Today is the birthday
… of Margaret Thatcher, 85.
… of Melinda Dillon. That’s the mom in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She’s 71. Dillon was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar for that role and for her part in Absence of Malice. But best of all, she was the mom in The Christmas Story.
Mr. Parker: Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian.
Mrs. Parker: Uh, I think that says FRAGILE, dear.
Mr. Parker: Oh, yeah.
… of Paul Simon. He’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” at 69.
Paul Simon is among the most erudite and daring songsmiths in popular music. After the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel in 1970, Simon embarked on a fruitful solo career that’s been notable for lyrical acuity, impeccable musicianship and stylistic daring. While Simon and Garfunkel worked largely (but not exclusively) in the folk idiom, Simon the solo artist has roamed wherever his muse has taken him – and that has literally meant around the world. His is not so much a conventional career in music as an odyssey of discovery using “intuitive flashes, synaptic leaps and shorthand logic” (in Simon’s own words) to help him on his way.
… of Demond Wilson. Sanford’s son is 64.
… of Sammy Hagar, 63.
However, Van Halen bounced back strong following Roth’s departure. The group recruited Sammy Hagar, who sang and played guitar. Hagar had started out with the hard-rock group Montrose and had a highly successful solo career. He fit well with Van Halen, with whom he was more personally compatible than his predecessor. In fact, the newly harmonious group scored its first Number One album with 5150, on which Hagar handles lead vocals.
… of Marie Osmond. She’s 51.
… of Jerry Rice. He’s 48.
… of Kate Walsh, 43. “The real question is, when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?”
… of skater Nancy Kerrigan. She’s 41.
… of Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen is 39.
The woman known as Molly Pitcher was born on October 13, 1754.
An Artillery wife, Mary Hays McCauly (better known as Molly Pitcher) shared the rigors of Valley Forge with her husband, William Hays. Her actions during the battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778 became legendary. That day at Monmouth was as hot as Valley Forge was cold. Someone had to cool the hot guns and bathe parched throats with water.
Across that bullet-swept ground, a striped skirt fluttered. Mary Hays McCauly was earning her nickname “Molly Pitcher” by bringing pitcher after pitcher of cool spring water to the exhausted and thirsty men. She also tended to the wounded and once, heaving a crippled Continental soldier up on her strong young back, carried him out of reach of hard-charging Britishers. On her next trip with water, she found her artilleryman husband back with the guns again, replacing a casualty. While she watched, Hays fell wounded. The piece, its crew too depleted to serve it, was about to be withdrawn. Without hesitation, Molly stepped forward and took the rammer staff from her fallen husband’s hands. For the second time on an American battlefield, a woman manned a gun. (The first was Margaret Corbin during the defense of Fort Washington in 1776.) Resolutely, she stayed at her post in the face of heavy enemy fire, ably acting as a matross (gunner).
For her heroic role, General Washington himself issued her a warrant as a noncommissioned officer. Thereafter, she was widely hailed as “Sergeant Molly.” A flagstaff and cannon stand at her gravesite at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A sculpture on the battle monument commemorates her courageous deed.
Burr Tillstrom was born on October 13, 1917. He was a puppeteer, creator of Kukla, Ollie and a passel of other characters who interacted with actress Fran Allison in the early days of television. Kukla, Fran and Ollie began in Chicago and then was on NBC each evening Monday through Friday, shortened to 15 minutes, then made weekly, but lasting until 1957. Early on the show won a Peabody Award for, “whimsy and gentle satire of the James Barrie-Lewis Carroll sort.” Time said KFO, “flourished in this desert as an oasis of intelligent fantasy.”
Kukla, Fran and Ollie was the first children’s show to be equally popular with children and adults. The show’s immense popularity stemmed from its simplicity, gentle fun and frolic and adult wit. Burr Tillstrom’s Kuklapolitan Players differed from typical puppets in that the humor derived from satire and sophisticated wit rather than slapstick comedy. At the height of the show’s popularity, the cast received 15,000 letters a day, and its ratings were comparable to shows featuring Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan.
The basic format of the show was simple: Fran Allison stood in front of a small stage and interacted with the characters. The format was derived from the puppet act Tillstrom performed for the RCA Victor exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
That’s Tillstrom with his stars.
Art Tatum was born on October 13th in 1909.
It’s hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum’s piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, “I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.”
Leonard Alfred Schneider was born on this date in 1925. We know him as Lenny Bruce.
On April 1, 1964, four New York City vice squad officers attended Bruce’s performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. The officers arrested Bruce and owner Howard Solomon following Bruce’s 10:00 P.M. show. Assistant District Attorney Richard Kuh presented a grand jury with a typed partial script of Bruce’s performance including references to Jackie Kennedy trying to “save her ass” after her husband’s assassination, Eleanor Roosevelt’s “nice tits,” sexual intimacy with a chicken, “pissing in the sink,” the Lone Ranger sodomizing Tonto, and St. Paul giving up “fucking” for Lent. The jury indicted Bruce on the obscenity charge. The trial before a three-judge court in New York City that followed stands as a remarkable moment in the history of free speech. Both the prosecution and defense presented parades of well-known witnesses to either denounce Bruce’s performance as the worst sort of gutter humor or celebrate it as a powerful and insightful social commentary. Among the witnesses testifying in support of Bruce were What’s My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, sociologist Herbert Gans, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. In the end, the censors won. Voting 2 to 1, the court found Bruce guilty of violating New York’s obscenity laws and sentenced him to “four months in the workhouse.”
Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966.