December ninth

Today is the birthday

… of Kirk Douglas. The three-time Oscar nominee is 94. NewMexiKen’s favorite Douglas performance is in Lonely Are the Brave. “Filmed on location in New Mexico, Lonely are the Brave was adapted by Dalton Trumbo from Edward Abbey’s novel Brave Cowboy.”

… of Judi Dench. The six-time Oscar nominee, one-time winner, is 76.

… of Beau Bridges. Jeff’s big brother is 69. No Oscars for Beau, but he has three wins from 10 Emmy nominations.

… of Dick Butkus, 68. The Butkus Award is given each year to the best college linebacker, so I guess that tells you what kind of a linebacker Butkus was.

… of Tom Kite. He’s 61.

… of John Malkovich. The two-time Oscar nominee is 57.

… of Donny Osmond, 53. Fifty. Three.

… of Felicity Huffman. The Oscar nominee and Desperate Housewife is 48.

… of Jakob Dylan, son of Bob. Jakob is 41 today. He’s the youngest of his dad’s four children with first wife Sara Lownds, the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

The screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo was born in Montrose, Colorado, 105 years ago today. Trumbo was nominated for three writing Oscars, winning twice, for Roman Holiday and The Brave One. Because he was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, both Oscars were awarded to fronts. The records were changed only years later after Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas fought the blacklisting and credited Trumbo’s screenwriting for Exodus and Spartacus respectively. Trumbo’s novel Johnny Got His Gun is a classic that everyone should read.

The famed circus clown Emmett Kelly was born on December 9, 1898. Kelly was known for his character Weary Willie, in makeup as a bum sweeping up. His was a revolutionary character; clowns always appeared in white face before Kelly. He was a star performer with Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus when I was a kid. And he was celebrity enough that he could appear on the popular TV show “What’s My Line?” The video is fun when Kelly first appears.

Grace Hopper was born in New York City 104 years ago today.

She began tinkering around with machines when she was seven years old, dismantling several alarm clocks around the house to see how they worked. She studied math and physics in college, and eventually got a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale.

Then World War II broke out, and Hopper wanted to serve her country. Her father had been an admiral in the Navy, so she applied to a division of the Navy called WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service. They turned her down at first[;] they said she was too old at 35, and that she didn’t weigh enough, at 105 pounds. But she wouldn’t give up, and they eventually accepted her. With her math skills, she was assigned to work on a machine that might help calculate the trajectory of bombs and rockets.

Hopper learned how to program that early computing machine, and wrote the first instruction manual for its use. And she went on to help write an early computer language known as COBOL — “Common Business-Oriented Language.” She remained in the Navy, and eventually she became the first woman ever promoted to rear admiral.

The Writers Almanac from American Public Media (2006)

Clarence Birdseye was born on this date in 1886. Birdseye, fishing with Inuit in the Arctic, observed that fish flash frozen at Arctic temperatures, when thawed, tasted much better and fresher than fish frozen at higher temperatures, as was being done commercially. That is, Birdseye came up with the approach that made frozen food acceptable. The company he founded eventually became General Foods.