Kurt Russell is 59 today.
John Sebastian is 66.
Oscar-nominee (for Forrest Gump) Gary Sinise is 55.
Rob Lowe is 46.
Mia Hamm is 38.
Author Gary Paul Nabhan is 58 today.
He dropped out of high school, but he ended up going back to college and studying environmental science and botany. He said that coming from an Arab family, he was attracted to the desert, so he moved to Arizona when he was 19. And he was fascinated by all the ways that food was a part of life there — for ranchers, Native Americans, immigrants.
Excerpt from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Author Penelope Lively is 77 today. According to The Writer’s Almanac, she is “the only writer who has ever won both the Carnegie Medal (for outstanding children’s books) and the Booker Prize (for fiction written for adults).” Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe won the Carnegie Medal. Her Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize.
It’s the birth date of two greats who died young — Nat “King” Cole (1919-1965) and Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993).
Bobby Jones was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1971.
In the decade following World War I, America luxuriated in the Golden Era of Sports and its greatest collection of super-athletes: Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in baseball, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing, Bill Tilden in tennis, Red Grange in football and Bobby Jones in golf.
Many of their records have been broken now, and others are destined to be broken. But one, sports experts agree, may outlast them–Bobby Jones’s grand slam of 1930.
Jones, an intense, unspoiled young man, started early on the road to success. At the age of 10, he shot a 90 for 18 holes. At 11 he was down to 80, and at 12 he shot a 70. At 9 he played against men, at 14 he won a major men’s tournament and at 21 he was United States Open champion.
At 28 he achieved the grand slam–victories in one year in the United States Open, British Open, United States Amateur and British Amateur championships. At that point, he retired from tournament golf.
A nation that idolized him for his success grew to respect him even more for his decision to treat golf as a game rather than a way of life. This respect grew with the years.