Today is the birthday of Billy Graham. He’s 93. You’d think he’d want to go to heaven by now.
Tom Peters is 69 today. In 1982 he published a widely-acclaimed bestseller In Search of Excellence. I have a first edition. The pages of the book about excellence are bound into the cover upside-down.
Johnny Rivers is 69.
Roberta Joan Anderson is 68. We know her as Joni Mitchell.
A consummate artist, Joni Mitchell is an accomplished musician, songwriter, poet and painter. Hailing from Canada, where she performed as a folksinger as far back as 1962, she found her niche on the same Southern California singer/songwriter scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies that germinated such kindred spirits as Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Mitchell’s artistry goes well beyond folksinging to incorporate elements of jazz and classical music. In her own words, “I looked like a folksinger, even though the moment I began to write, my music was not folk music. It was something else that had elements of romantic classicism to it.” Impossible to categorize, Mitchell has doggedly pursued avenues of self-expression, heedless of commercial outcomes. Nonetheless, she managed to connect with a mass audience in the mid-Seventies when a series of albums—Court and Spark (1974, #2), Miles of Aisles (1974, #2), The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975, #4) and Hejira (1976, #13)-established her as one of that decade’s pre-eminent artists.
General David Petraeus is 59. His current job is Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Christopher Knight is 54. We know him better as Peter Brady.
The jockey Calvin Borel is 45 today.
Herman Mankiewicz was born 114 years ago today.
[Mankiewicz] worked as a screenwriter on many successful Hollywood films, but he was uncredited on a lot of them, like Horse Feathers (1932), Million Dollar Legs (1932), and The Wizard of Oz (1939) — he was the one who suggested that they film the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz in black and white. But he did get credit for his work with Orson Welles co-writing the script for Citizen Kane (1941). Citizen Kane topped a lot of lists as the best film of the 20th century, but when it came out it only won one Academy Award, and that was for its screenplay.
When he was in New York, he said, “Oh, to be back in Hollywood, wishing I was back in New York.”
Leon Trotsky was born on November 7, 1879 (but it was October 26th at the time).
The first internet radio broadcast was 17 years ago today according to Wikipedia. It was by WXYC at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Doug Wilder was elected governor of Virginia 22 years ago today. He was the first African-American governor of any state. Twenty-two years earlier, Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, the first African-American mayor of a major city.