Calvin Hill is 65. A Yale graduate, Hill was a first round draft choice by Dallas and was NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year in 1969. He was a four-time Pro Bowl selection. Hill also had the strongest looking hands I ever saw.
Tia Carrere, 45. She was born Althea Rae Janairo in Honolulu (or possibly Kenya).
Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. is 44.
Christy Turlington, 43.
Taye Diggs, 41.
Paz Vega, 36. Her name is Paz Campos Trigo. She was born in Seville, Spain; her father a retired bull fighter. She is the mother of three.
Kate Bosworth, 29.
The “King of the Road” Roger Miller was born in Fort Worth on January 2, 1936.
One of the most multifaceted talents country music has ever known, Roger Dean Miller left a musical legacy of astonishing depth and range. A struggling honky-tonk singer and songwriter when he first hit Nashville in 1957, he blossomed into a country-pop superstar in the 1960s with self-penned crossover hits like “Dang Me” and “King of the Road.” In 1965–66 he won eleven Grammy awards. Two decades later, he received a 1985 Tony award for his score for Big River, a Broadway musical based on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In between such career triumphs, Miller kept friends and fans in constant stitches as his extemporaneous wit proved almost as famous as his music.
Issac Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russia, on this date in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac profile in 2009 included this:
He published his first story when he was 18, and published 30 more stories in the next three years. At age 21, he wrote his most famous story after a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, which includes the passage, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!” Asimov went home and wrote the story “Nightfall” (1941), about a planet with six suns that has a sunset once every 2,049 years. It’s been anthologized over and over, and many people still consider it the best science fiction short story ever written.
Asimov died in 1992.
Sally Rand was born on this date in 1904. Ms. Rand was a burlesque dancer, famed for her feather fan and bubble dances. She was portrayed in the movie The Right Stuff, shown performing for the Mercury Astronauts in 1962 when she was 58. Ms. Rand died in 1979.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac in 2003:
He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
And, as discussed in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer, where Cherry-Garrard’s tale is listed second:
Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”