Today is the birthday
… of Rosalynn Carter; she’s 83.
… of Roman Polanski, 77.
… of Rafer Johnson. The decathlete is 75. It was Johnson who lit the Olympic torch in Los Angeles in 1984.
… of Robert Redford; he’s 73. Redford has been nominated for two directing Oscars, winning for Ordinary People. His only acting nomination was for The Sting.
… of Rockabilly great Johnny Preston, singer of the classic “Running Bear.” He’s 71. (Here’s a link to YouTube, audio only. My god we were a simpler country 50 years ago.)
… of Martin Mull; he’s 67.
… of Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, 49.
… of Edward Norton; he’s 41. Norton has both a leading and a supporting Oscar nomination but no wins yet.
… of Christian Slater; he too is 41.
Roberto Clemente should have been 76 today. The Puerto Rican born Baseball Hall of Fame inductee won four National League batting titles, was MVP in 1966 and finished his shortened career with exactly 3,000 hits. Clemente died at age 38 in a plane crash while delivering supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua on New Year Year’s Eve 1972.
Antonio Salieri was born on this date in 1750. After his characterization as a villain in Peter Shaffer’s play and film Amadeus, it seems Salieri has made a bit of a comeback. According to a December 2003 article at Guardian Unlimited and other sources, while there was competition between the upstart Mozart and the established artist Salieri in Vienna, there was cooperation, too; that is, what transpired between them was typical office politics.
Meriwether Lewis was born on this date in 1774. Lewis had this to say on his 31st birthday 205 years ago today, camped just east of Lemhi Pass near the present-day Montana-Idaho border. (From the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online at the University of Nebraska.)
This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.—
His birthday doubts are made all the more poignant, of course, with the knowledge that just more than four years later Lewis took his own life at age 35.