Today is the birthday
… of Richard Penniman, born 79 years ago today (1932).
He claims to be “the architect of rock and roll,” and history would seem to bear out Little Richard’s boast. More than any other performer – save, perhaps, Elvis Presley, Little Richard blew the lid off the Fifties, laying the foundation for rock and roll with his explosive music and charismatic persona. On record, he made spine-tingling rock and roll. His frantically charged piano playing and raspy, shouted vocals on such classics as “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” defined the dynamic sound of rock and roll. Onstage, he’d deliver wild, piano-pounding epistles while costumed in sequined vests, mascara, lipstick, and a pompadour that shook with every thundering beat. His road band, the Upsetters, has been credited by James Brown and others with first putting the funk in the rock and roll beat.
In a 1990 interview, Little Richard offered this explanation for the birth of rock: “I would say that boogie-woogie and rhythm & blues mixed is rock and roll.” . . .
Little Richard, 55 years ago.
… of Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin, two of America’s finest writers, both of whom have written movingly about the loss of their spouse. Didion is 77 and Trillin is 76.
[B]orn in Sacramento, California (1934). [Didion] was a shy girl, without too many friends. She loved to read and she was a good student, nothing special; she chose UC Berkeley because it was so big, and she wanted to be anonymous. She remembered herself at the age of 23: “Skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again.” As a senior at Berkeley, she won first place in an essay contest for Vogue, and her prize was a job at the magazine, where she started her writing career.
. . .A couple of months ago, she published a new memoir, Blue Nights (2011), about her relationship with her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, who died just before the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking.
Eventually, [Trillin] was hired by The New Yorker. For 15 years, from 1967 to 1982, he traveled around the country writing a column for The New Yorker called U.S. Journal. He also writes about food, and has a humorous poetry column in The Nation.
He said, “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
Both of the above excerpts from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
… of James Lee Burke, author of the “Dave Robicheaux” detective novels. He’s 75.
… of John Weldon “J.J.” Cale, 73. The Grammy winner is the author of “Cocaine” and “After Midnight”.
Tenor José Carreras is 65. Jim Messina is 64. So is Heisman-winner Jim Plunkett.
Frankie Muniz is 26 today. Party on, Malcolm.
Walter Elias Disney was born 110 years ago today.
From his fertile imagination and industrious factory of drawing boards, Walt Elias Disney fashioned the most popular movie stars ever to come from Hollywood and created one of the most fantastic entertainment empires in history.
In return for the happiness he supplied, the world lavished wealth and tributes upon him. He was probably the only man in Hollywood to have been praised by both the American Legion and the Soviet Union.
Where any other Hollywood producer would have been happy to get one Academy Award–the highest honor in American movies–Mr. Disney smashed all records by accumulating 29 Oscars.
“We’re selling corn,” Mr. Disney once told a reporter, “and I like corn.”
David Low, the late British political cartoonist, called him “the most significant figure in graphic arts since Leonardo.”
Walt Disney, 65, Dies on Coast; Founded an Empire on a Mouse (1966)
Rose Wilder Lane was born on December 5, 1886. She is the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder. She collaborated with her mother in writing the Little House books. She was also instrumental in founding the Libertarian movement.
Bill Pickett was born on December 5, 1870.
Bill Pickett…is credited with founding bulldogging or steer wrestling, as it is known today. Legend has it that Pickett resorted to biting the lip of a recalcitrant steer to wrestle it to the dirt to get it into the corral. Pickett moved from ranch work into the show arena in the 1890s, when he and his brother began the Pickett Brothers Bronco Busters and Rough Riders Show that toured fairs and rodeos. In 1907, Pickett was hired as a cowhand on the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma and participated in the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch Wild West Show. He worked on the ranch when he was not traveling with the Miller Brothers for more than 25 years. He died April 2, 1932, after being kicked in the head while breaking a colt at the ranch. He was later honored by the U.S. Postal Service, who featured Pickett on a stamp as part of its Legends of the West series.
One problem with the stamp. Artist Mark Hess depicted Bill’s brother Ben in the orginal artwork for the 1993 20-stamp panel Legends of the West. When the family notified the Postal Service, they had Hess re-do the art and withdrew 5 million panes of stamps (that’s 100 million stamps). Alas, some had already been sold and rather than create a rare collector’s item, the Postal Service sold 150,000 of the incorrect panels to create a not-so-rare collector’s item. The wrong stamp is worth about $150 today. (The Bill Pickett incident)
Ben on the left, Bill on the right.
 |
 |
George Armstrong Custer was born on this date in 1839. The PBS series The West has a fair essay on his life, career and legacy.
Custer’s blunders cost him his life but gained him everlasting fame. His defeat at the Little Bighorn made the life of what would have been an obscure 19th century military figure into the subject of countless songs, books and paintings. His widow, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, did what she could to further his reputation, writing laudatory accounts of his life that portrayed him as not only a military genius but also a refined and cultivated man, a patron of the arts, and a budding statesman.
Martin Van Buren was born on December 5, 1782, in Kinderhook, New York. He was the tenth Secretary of State, eighth Vice President and eight President of the United States (1837-1841).
Just five feet six inches tall, with reddish-blond hair, Van Buren earned the nicknames “The Little Magician” and the “Red Fox of Kinderhook” for his legendary skill in political manipulation. Alongside his gift for politics, however, Van Buren harbored a sense of idealism that helped lead him, late in his career, to oppose the westward expansion of slavery.
Van Buren rose to national fame under the wing of Andrew Jackson, who defeated President John Quincy Adams in Adams’ 1828 bid for a second term. Before coming to Washington as a senator in 1821, Van Buren crafted the powerful New York political machine known as the “Albany Regency.” In 1825, he put his formidable political skills at Jackson’s disposal.
Having assembled the coalition that made possible “Old Hickory”‘s ascension to the presidency in 1828, Van Buren was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of state. The election, the first in which a candidate directly appealed for the popular vote, marked a turning point in American politics and confirmed the emergence of the Democratic Party as heir to the Jeffersonian Republicans.
There is a school of thought that holds that Custer played a pivotal role in Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, and thus in the Confederate loss of the civil war, by preventing Stuart’s cavalry attacking the weakened center of the Union Cemetery Ridge line from the east at the same time Longstreet’s (“Pickett’s”) charge was attacking that line from the West. The action I refer to was a gigantic cavalry battle which occurred several miles to the east of Cemetery Ridge, at a detached piece of what is now Gettysburg Battlefield Park called East Cavalry Field. It looks to me like people back then knew Custer as a national hero, and that explains why it was such a shocker, still discussed to this day, when he was killed in Montana. Both of these results were attributable to Custer being a wild man. If it’s true that Stuart was to attack from one side and Longstreet from the other, then Longstreet’s (“Pickett’s”) charge makes much more sense.