Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, Jerry Lee Lewis is 75 today.
Jerry Lee Lewis is the wild man of rock and roll, embodying its most reckless and high-spirited impulses. On such piano-pounding rockers from the late Fifties as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” Lewis combined a ferocious, boogie-style instrumental style with rowdy, uninhibited vocals.
. . .Through a life marked by controversy and personal tragedy, Lewis has remained a defiant and indefatigable figure who refuses to be contained by politesse or pigeonholes. As he declared from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1973, “I am a rock and rollin’, country & western, rhythm & blues singing [expletive deleted]!”
Lewis, 53 years ago —
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yRdDnrB5kM
Ian McShane is 68. McShane played that c***s**k** Al Swearengen on Deadwood.
Bryant Gumbel is 62.
Gwen Ifill — interruption here for non sequitur question — is 55.
Stanley Berenstain was born on September 29th in 1923 (he died in 2005). Together with his wife Jan, they created the Berenstain Bears, a series with more than 200 books since 1962.
Gene Autry was born in Tioga, Texas, on this date 103 years ago today. The following is from the biography at the Official Website for Gene Autry:
Discovered by humorist Will Rogers, in 1929 Autry was billed as “Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy” at KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He gained a popular following, a recording contract with Columbia Records in 1929, and soon after, performed on the “National Barn Dance” for radio station WLS in Chicago. Autry first appeared on screen in 1934 and up to 1953 popularized the musical Western and starred in 93 feature films. In 1940 theater exhibitors of America voted Autry the fourth biggest box office attraction, behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy.
Autry made 635 recordings, including more than 300 songs written or co-written by him. His records sold more than 100 million copies and he has more than a dozen gold and platinum records, including the first record ever certified gold [That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine]. His Christmas and children’s records Here Comes Santa Claus and Peter Cottontail are among his platinum recordings. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the second all-time best selling Christmas single, boasts in excess of 30 million in sales.
… Autry’s great love for baseball prompted him to acquire the American League California Angels in 1961. Active in Major League Baseball, Autry held the title of Vice President of the American League until his death [1998].
… Autry is the only entertainer to have five stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, one each for radio, records, movies, television, and live performance including rodeo and theater appearances.
Autry’s Melody Ranch radio show aired from 1940 to 1956. His television program from 1950 through 1955 (91 episodes), and long after in syndication.
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome 109 years ago today.
More than any other man of his time, Enrico Fermi could properly be named “the father of the atomic bomb.”
It was his epoch-making experiments at the University of Rome in 1934 that led directly to the discovery of uranium fission, the basic principle underlying the atomic bomb as well as the atomic power plant. And eight years later, on Dec. 2, 1942, he was the leader of that famous team of scientists who lighted the first atomic fire on earth, on that gloomy squash court underneath the west stands of the University of Chicago’s abandoned football stadium.
That day has been officially recognized as the birthday of the atomic age. Man at last had succeeded in operating an atomic furnace, the energy of which came from the vast cosmic reservoir supplying the sun and the stars with their radiant heat and light–the nucleus of the atoms of which the material universe is constituted.
Enrico Fermi was the chief architect of that atomic furnace, which he named “pile,” but has since become better known as a nuclear reactor, the technical name for an atomic power plant.
And, according to many sources, Miguel de Cervantes may have been born on this date in 1547.
In 2002, one hundred writers polled overwhelmingly chose Don Quixote as the World’s Best Work of Fiction. Votes for Cervantes’ novel came from Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Milan Kundera, Nadine Gordimer, Carlos Fuentes, and Norman Mailer.
Dostoyevsky wrote in his diary that Don Quixote was “the saddest book ever written … the story of disillusionment.” American novelist William Faulkner reportedly read Don Quixote every year.
. . .When Edith Grossman published her translation of Don Quixote in October 2003, it was hailed as the “most transparent and least impeded among more than a dozen English translations going back to the 17th century.”
Grossman has translated many living Latin American authors, and has done every one of Gabriel García Márquez’s books since Love in the Time of Cholera. When García Márquez learned that Grossman was translating Cervantes, he joked to her: “I hear you’re two-timing me with Miguel.”
Pompey The Great was born on September 29, just 2115 years ago today in 106 BCE.