Category: Birthdays

Today is the birthday

… of Elmore Leonard. He’s 85. Leonard on his Rules of Writing — “These rules I picked up along the way to help me remain invisible while I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.” (Quotation from If You Can’t Do It Well, Don’t Do It.)

Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle (Leonard’s Rules of Writing).

Elmore Leonard’s western stories are as good if not better than his detective novels.

… of Joan Cusack. The actress is 48. She’s been nominated for the best actress in a supporting role Oscar twice, Working Girl and In & Out.

And, if they rated first ladies like they rate the presidents, the one who would surely be at the top, Eleanor Roosevelt, was born on this date in 1884. (She died in 1962.) The following is excerpted from the White House Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt:

A shy, awkward child, starved for recognition and love, Eleanor Roosevelt grew into a woman with great sensitivity to the underprivileged of all creeds, races, and nations. Her constant work to improve their lot made her one of the most loved–and for some years one of the most revered–women of her generation.

She was born in New York City on October 11, 1884, daughter of lovely Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt, younger brother of Theodore. …

In her circle of friends was a distant cousin, handsome young Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They became engaged in 1903 and were married in 1905, with her uncle the President giving the bride away. Within eleven years Eleanor bore six children; one son died in infancy. …

From [Franklin’s] successful campaign for governor in 1928 to the day of his death, she dedicated her life to his purposes. She became eyes and ears for him, a trusted and tireless reporter.

When Mrs. Roosevelt came to the White House in 1933, she understood social conditions better than any of her predecessors and she transformed the role of First Lady accordingly. She never shirked official entertaining; she greeted thousands with charming friendliness. She also broke precedent to hold press conferences, travel to all parts of the country, give lectures and radio broadcasts, and express her opinions candidly in a daily syndicated newspaper column, “My Day.”

October 10th is the 283rd day of 2010.

Thelonious Monk was born on this date in 1917.

Thelonious Monk, who was criticized by observers who failed to listen to his music on its own terms, suffered through a decade of neglect before he was suddenly acclaimed as a genius; his music had not changed one bit in the interim. In fact, one of the more remarkable aspects of Monk’s music was that it was fully formed by 1947 and he saw no need to alter his playing or compositional style in the slightest during the next 25 years.

All Music

A must-have jazz album is Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. All Music has a review and the background — the tape had been lost for decades.

Monk died in 1982.

October 10th is the birthday

… of Peter Coyote, the actor. He’s 69. Coyote does a lot of voice-over and narration. He’s the one that sounds a lot like Henry Fonda. He’s appeared in more than 100 films and television shows (including recently in “Commander in Chief”), though he began acting only at age 39. He tested for the part of Indiana Jones.

… of actor Ben Vereen, 64.

… of singer John Prine, 64.

… of David Lee Roth, 56.

… of Tanya Tucker, 52.

… of Bradley Whitford. He’s 51.

… of Brett Favre. He’s 41 and done.

… of Dale Earnhardt Jr. He’s 36.

Novelist and screenwriter James Clavell was born in Sydney, Australia, on this date in 1924; he died in 1994. Among Clavell’s films, The Great Escape and To Sir, with Love. His most famous novels are King Rat and Shōgun.

Helen Hayes was born on October 10th in 1900. Hayes won two acting Oscars — leading in 1932 and supporting 39 years later in 1971.

Long regarded as “the First Lady of American Theater,” Helen Hayes earned international esteem and affection during a career that spanned more than eighty years on stage and in films, radio, and television. As a screen actor she won two Oscars, as a stage actor she won a prestigious Drama League of New York award, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan presented her with the National Medal of Arts. Deeply in love with her profession, Hayes enjoyed playing a variety of roles, from Amanda Wingfield in Tennesse Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” (1948) to a little old lady stowaway in AIRPORT (1970). Both the charm of her comic roles and the depth of her tragic ones made Hayes one of the most respected and beloved American actors.

American Masters

Robert Gould Shaw, the Union officer commanding the 54th Regiment, portrayed in the movie Glory by Matthew Broderick, was born on October 10th in 1837. He died leading an attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has an interesting few paragraphs today on St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Time marches on.

Today Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan, is 71; Jesse Jackson 69; Chevy Chase 67; Stephanie Zimbalist 54. Even Matt Damon is 40.

