Robert Blake is 77 today.
James Gandolfini is 49.
Frankie Avalon is 70. (Annette will be 68 next month.)
Coach Rick Pitino is 58.
Baseball hall-of-famer Ryne Sandberg is 51.
Dazzling defensive flair and a tremendous knack for power enabled Ryne Sandberg to join the list of greats at second base. As the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1984, Sandberg led the Chicago Cubs to their first postseason appearance since 1945. His amazing range and strong, accurate throwing arm, led to nine consecutive Gold Glove Awards at the keystone position, and helped him pace NL second basemen in assists seven times, and in fielding average and total chances four times each. With the bat, Sandberg launched 282 career home runs, and in 1990 he become the first second baseman since Rogers Hornsby in 1922 to hit 40 homers in a single-season.
Jada Pinkett Smith is 39.
Lance Armstrong is 39 today, too.
Greta Garbo was born on September 18, 1905. This is from her New York Times obituary in 1990:
The finest element in a Garbo film was Garbo. She invariably played a disillusioned woman of the world who falls hopelessly and giddily in love. Tragedy is often imminent, and her tarnished-lady roles usually required her to die or otherwise give up her lover. No one could suffer like Garbo.
Mysterious and aloof, she appealed to both men and women, and she exerted a major influence on women’s fashions, hair styles and makeup. On screen and off, she was a remote figure of loveliness.
Garbo’s career spanned only 19 years. In 1941, at the age of 36, she made the last of her 27 movies, a slight comedy called ”Two Faced Woman.” She went into what was to be temporary retirement, but she never returned to the screen.
Actor Jack Warden was born on this date in 1920. Warden was nominated twice for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar — for Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. NewMexiKen liked him best as juror # 7 in 12 Angry Men.
Eighty years ago today the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System went on the air with 16 stations. 27-year-old William S. Paley bought it a week later, dropped Phonograph from the name, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The first edition of The New York Times was published on September 18, 1851.
President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol on September 18 in 1793.