… is the birthday of
… Gavin MacLeod. The captain of the Love Boat and Mary Tyler Moore’s wisecracking news writer is 79.
… Dean Smith. The hall-of-fame basketball coach is 79.
… Mario Andretti. He’s in the left lane with his blinker on at age 70.
… Bubba Smith. The football star turned actor is 65.
… Bernadette Lazzara, known to us as Bernadette Peters. The star of stage, screen and television (beginning at age 3) is 62 today. She’s won a Tony twice as Best Leading Actress in a Musical — “Song and Dance” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”
… Gilbert Gottfried, 55.
… John Turturro. The actor is 53.
… Colum McCann. The National Book Award winner for Let the Great World Spin is 45. According to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, “It’s a prize they’ve been giving out for 60 years, but he’s only the third non-American-born writer” to win. Click for more on McCann.
Linus Pauling was born on this date in 1901. Pauling won two Nobel Prizes.
Dr. Pauling received the prize for chemistry in 1954, as a result of his research into the nature of the chemical bond, the force that gives atoms the cohesiveness to form the molecules that in turn become the basis of all physical matter.
In 1962, at age 61, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The award’s citation acclaimed him for his work since 1946 “not only against the testing of nuclear weapons, not only against the spread of these armaments, not only against their very use, but against all warfare as a means of solving international conflicts.”
Dr. Pauling was also said to have provided powerful impetus to others in achieving what many came to regard as the medical discovery of the century. That was the determination of the structure of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the genetic material in all living organisms.
To those who eventually won the race to solve DNA, Dr. Pauling was seen at the time as the closest rival. Had he been the victor, he, no doubt, would have been the recipient of a third Nobel Prize.