Susan Alexandra Weaver is 61. She is one of 11 actors to be nominated for both leading and supporting Oscars in the same year — Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl. She was also nominated for leading actress for Aliens. She’s 5-foot-11 and took the name Sigourney after reading The Great Gatsby.

Author R.L. Stine is 67.

When someone asked him how he first knew that Goosebumps was going to be a big success, he said: “I was in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, driving to a bookstore for a book signing. I remember I was stuck in a huge traffic jam and I was really worried I would be late and was growing more and more annoyed at all the traffic. When we finally approached the bookstore, I realized that the traffic jam was caused by all the people who were coming to see me.” For several years in a row in the 1990s, he was voted not just the best-selling children’s author in the country, but the best-selling author. He has written more than 100 books and sold more than 400 million copies.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2009)

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, was born on this date in 1920. He died in 1986.

Eddie Rickenbacker was born on this date in 1890.

Edward Vernon Rickenbacker was a man whose delight in turning the tables on seemingly hopeless odds took him to the top in three distinct fields.

In the daredevil pre-World War I days of automobile racing he became one of this country’s leading drivers, although he had a profound dislike for taking unnecessary risks. He had entered the auto industry as a trainee mechanic and made his first mark servicing the cranky machines of that day.

In World War I he became the nation’s “Ace of Aces” as a military aviator despite the fact that he had joined the Army as a sergeant-driver on Gen. John J. Pershing’s staff.

He was named by Gen. William Mitchell to be chief engineering officer of the fledgling Army Air Corps. His transfer to actual combat flying–in which he shot down 22 German planes and four observation balloons–was complicated not only by his being two years over the pilot age limit of 25, but also because he was neither a college man nor a “gentleman” such as then made up the aristocratic fighter squadrons of the air service.

In the highly competitive airline business, Mr. Rickenbacker was the first man to prove that airlines could be made profitable, and then the first to prove that they could be run without a Government subsidy and kept profitable.

New York Times (1973)

Seems like he might have been the last man to prove that airlines could be made profitable too.

In addition to Kiley, 8 today, it’s the birthday of these fine Libras.

Mary Badham is 58 today. You know her as Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. She was nine going-on 10 when they made the film and she received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination. Badham has just five other film and TV credits.

Desmond Tutu is 79.

John Mellencamp is 59.

Yo-Yo Ma is 55.

Simon Cowell is 51.

Sherman Alexie was born 44 years ago today on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

He has written many novels, books of poetry, short stories, and screenplays, including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), Reservation Blues (1995), and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). His most recent books are Face, a book of poems published earlier this year, and War Dances, a book of short stories that just came out this week.

He wrote, “He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2009)

Alexie’s books and stories are good stuff, and the movie Alexie adapted from Lone Ranger and Tonto, Smoke Signals, is delightful.

Andy Devine was born in Flagstaff, Arizona, 105 years ago today. He grew up in Kingman, and is still their favorite son. Devine and his unusual voice were in more than 400 films, on radio and TV. I always liked Andy, but Smilin’ Ed McConnell was definitely better on Saturdays with Froggy the Gremlin and Buster Brown shoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ5CPCvf6aA

June Allyson was born Eleanor Geisman in The Bronx, New York, on October 7, 1917.

The American poet James Whitcomb Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana, on October 7th in 1849. RIley was quite successful — as poets go — much of his income from his reading tours. He is generally regarded as one of the founders of midwestern America cultural identity.

The labor leader and martyr Joe Hill was born Joel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, on this date in 1979. Hill was executed for murder he most likely didn’t commit in Utah in 1915 — reportedly his last word before the firing squad shot, was “Fire.” The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has an informative narrative about Hill.

It’s the birthday

… of Maya Lin. The designer of the Vietnam Memorial is 51.

… of Bill Keane. The artist and creator of Family Circus is 88.

… of comedian Bill Dana, born William Szathmary 86 years ago today. He was once a famed astronaut, José Jiménez.

… of Steve Miller. Miller was encouraged as a child by family friend Les Paul. Fly Like and Eagle today Steve, you’re 67.

… of Edward P. Jones. The author of the Pulitizer Prize winning novel The Known World is 59. A great book.

… of Diane Cilento. Ms. Cilento received a supporting actress Oscar nomination for her performance in Tom Jones, but NewMexiKen liked her best as the spicy, outspoken passenger in Hombre (with Paul Newman in photo). Diane Cilento was married to Sean Connery 1962-1973. She’s 77 today.

… of Karen Allen, 59.

