Billy Gray, the kid that befriended Klaatu in the classic 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still, is 74 today. Billy’s old enough to play Professor Barnhardt this time around. Gray was Bud on the 50s sitcom Father Knows Best.
Richard Moll of Night Court is 69.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus is 51.
Patrick Dempsey is 46.
Orlando Bloom is 35.
Nate Silver, statistician and journalist, is 34.
“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; Believe me, honey, rich is better.”
Sophia Kalish was born at a farm house along the road in Russia as her mother was emigrating to America on this date in 1884. As Sophie Tucker she was one of the great stars of vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies and early movies. In the 1930s she brought elements of nostalgia for the early years of 20th century into her show. She was billed as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas.” Her hearty sexual appetite was a frequent subject of her songs, unusual for female performers of the era. In addition to her performing, Sophie Tucker was active in efforts to unionize professional actors, and was elected president of the American Federation of Actors in 1938.
“From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents. From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks. From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality. From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.”
The Library of Congress has more about The Last of the Red Hot Mamas.
A.B. Guthrie was born on this date in 1901. His The Big Sky (1946) is one of the classic works of western American literature. Its sequel, The Way West (1949), won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 1950.
What “The Big Sky” is: An unflinching account not only of the hardships and dangers of the 1830-1845 mountain man era, but also a glimpse into the meaning of our own existence here — the reasons why we come, the reasons why we stay. True to Guthrie’s bid for honesty, the answers aren’t always pretty.
Guthrie’s Boone Caudill is the quintessential anti-hero, a mean, moody misanthrope who heads West to escape his troubled past as well as to seek adventure and freedom. Ultimately, though, trouble follows Boone — because, after all, the one thing he can’t run away from is himself.
The theme, Guthrie wrote, is “that each man kills the thing he loves.
“If it had any originality at all, it was only that a band of men, the fur-hunters, killed the life they loved and killed it with a thoughtless prodigality perhaps unmatched.”
“The 100 Most Influential Montanans of the Century” by The Missoulian (1999)
Horatio Alger Jr. was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts on this date in 1832.
He was one of the most influential writers in American history. He wrote more than a hundred novels, almost every single one of which tells the same story: A young boy, living in poverty, manages to find success and happiness by working hard and never giving up. But even though Alger’s books were all the same, and none was a literary masterpiece, they were read by thousands of young Americans all across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been argued that Horatio Alger, more than any other person, was responsible for creating the idea of the American Dream.