. . . is the birthday
… of Russ Tamblyn. Riff, “a Jet to his dying day,” is 76.
… of Sandy Koufax. The most dominant pitcher in the game in the early 1960s, the man who threw four no-hitters including a perfect game is 75.
… of Noel Paul Stookey. Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary is 73.
… of James Burrows. The director of “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “Will and Grace” is 70.
… of Fred Ward. The actor (Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff and Earl Bassett in the greatest movie ever, Tremors) is 68.
… of Monkees Michael Nesmith (68) and Davy Jones (65).
… of Patti Smith. Punk rock’s poet laureate is 64. An excerpt from a longer profile at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor:
She worked at Scribner’s bookstore in Manhattan, a job that she adored. They were required to read the New York Times Book Review, and she loved that people there “took book clerks seriously”. At the store she read a lot of French poetry and biographies of poets and painters. Outside the store, she spent time at the St Mark’s Poetry Project, and also wrote articles for Rolling Stone magazine.
She had some friends who’d moved to New York City before her, and she was supposed to stay with them for a while. She showed up at their apartment looking for them. But it turns out that they didn’t live there any more, and instead of finding them she stumbled across a sleeping art student, Robert Mapplethorpe, a man who would go on to become a famous photographer. But at the time, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were each just 20 years old, and they became lovers and roommates — inseparable young cash-strapped companions living out bohemian dreams in New York City. They rented the smallest room at the Hotel Chelsea, so they could reside in a place famous for housing writers and artists like Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Simone de Beauvoir.
… of Meredith Viera and of Matt Lauer. The Today show hosts are 57 and 53.
… of Tracey Ullman. She’s 51.
… of Eldrick Woods. Tiger is 35.
… of LeBron James. He’s 26 today.
The Genius Among Geniuses, Alfred Einstein, was born on December 30, 1880.
And a genius of another kind, Bo Diddley was born on this date in 1928. (He died in 2008.)
Music historian Robert Palmer has described Bo Diddley as “one of the most original and fertile rhythmic intelligences of our time.” He will forever be known as the creator of the “Bo Diddley beat,” one of the cornerstone rhythms of rock and roll. He employed it in his namesake song, “Bo Diddley,” as well as other primal rockers like “Mona.” This distinctive African-based rhythm pattern (which goes bomp bomp bomp bomp-bomp) was picked up from Diddley by other artists and has been a distinctive and recurring element in rock and roll through the decades.