… of Michael Andretti, 48.

… of Mario Lemieux, 45.

… of Grant Hill. The basketball player and high school classmate of Emily, official daughter of NewMexiKen, is 38.

… of Kate Winslet. The actress is 35. She’s been nominated for the best leading actress Oscar four times and the best supporting actress Oscar twice. She won for The Reader in 2009.

… of Ray Kroc, developer of the McDonald’s empire, who was born on October 5th in 1902.

But by 1941, “I felt it was time I was on my own,” Mr. Kroc once recalled, and he became the exclusive sales agent for a machine that could prepare five milkshakes at a time.

Then, in 1954, Mr. Kroc heard about Richard and Maurice McDonald, the owners of a fast-food emporium in San Bernadino, Calif., that was using several of his mixers. As a milkshake specialist, Mr. Kroc later explained, “I had to see what kind of an operation was making 40 at one time.”
. . .

Mr. Kroc talked to the McDonald brothers about opening franchise outlets patterned on their restaurant, which sold hamburgers for 15 cents, french fries for 10 cents and milkshakes for 20 cents.

Eventually, the McDonalds and Mr. Kroc worked out a deal whereby he was to give them a small percentage of the gross of his operation. In due course the first of Mr. Kroc’s restaurants was opened in Des Plaines, another Chicago suburb, long famous as the site of an annual Methodist encampment.

Business proved excellent, and Mr. Kroc soon set about opening other restaurants. The second and third, both in California, opened later in 1955; in five years there were 228, and in 1961 he bought out the McDonald brothers.

Source: Kroc obituary in 1984 from The New York Times

Chester A. Arthur, the 21st president, was born on October 5th in 1829. Arthur became president when Garfield was assassinated.

And it’s the birthday of my mother, born in Laredo, Texas, 85 years ago today. Dad always called Mom “Peter Pan,” never wanting to grow up. And she didn’t; she died at 48. I wonder what she’d be like as an octogenarian.

It’s the birthday

… of Sam Huff. He’s 76.

… of Gothic author Anne Rice, 69. She is said to have sold 100 million books.

[B]orn Howard Allen O’Brien in New Orleans (1941). Her parents were Irish Catholics, and also free spirits, and they thought it would be great fun to name their daughter after her father, whose name was Howard. But she hated it so much that she changed her name to Anne when she was in first grade.

Anne was one of four girls, and she said that they were all a little weird, grew up isolated and strange like the Brontë sisters. They created fantasy worlds and made up horror stories together, and they liked to wander through cemeteries for fun. And while they walked through the streets of New Orleans, past falling-down mansions, their mom would tell them stories of horrible things that had happened inside. Even though Anne was fascinated by ghosts and violence, she was also a devout Catholic, so devout that she wanted to be a nun for a while. But when she was 14, her mother died from alcoholism, and her dad moved the family to Texas. Here Anne became a normal teenager, had friends, and edited her school’s paper. She gave up Catholicism, inspired by the defiance of 1960s counterculture. She went to college and ended up marrying her high school sweetheart.

Excerpt from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Susan Sarandon. The five-time nominee for best actress (she won for Dead Man Walking) is 64 today.

… of Alicia Silverstone, probably not as clueless at 34.

John Charles Carter was born on October 4, 1923. As Charlton Heston he won the best actor Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), his only nomination.

It’s the birthday of Buster Keaton, born on this date in 1895.

Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time. …

It was this “stone face,” however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.

In films such as The Navigator (1924), The General (1926), and The Cameraman (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films.

American Masters | PBS

Damon Runyan, the author of Guys and Dolls, from which the movie came, was born on October 4th in 1880. “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that is the way to bet.” The Writer’s Almanac has more.

Frederic Remington was born on October 4th in 1861.

With his dynamic representations of cowboys and cavalrymen, bronco busters and braves, 19th-century artist Frederic Remington created a mythic image of the American West that continues to inspire America today. His technical ability to reproduce the physical beauty of the Western landscape made him a sought-after illustrator, but it was his insight into the heroic nature of American settlers that made him great. This painter, sculptor, author, and illustrator, who was so often identified with the American West, surprisingly spent most of his life in the East. More than anything, in fact, it was Remington’s connection with the eastern fantasy of the West, and not a true knowledge of its history and people, that his admirers responded to.

American Masters | PBS

Photo of sculpture from Amon Carter Museum.

