Today is the birthday
… of Gothic author Anne Rice, 70. She is said to have sold 100 million books. Excerpt from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor from last year:
[B]orn Howard Allen O’Brien in New Orleans (1941). Her parents were Irish Catholics, and also free spirits, and they thought it would be great fun to name their daughter after her father, whose name was Howard. But she hated it so much that she changed her name to Anne when she was in first grade.
Anne was one of four girls, and she said that they were all a little weird, grew up isolated and strange like the Brontë sisters. They created fantasy worlds and made up horror stories together, and they liked to wander through cemeteries for fun. And while they walked through the streets of New Orleans, past falling-down mansions, their mom would tell them stories of horrible things that had happened inside. Even though Anne was fascinated by ghosts and violence, she was also a devout Catholic, so devout that she wanted to be a nun for a while. But when she was 14, her mother died from alcoholism, and her dad moved the family to Texas. Here Anne became a normal teenager, had friends, and edited her school’s paper. She gave up Catholicism, inspired by the defiance of 1960s counterculture. She went to college and ended up marrying her high school sweetheart.
… of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, 67. LaRussa is the third winningest manager in baseball history, behind Connie Mack and John McGraw. He has managed 5,097 games.
… of Susan Sarandon. The five-time nominee for best actress (she won for Dead Man Walking) is 65 today.
… of Admiral Michael Mullen, 65. Mullen was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 until last Friday.
… of director Stephen Gyllenhaal. Maggie and Jake’s dad is 62 today.
… of Alicia Silverstone, probably not as clueless at 35.
John Charles Carter was born on October 4, 1923. As Charlton Heston he won the best actor Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), his only nomination.
It’s the birthday of Buster Keaton, born on this date in 1895.
Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time. …
It was this “stone face,” however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.
In films such as The Navigator (1924), The General (1926), and The Cameraman (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films.
Damon Runyan, the author of Guys and Dolls, from which the movie came, was born on October 4th in 1880. “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that is the way to bet.” The Writer’s Almanac has more.
Frederic Remington was born on October 4th in 1861.
With his dynamic representations of cowboys and cavalrymen, bronco busters and braves, 19th-century artist Frederic Remington created a mythic image of the American West that continues to inspire America today. His technical ability to reproduce the physical beauty of the Western landscape made him a sought-after illustrator, but it was his insight into the heroic nature of American settlers that made him great. This painter, sculptor, author, and illustrator, who was so often identified with the American West, surprisingly spent most of his life in the East. More than anything, in fact, it was Remington’s connection with the eastern fantasy of the West, and not a true knowledge of its history and people, that his admirers responded to.
Photo of sculpture from Amon Carter Museum.
And it’s the birthday of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on this date in 1822.
As the Library of Congress tells it:
Rutherford B. Hayes became…president in 1877 after a bitterly-contested election against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Tilden won the popular vote, but disputed electoral ballots from four states prompted Congress to create a special electoral commission to decide the election’s result. The fifteen-man commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices, eight of whom were Republicans, voted along party lines deciding the election in Hayes’s favor.
The Space Age began 54 years ago today with the launch of Sputnik (Cпутник) by the Soviet Union. The word means companion or satellite in Russian.