Jake LaMotta, the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, is 90 today. He was middleweight champion of the world 1949-1951.
Earl Henry Hamner, Jr., is 88 today. It’s he who wrote Spencer’s Mountain, based on his own childhood; it became the basis for the TV series The Waltons. Hamner was the voiceover narrator for the show. Good-night, Grandpa. Good-night, John-Boy.
Canadian author Alice Munro is 80. Ms. Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, “awarded once every two years to a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage.”
Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.
Man Booker International Prize judging panel
Lolita, the actress Sue Lyon, is 65 today.
Arlo Guthrie is 64.
Béla Fleck is 53.
Adrian Grenier is 35 today.
Jessica Simpson is 31.
Arthur Ashe, the first black man to win a major tennis championship, was born on this date in 1943. Ashe won Wimbledon, the U.S. and Australian Opens. He died from pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, in 1993. He contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during surgery (not altogether uncommon before the disease was understood).
Fred Gwynne, best know perhaps as Herman Munster, was born on July 10, 1926. He died in 1993.
Two long-time television personalities were born on this date. Don Herbert, Mr. Wizard, was born on July 10th in 1917. David Brinkley was born on July 10th in 1920.
Marcel Proust was born on July 10th in 1871. His fame is based on the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which is best translated In Search of Lost Time. Jane Smiley belongs to that tiny group that has read the entire 3,000-page work — she wrote about her experience for Salon in 2005. A brief excerpt from her story:
[I]t is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.
First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition — mine came in a six-book set — and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let’s say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages — but don’t read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.
Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, began overnight on July 9-10, 1943. The amphibious landings were lead by General Bernard Montgomery with the British 8th Army and General George Patton with the American 7th Army. Overall commander was General Dwight Eisenhower, with Sir Harold Alexander second in command. The allied forces reached Messina, just across from the Italian mainland, on August 16th.