September 17th really should be a national holiday

… because it’s the birthday of the Constitution and Hank Williams. And also these folks.

Football hall-of-fame inductee George Blanda is 83 today. I’m surprised he doesn’t suit up. Blanda played his last game on January 4, 1976, the 1975 AFC Championship. He was 48.

Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter is 71.

Coach Phil Jackson is 65. Lots of good people born in 1945 (and we are not Baby Boomers, we are War Babies).

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is 59. That’s Cassandra Peterson.

Rita Rudner is 57. Some Rudner-isms:

• “Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love. I’d stepped in it a few times.”
• “I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn’t mine.”
• “I know I want to have children while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.”
• “I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don’t know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes I see a really great outfit, I’ll break up with someone on purpose.”
• “We’ve begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet — so we bought a dog. Well, it’s cheaper, and you get more feet.”

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was born on September 17, 1935. The Writer’s Almanac had a good little essay a few years ago that you could just go read. It begins:

Ken Kesey … was born on this day in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He was a champion wrestler in high school and voted most likely to succeed. He married his high school sweetheart and almost went to Hollywood to be an actor and then accepted a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford, where, as part of a VA experiment, for $75 a day, which was good money, he became one of the first Americans to be exposed to a new drug called LSD.

Maureen Connolly was born on this date in 1934. Connolly was the first woman to win the tennis grand slam (1953). She died of cancer at age 34.

The 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, was born 103 years ago today.

William Carlos Williams was born on this date in 1883. Williams was a physician and poet.

He thought that poetry shouldn’t be full of fancy allusions and abstract ideas, and that there should be “no ideas but in things.” His poems were inspired by the townspeople of Rutherford, especially his patients. A lot of his patients didn’t even know that their hardworking doctor — who delivered more than 2,000 babies — spent his nights and weekends writing poems. Those poems were published in books that include Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and the epic five-volume poem Paterson (1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958) about Paterson, New Jersey, the nearest city to his hometown of Rutherford.

The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

David Dunbar Buick was born on September 17th in 1854. Didn’t know Buick was someone’s name, did you?