s life in the years leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The novel was a huge international best-seller, in part because Jones tried to portray military life as realistically as possible, using dirty language in the dialogue and describing soldiers’ reckless sex lives.
New Yorker founder Harold Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, on November 6, 1892.
Walter “Big Train” Johnson was born 122 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.
You forgot to mention that Sally Field is hot.
Ash Wednesday is the best novel written by a celebrity I’ve read so far.
Annette – I would also recommend Hugh Laurie’s The Gun Seller. Though it may not be the best, it is truly hilarious.