Two immortal football coaches share this birthday. Paul “Bear” Bryant was born on this date in 1913. Tom Landry was born on this date in 1924.
U.S. Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii is 86. Akaka is the third oldest U.S. senator, but the second oldest from Hawaii (Senator Daniel Inouye is four days older.) Akaka is the only senator with Hawaiian and Chinese ancestry.
Actor Earl Holliman is 82. Holliman is perhaps best know as Lt. Bill Crowley on Police Woman with Angie Dickinson.
David Broder is 81.
Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead is 67.
Musician Leo Kottke is 65.
One-time Oscar nominee Amy Madigan is 60. She was nominated for Twice in a Lifetime in 1985. She was the wife who owned the farm in Field of Dreams. Ms. Madigan has been married to Ed Harris 27 years.
Sportscaster Lesley Visser is 57. Visser was the first woman to receive the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award.
Oscar nominee for best supporting actress for her performance in Sideways, Virginia Madsen is 49.
Kristy McNichol is 48.
Harry Connick Jr. is 43. He grew up in New Orleans where his father was D.A.
Ludacris is 33.
William Sydney Porter was born on this date in 1852. We know him as O. Henry.
The feds did an audit of the bank he’d been working at, and when they found a bunch of discrepancies, they decided to indict him on federal embezzlement charges. His wife’s dad posted bail for him, but instead of sticking around for trial, O. Henry fled to New Orleans and then to Honduras, where he stayed for months. But when he found out that his beloved wife was on the verge of dying from her tuberculosis, he came back to Texas and turned himself in. Soon after, his wife died. He stood trial, was convicted of embezzlement, and was sent away to a federal penitentiary in Ohio.
He wrote short stories there, and he came up with the pseudonym O. Henry. Magazine editors were clueless that the stories they published were written by an inmate locked up in a federal penitentiary.
He got out of jail and wrote fast and furiously, about 400 short stories in those years following his release. He became famous, and an alcoholic, and he died less than a decade after getting out of jail, at the age of 47, from liver disease.
A particular favorite is The Ransom of Red Chief.
D. H. Lawrence was born on this date in 1885.
He had an incredibly difficult life. He was a teacher, but he caught tuberculosis as a young man and eventually became too sick to teach. During World War I, the British government suspected he was a German spy, because his wife was German and he opposed the war. Most of all, he struggled against censorship. More than almost any other writer at the time, he believed that in order to write about human experience, novelists had to write explicitly about sex. When he published his first important novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), he found that his editor had deleted numerous erotic passages without his permission. When he published his novel The Rainbow in 1915, Scotland Yard seized most of the printed copies under charges of obscenity. He was blacklisted as an obscene writer and none of the magazines in England would publish anything he wrote. He finished Women in Love in 1916, but couldn’t get it published until 1920, and even then he could only publish it privately.
Lawrence was finally allowed to leave England when World War I was over, and he was so happy that he traveled everywhere, to Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], Australia, Tahiti, Mexico, and New Mexico.
He eventually moved back to Europe and worked on his last big novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). It was banned in England and America. One British critic called it “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country.” It was not widely available until 1960, when Penguin published an unexpurgated edition.
My brother and a first cousin were also born on this day in 1955.