And it’s the birthday of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, 19th President of the United States. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on this date in 1822.

As the Library of Congress tells it:

Rutherford B. Hayes became…president in 1877 after a bitterly-contested election against Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Tilden won the popular vote, but disputed electoral ballots from four states prompted Congress to create a special electoral commission to decide the election’s result. The fifteen-man commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices, eight of whom were Republicans, voted along party lines deciding the election in Hayes’s favor.

Gore Vidal is 85 today.

Steve Reich is 74. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross in The New Yorker explain Reich’s compostitions:

In this sense, “Different Trains,” for recorded voices and string quartet, may be Reich’s most staggering achievement, even if “Music for 18” gives the purest pleasure. He wrote the piece in 1988, after recalling cross-country train trips that he had taken as a child. “As a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period, I would have had to ride very different trains,” he has said. Recordings of his nanny reminiscing about their journeys and of an elderly man named Lawrence Davis recalling his career as a Pullman porter are juxtaposed with the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors. These voices give a picture of the dividedness of twentieth-century experience, of the irreconcilability of American idyll and European horror—and something in Mr. Davis’s weary voice also reminds us that America was never an idyll for all. The hidden melodies of the spoken material generate string writing that is rich in fragmentary modal tunes and gently pulsing rhythms.

The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.”

Ernest Evans is 69; that’s Chubby Checker. His version of “The Twist” was number one in both 1960 and 1962, though not at my high school where the Carmelite fathers decreed it too impure.

My daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
Yeah daddy is sleepin’ and
mama ain’t around
We’re gonna twisty twisty twisty
‘Til we turn the house down

Senator Jeff Bingaman is 67 today.

Roy is 66.

Siegfried & Roy met in 1957. Siegfried took a job on an ocean liner, first working as a steward. Roy got a job on the same ship as a waiter. While working one night, Roy heard people applauding and looked over to see Siegfried on a makeshift stage, taking a rabbit out of a hat. The two young men became friends and Roy began to serve as Siegfried’s assistant.

One night Siegfried asked Roy what he thought of the show. Roy got up the nerve to tell Siegfried that he found the magic a little too predictable. Astounded at Roy’s candor, especially considering he was five years Siegfried’s junior, Siegfried asked him how the show might be made better. “If you can make a rabbit and a dove appear and disappear, can you do the same with a cheetah?” Roy inquired. “In magic, anything is possible,” Siegfried responded.

As fate would have it, Roy had smuggled Chico the cheetah onboard, liberating him from the zoo. So Siegfried & Roy began to develop the magic that would become their trademark. Though the next five years were tough, traveling around Europe, playing small, unsophisticated clubs for little pay, they refused to become discouraged. Instead they focused on their magic and presentation.

A Magical Partnership

Lindsey Buckingham is 61.

Keb’ Mo’ is 59.

Dave Winfield is 59.

A true five-tool athlete who never spent a day in the Minor Leagues, Dave Winfield played 22 seasons, earning 12 All-Star Game selections. At 6-foot-6, he was an imposing figure and a durable strongman with the rare ability to combine power and consistency. In tours of duty with six Major League teams, Winfield batted .283, hit 465 home runs and amassed 3,110 hits. He was a seven-time Gold Glove winner and helped lead the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Championship in 1992.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Dennis Eckersley is 56.

Dennis Eckersley blazed a unique path to Hall of Fame success. During the first half of his 24-year big league career, Eck won over 150 games primarily as a starter, including a no-hitter in 1977. Over his final 12 years, he saved nearly 400 games, leading his hometown Oakland A’s to four American League West titles and earning both Cy Young and MVP honors in 1992. The only pitcher with 100 saves and 100 complete games, Eckersley dominated opposing batters during a six-year stretch from 1988-93, in which he struck out 458 while walking just 51.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Al Sharpton is 56.

Janel Moloney of The West Wing is 41.

Gwen Stefani is 41, neither “Hollaback” nor “Girl.”

A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
Cause I ain’t no hollaback girl
I ain’t no hollaback girl

(A hollaback girl is a girl who lets boys do whatever, then waits for them to call, to holler back. Originally it meant a cheerleader who echoed the lead cheerleader’s call. The song uses both meanings well.)

Emily Post was born on October 3rd in 1873, thank you very much.

She taught as the basis of all correct deportment that “no one should do anything that can either annoy or offend the sensibilities of others.” Thousands found their social problems solved by her simple counsels. Her name became synonymous with good manners.

