Isaac Donald Everly is 73 today (Phil Everly was 71 last month). The brothers broke up in 1973 and did not speak to each other until they reunited in 1983.
Garret Morris of “Saturday Night Live” is 73 today.
Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons” is 72.
Lisa Marie Presley is 42.
Four-time Oscar winner for best director John Ford was born on this date.
It’s the birthday of American movie director John Ford, born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (1895), the youngest of 13 children. He made more than 120 films, most of them Westerns. On the sets of his movies he wore old khaki pants, tennis shoes with holes in the toes, a worn-out fedora, and a dirty scarf around his neck. He always had poor eyesight. He started wearing an eye patch like a pirate after he went blind in one eye. He usually worked with a glass of brandy in his hand and was always smoking a cigar.
Clark Gable was born on this date in 1901. He won the Best Actor award in 1935 for It Happened One Night. He was nominated for Best Actor for Mutiny of the Bounty and Gone With the Wind.
Langston Hughes was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1967.
Mr. Hughes was sometimes characterized as the “O. Henry of Harlem.” He was an extremely versatile and productive author who was particularly well known for his folksy humor.
In a description of himself written for “Twentieth Century Authors, a biographical dictionary, Mr. Hughes wrote:
“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong.”
“I live in Harlem, New York City,” his autobiographical sketch continued. “I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”
Victor Herbert was born Dublin on this date in 1859.
He studied music in Germany, where he became a cellist and composer for the court in Stuttgart and joined the faculty of the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music. In 1886, he and his wife, opera singer Therese Foerster, immigrated to New York where they worked for the Metropolitan Opera and became active in the musical life of the city.
Herbert, a composer of symphonic music and chamber string pieces, joined the faculty of the National Conservatory of Music. In 1893, he became leader of the 22nd Regiment Band of New York after the death of the celebrated Patrick S. Gilmore. Herbert wrote a number of marches while he was the leader of the band.
From 1898 to 1904 he directed the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and then formed the Victor Herbert Orchestra which performed lighter music. Herbert was most famous as a composer of light operetta. Between 1894 and 1924 he composed more than forty comic operettas which had lengthy runs on Broadway and on tour around the country. His best known remains Babes in Toyland, which opened in 1903, a fantasy inspired by Frank L. Baum’s popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.