Harry Belafonte is 84 today.
Ron Howard’s brother’s only brother is 57.
Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach) is 57.
Javier Bardem is 42.
Well-known Americans of the 20th century born on this date include band-leader Glenn Miller (1904), author Ralph Ellison (1914), poet Robert Lowell (1917), Mad magazine publisher William M. Gaines (1922) and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle (1926).
And it is my brother Lee’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Middle Bro.
Lee hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada in 2002, amazingly enough providing a journal along the way (on the tiniest of keyboards). Here’s my favorite excerpt:
For the first time since I began this Odyssey I fear my life-long dream to do a single season thruhike of the Pacific Crest Trail could be in serious jeopardy.
Four consecutive days of 110 degrees didn’t stop me.
Streams deep and icy enough to make all men equal didn’t stop me.
High mountain passes clogged with ice and snow didn’t stop me.
Rattlesnakes, cougars, bears, howling packs of coyotes, ticks, wasps, bees, hornets, gnats, biting flies, and mosquitoes did not deter me.
Raging fires with smoke thick enough to give me headaches and a sore throat have not chased me off the trail.
God help me even a broken heart didn’t stop me.
So what insidious thing could hold me back on the threshold of my dream? The huckleberry!
“But how,” you ask? By slowing my progress to a veritable standstill! One can walk by only by so many bushes teeming with these succulent purple orbs of orgiastic delight without stopping! My God, I’m not made of stone!
So my pace seems to be half of what it was. Instead of the mighty 30 mile days I had looked forward to in Oregon I will be very lucky to eke out a meager 15 or less. There just isn’t enough time to reach British Columbia before winter sets in. I fear the only hope to salvage my trek may be to enlist the aid of a top-notch hypnotist to attempt to persuade my subconscious that I really don’t like wild huckleberries, at least until I get to Manning Park. Drastic measures indeed, but what else can I do?