Mrs. Post’s advice was varied. She gave suggestions about how to inculcate good manners in an active 7-year-old boy and she could and did answer complicated questions about the proper way to address titled persons of Europe.

But for the most part she advised the debutante, the confused suitor and the newly married couple who wished to establish themselves in good relations with the world about them. She always avoided giving lonelyhearts advice and never suggested ways to capture a husband or wife, although many young persons found courtship easier because of what she said.

The New York Times

George Bancroft was born on October 3, 1800. As Secretary of the Navy, Bancroft initiated the creation of the United States Naval Academy in 1846. A historian even more than a politician, Bancroft wrote one of the first great histories of the U.S., the multi-volume History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent.

John Ross was born on October 3, 1790.

John Ross, a man with the legend touch, walked tall upon the earth and cast a long shadow.  He set a precedent in democratic political history that will never be broken.  By free ballot, he was elected to ten successive terms of four years each as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

He died in office as chief executive of a government fashioned after that of the United States of America.
Intellectually, he was the greatest chief in the history of the Cherokee people.

. . .

John Ross stood so high in the eyes of his people that they called him Guwisguwi, the name of a rare migratory bird of large size and white or grayish plumage that had one time appeared at long intervals in the old Cherokee country.

He was only one-eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Scot.  He was as much a Scotsman as his great opponent, Andrew Jackson, and fought just as tenaciously.  But he was forever Cherokee-minded.

Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee

Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2nd in 1869. Groucho Marx was born on October 2nd in 1890. Coincidence? I think not.

Maury Wills is 78 today. Wills stole 104 bases in 1962 to break Ty Cobb’s 47-year-old record. So far, that hasn’t been enough to get him into the Hall of Fame.

Don McLean is 65.

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz is 61.

In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Annie Leibovitz – Life Through A Lens | American Masters

Gordon Sumner is 59. You know? Sting.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you

O can’t you see
You belong to me
How my poor heart aches with every step you take

Lorraine Bracco is 56.

Gillian Welch is 43.

And the great barge sank.
And the Okies fled.
And the great emancipater
took a bullet in the head.

in the head…
took a bullet in the back of the head.

It was not December.
Was not in May.
Was the 14th of April.
That is ruination day.

That’s the day…
The day that is ruination day.

Graham Greene was born on October 2nd in 1904.

He had bipolar disorder, and he once told his wife, Vivien, that it gave him “a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life” and that “unfortunately, the disease is also one’s material.” He attempted suicide several times as a teenager. When he was 16, he had a nervous breakdown and became a patient of one of Freud’s students. He fell in love with his therapist’s wife.

He joined the Communist Party in 1925 for six weeks, and the next year he converted to Catholicism so that his girlfriend would marry him. He also converted because, he said, “I had to find a religion … to measure my evil against.” In one of his novels, he wrote: “I believe there’s a God — I believe the whole bag of tricks; there’s nothing I don’t believe; they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe.” He became known as a “Catholic novelist,” though didn’t himself like the label.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Bud Abbott was born on this date in 1897. He was the thin one of Abbott and Costello.

… is the birthday

… of Bonnie Parker, the Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, born 100 years ago today. She died 23 years and 7⅔ months later.

… of Jimmy Carter. The 39th President is 86 today.

[T]he first American president to be born in a hospital. He grew up in a house where everyone brought a book to the dinner table, and then the family sat there together at dinner eating and reading in silence. He started selling boiled peanuts from a red wagon by the side of the road when he was six, around the same age that he started winning all sorts of prizes for being the top reader in his rural grade school.

He played basketball in high school, joined the Future Farmers of America club, and went off to the United States Naval Academy, where he taught Sunday school to the officer’s kids and graduated 59th in his class of 820. While in the Navy, he did graduate work in nuclear physics. Then, after his dad died, he left the Navy and took over the family peanut farming business. For a while, he was a wealthy peanut farmer.

— Excerpt from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Tom Bosley. Richie Cunningham’s father is 83.

… of Julie Andrews. Mary Poppins is 75. Ms. Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins; she was nominated for The Sound of Music and Victor/Victoria. Of course, her claim to fame really was as Eliza Doolittle in the stage version of My Fair Lady.

… of Rod Carew. The baseball hall of fame player is 65.

