Amanda Peet is 40 today.
Nine-time Grammy winner Mary J. Blige is 41.
Frequent TV actress Kim Coles is 50.
Vicki Peterson of the Bangles is 54 (the others forming The Bangles were Vicki’s sister Debbi and Susanna Hoffs).
Ben Crenshaw is 60. Crenshaw won the Masters in 1984 and 1995.
Naomi Judd is 66. Her birth name was Diana Ellen Judd.
Clarence Clemons should have been 70 today. He died in June.
Rod Taylor is 82. He was the male lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and had 50 or so other credits.
Carroll Shelby is 89. He was a race driver but his greatest fame is from designing the Mustang Cobras.
Baseball Hall of Fame inductee Max Carey was born on this date in 1890.
Max Carey enjoyed six seasons in which he hit over .300, but he built a more lasting reputation as a superb defensive center fielder and a successful basestealer. The Pirates great still holds several National League records for fielding prowess and led the league in steals 10 times. In 1922, he approached perfection on the basepaths, stealing 51 bases in 53 attempts. In 1925 at age 35, Carey experienced his best season, hitting .343 during the regular season and .458 in the World Series.
Author and environmentalist Aldo Leopold was born on this date in 1887.
Born in 1887 and raised in Burlington, Iowa, Aldo Leopold developed an interest in the natural world at an early age, spending hours observing, journaling, and sketching his surroundings. Graduating from the Yale Forest School in 1909, he eagerly pursued a career with the newly established U.S. Forest Service in Arizona and New Mexico. By the age of 24, he had been promoted to the post of Supervisor for the Carson National Forest in New Mexico. In 1922, he was instrumental in developing the proposal to manage the Gila National Forest as a wilderness area, which became the first such official designation in 1924.
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A prolific writer, authoring articles for professional journals and popular magazines, Leopold conceived of a book geared for general audiences examining humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Unfortunately, just one week after receiving word that his manuscript would be published, Leopold experienced a heart attack and died on April 21, 1948 while fighting a neighbor’s grass fire that escaped and threatened the Leopold farm and surrounding properties. A little more than a year after his death Leopold’s collection of essays A Sand County Almanac was published. With over two million copies sold, it is one of the most respected books about the environment ever published, and Leopold has come to be regarded by many as the most influential conservation thinker of the twentieth century.
Leopold’s legacy continues to inform and inspire us to see the natural world “as a community to which we belong.”
Alexander Stirling Calder was born on January 11th in 1870. He was the son and father of Alexander Calders.
The philosopher and psychologist William James was born on this date in 1842.
William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific.
The Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald GCB KCMG PC PC (Can) QC was born on January 11th in 1815. Macdonald was the first prime minister of Canada, 1867-1873 (and again 1878-1891).
Ezra Cornell was born on this date in 1807. He was the founder of Western Union and the co-founder of Cornell University.
Alexander Hamilton was born on Nevis in the Caribbean on Janaury 11, 1755 (or possibly 1757).