Clint Eastwood is 81 today.
Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary, and the author of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” is 73.
Joe Namath is 68.
Tom Berenger is 61, Lea Thompson is 50, Brooke Shields is 46 and Colin Farrell is 35.
Fred Allen was born on May 31st in 1894.
Allen was a radio comedian for nearly two decades who, as early as 1936, had a weekly radio audience of about 20 million. When he visited The Jack Benny Show to continue their long running comedy feud, they had the largest audience in the history of radio, only to be later outdone by President Franklin Roosevelt during a Fireside Chat. The writer Herman Wouk said that Allen was the best comic writer in radio. His humor was literate, urbane, intelligent, and contemporary. Allen came to radio from vaudeville where he performed as a juggler. He was primarily self-educated and was extraordinarily well read. . . .
Allen’s program was imbued with literate, verbal slapstick. He had ethnic comedy routines in Allen’s Alley, appearances by celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, musical numbers with talent from the likes of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, and social commentaries on every conceivable subject, especially criticisms of the advertising and radio industry. . . .
In 1946-47 Allen was ranked the number one show on network radio. World War II was over, Americans were beginning a new era of consumerism. And a very few consumers had recently purchased a new entertainment device called television. When Fred Allen was asked what he thought of television, he said he didn’t like furniture that talked. . . .
Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819.
American poet, journalist, and essayist … [His] verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature.
Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and at age 12 began to learn the printing trade. Over time he moved from printing to teaching to journalism, becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He began experimenting with a new form of poetry, revolutionary at the time, free of a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme that has come to be known as ‘free verse.’ In 1855, Whitman published, anonymously and at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Revolutionary too was the content of his poems celebrating the human body and the common man. Whitman would spend the rest of his life revising and enlarging Leaves of Grass; the ninth edition appeared in 1892, the year of his death.