Rod Carew lined, chopped and bunted his way to 3,053 career hits. His seven batting titles are surpassed only by Ty Cobb, Tony Gwynn and Honus Wagner, and equaled only by Rogers Hornsby and Stan Musial. He used a variety of relaxed, crouched batting stances to hit over .300 in 15 consecutive seasons with the Twins and Angels, achieving a .328 lifetime average. He was honored as American League Rookie of the Year in 1967, won the league MVP 10 years later and was named to 18 straight All-Star teams. He remains a national hero in Panama.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

… of Tim O’Brien. The novelist is 64. O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 1990, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time as the best novel of 1994. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.

The title story of The Things They Carried begins:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

… of Randy Quaid, 60.

… of Youssou N’Dour, 51.

… of Mark McGwire, 47.

Vladimir Horowitz was born on this date in 1903.

Vladimir Horowitz, the eccentric virtuoso of the piano whose extraordinary personality and skill overwhelmed six decades of concert audiences, died suddenly early yesterday afternoon [November 5, 1989] at his home in Manhattan, apparently of a heart attack. Though standard biographies list his birth date as Oct. 1, 1904, Mr. Horowitz recently celebrated what he called his 86th birthday.

Held in awe by aficionados of the instrument, Mr. Horowitz virtually cornered the market on celebrity among 20th-century pianists. His presence hovered over several generations of pianists who followed him.

The New York Times

The actor Stanley Holloway was born on October 1, 1890. Holloway is known foremost as Alfred P. Doolittle in the stage and film productions of My Fair Lady. He was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for the role and he was the only lead actor to do his own singing. This story was found at Wikipedia:

Holloway appeared with Rex Harrison in the stage production of “My Fair Lady”. Harrison had a reputation for being very abrupt with his fans. One night after a performance of the show, Holloway and Harrison left by the stage door. It was late, cold and pouring rain and there was an old woman standing alone outside the door. When she saw Harrison, she asked him for his autograph. He told her to “Sod off”, and she was so enraged at this that she rolled up her program and hit Harrison with it. Holloway congratulated him on not only making theater history, but, for the first time in world history, “the fan has hit the shit.”

The very first World Series game was played 107 years ago today. The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Pilgrims 7-3. Cy Young was the losing pitcher that day but went on to win two games as Boston—later the Red Sox—won the best-of-nine series, five games to three.

Walt Disney World opened in 1971. Johnny Carson debuted as regular host of The Tonight Show in 1962. The first Model T went on sale in 1908.

Today is the birthday

… of the poet laureate of the United States, W.S. Merwin. He’s 83 today. W.S. is for William Stanley.

He won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Carrier of Ladders and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for The Shadow of Sirius (published in 2008). He also won the 2005 National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems.

He started writing poems when he was four or five years old, he said — at first, they were mostly hymns to give to his father, a Presbyterian minister. He studied literature and Romance languages at Princeton, gained the admiring attention of W. H. Auden, and published his first book of poems, A Mask for Janus, the year he turned 25.
. . .

He lives in Hawaii on the lip of a dormant volcano in Maui, on what used to be a pineapple plantation. He’s devoted to cultivating endangered palm trees and reforesting his land with native Hawaiian plants. He’s deeply interested in Buddhism.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, 82.

… of Angie Dickinson. “Pepper” is 79 today.

… of Johnny Mathis. Chances are the singer is 75 today.

… of Barry Williams. Greg Brady is 56 today.

… of Fran Drescher, 53. (Really, only 53?)

… of Dharma. Jenna Elfman is 39.

… of Faheem Rasheed Najm. T-Pain is 25.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on this date in 1924.

Mr. Capote’s first story was published while he was still in his teens, but his work totaled only 13 volumes, most of them slim collections, and in the view of many of his critics, notably his old friend John Malcolm Brinnin, he failed to join the ranks of the truly great American writers because he squandered his time, talent and health on the pursuit of celebrity, riches and pleasure.

New York Times

Yup, Truman Capote should have lived the life of Ebenezer Scrooge and forsaken that celebrity, riches and pleasure shit.

James Dean was killed on this date 55 years ago at the junction of California Highways 41 and 46. He was 24.

[Dean] and his mechanic, Rolf Wuetherich, were traveling in Dean’s new Porsche Spyder 550, which he planned to race that afternoon in Salinas. Dean had traded in his Porsche Speedster just nine days earlier, purchasing the Spyder for $6,900 and naming it “Little Bastard.” From JamesDean.com.

Goodness gracious, great balls of fire, Jerry Lee Lewis is 75 today.

Jerry Lee Lewis is the wild man of rock and roll, embodying its most reckless and high-spirited impulses. On such piano-pounding rockers from the late Fifties as “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” Lewis combined a ferocious, boogie-style instrumental style with rowdy, uninhibited vocals.
. . .

Through a life marked by controversy and personal tragedy, Lewis has remained a defiant and indefatigable figure who refuses to be contained by politesse or pigeonholes. As he declared from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in 1973, “I am a rock and rollin’, country & western, rhythm & blues singing [expletive deleted]!”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Lewis, 53 years ago —

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yRdDnrB5kM

Ian McShane is 68. McShane played that c***s**k** Al Swearengen on Deadwood.

Bryant Gumbel is 62.

Gwen Ifill — interruption here for non sequitur question — is 55.

Stanley Berenstain was born on September 29th in 1923 (he died in 2005). Together with his wife Jan, they created the Berenstain Bears, a series with more than 200 books since 1962.

Gene Autry was born in Tioga, Texas, on this date 103 years ago today. The following is from the biography at the Official Website for Gene Autry:

Discovered by humorist Will Rogers, in 1929 Autry was billed as “Oklahoma’s Yodeling Cowboy” at KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He gained a popular following, a recording contract with Columbia Records in 1929, and soon after, performed on the “National Barn Dance” for radio station WLS in Chicago. Autry first appeared on screen in 1934 and up to 1953 popularized the musical Western and starred in 93 feature films. In 1940 theater exhibitors of America voted Autry the fourth biggest box office attraction, behind Mickey Rooney, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy.

Autry made 635 recordings, including more than 300 songs written or co-written by him. His records sold more than 100 million copies and he has more than a dozen gold and platinum records, including the first record ever certified gold [That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine]. His Christmas and children’s records Here Comes Santa Claus and Peter Cottontail are among his platinum recordings. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the second all-time best selling Christmas single, boasts in excess of 30 million in sales.

… Autry’s great love for baseball prompted him to acquire the American League California Angels in 1961. Active in Major League Baseball, Autry held the title of Vice President of the American League until his death [1998].

… Autry is the only entertainer to have five stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, one each for radio, records, movies, television, and live performance including rodeo and theater appearances.

Autry’s Melody Ranch radio show aired from 1940 to 1956. His television program from 1950 through 1955 (91 episodes), and long after in syndication.

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome 109 years ago today.

More than any other man of his time, Enrico Fermi could properly be named “the father of the atomic bomb.”

It was his epoch-making experiments at the University of Rome in 1934 that led directly to the discovery of uranium fission, the basic principle underlying the atomic bomb as well as the atomic power plant. And eight years later, on Dec. 2, 1942, he was the leader of that famous team of scientists who lighted the first atomic fire on earth, on that gloomy squash court underneath the west stands of the University of Chicago’s abandoned football stadium.

That day has been officially recognized as the birthday of the atomic age. Man at last had succeeded in operating an atomic furnace, the energy of which came from the vast cosmic reservoir supplying the sun and the stars with their radiant heat and light–the nucleus of the atoms of which the material universe is constituted.

Enrico Fermi was the chief architect of that atomic furnace, which he named “pile,” but has since become better known as a nuclear reactor, the technical name for an atomic power plant.

Enrico Fermi Dead at 53 — New York Times

And, according to many sources, Miguel de Cervantes may have been born on this date in 1547.

In 2002, one hundred writers polled overwhelmingly chose Don Quixote as the World’s Best Work of Fiction. Votes for Cervantes’ novel came from Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Milan Kundera, Nadine Gordimer, Carlos Fuentes, and Norman Mailer.

Dostoyevsky wrote in his diary that Don Quixote was “the saddest book ever written … the story of disillusionment.” American novelist William Faulkner reportedly read Don Quixote every year.
. . .

When Edith Grossman published her translation of Don Quixote in October 2003, it was hailed as the “most transparent and least impeded among more than a dozen English translations going back to the 17th century.”

Grossman has translated many living Latin American authors, and has done every one of Gabriel García Márquez’s books since Love in the Time of Cholera. When García Márquez learned that Grossman was translating Cervantes, he joked to her: “I hear you’re two-timing me with Miguel.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2009)

Pompey The Great was born on September 29, just 2115 years ago today in 106 BCE.

Actor William Windom is 87. Windom continues his career; IMDb lists nearly 250 credits for him. He was the congressman in The Farmer’s Daughter and Dr. Seth Hazlitt on Murder She Wrote. IMDb says Windom’s kindergarten teacher was Margaret Hamilton.

Brigitte Bardot is 76.

Ben K. King — “Stand by Me,” “Spanish Harlem” — is 72.

Jeffrey Jones is 64. Ed Rooney, Ferris’s nemesis. And great as A.W. Merrick, the gasbag newspaperman, on Deadwood. That’s Jones with Alan Ruck (Ferris’s buddy Cameron) and Edie McClurg (Rooney’s secretary Grace).

Two-time Oscar nominee for writing, John Sayles is 60. He was nominated for Passion Fish and Lone Star.

Sylvia Kristel, Emmanuelle, is 58. Kristel and Ian MacShane (Deadwood’s Al Swearengen) were a couple once upon a time.

Steve Largent, one of the great receivers in NFL history, is 56 today. The hall-of-famer, who had been an All-American at the University of Tulsa, also served four terms as U.S. representative from Oklahoma’s first district.

Oscar winner Mira Sorvino is 43. She won the best supporting actress award for Mighty Aphrodite.

The Valley Girl, Moon Unit Zappa is 43.

Oscar nominee Naomi Watts is 42. She was nominated for best actress in a leading role for 21 Grams.

Oscar winner for best actor, Peter Finch was born on this date in 1916. Finch won for Network, the first posthumous winner. Finch was also nominated for the best acting Oscar for Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Three time Oscar nominee for best actor, Marcello Mastroianni was born on this date in 1924. Mastroianni died in 1996.

Ed Sullivan was born on this date in 1901. This from his Times obituary in 1974.

Ed Sullivan, a rock-faced Irishman with a hot temper, painful shyness and a disdain for phonies, had been a successful and well-known part of the Broadway scene since the Twenties.

But writing a gossip column, shuttling about the fringes of the entertainment world and being master of ceremonies for a succession of variety shows never gave him what he wanted most out of life–national recognition.

He didn’t achieve that until he moved into the whirlwind world of television in 1948, and his weekly show became an essential part of Sunday evening for millions of Americans.

Between 45,000,000 and 50,000,000 persons tuned in every week to watch the show–a vaudeville-like parade of top talent that cost $8,000,000 a year to produce and for which Mr. Sullivan received $164,000 a year.

The show was worth every penny of that to its sponsors, Lincoln-Mercury automobile dealers, who made Mr. Sullivan their salesman in chief through numerous trips around the country. And he was the proudest possession of the Columbia Broadcasting System, which found he could outdraw almost any competition from the other networks.

The basis of his appeal was an ephemeral thing that baffled those who tried to analyze it. He was not witty, he had no formal talents, he could not consciously entertain anyone. He was bashful, clumsy, self-conscious, forgetful and tongue-tied. And there were times he was painfully, excruciatingly sentimental.

William S. Paley was born on that same day in 1901. This from The Museum of Broadcast Communications:

Paley’s insights helped to define commercial network operations. At the start of his CBS stewardship, he transformed the network’s financial relationship with its affiliates so that the latter agreed to carry sustaining programs free, receiving network payments only for commercially-supported programs. Paley enjoyed socializing and negotiating with broadcast stars. In the late 1940s, his “talent raids” hired top radio stars (chiefly away from NBC) by offering huge prices for rights to their programs and giving them, in return, lucrative capital gains tax options. The talent pool thus developed helped to boost CBS radio ratings just as network television was beginning. At the same time, he encouraged development of CBS News before and during the war as it developed a stable of stars soon headed by Edward R. Murrow.
. . .

Paley is important for having assembled the brilliant team that built and expanded the CBS “Tiffany Network” image over several decades. For many years he had an innate programming touch which helped keep the network on top in annual ratings wars. He blew hot and cold on network news, helping to found and develop it, but willing to cast much of that work aside to avoid controversy or to increase profits. Like many founders, however, he stayed too long and unwittingly helped weaken his company.

Paley was very active in New York art and social circles throughout his life. He was a key figure in the Museum of Modern Art from its founding in 1929.

It is said Paley kept a pair of shoes in his office desk drawer so he could put his feet up on his desk and the soles had never touched anything but carpet. He was that fastidious.

The cartoonist Al Capp, creator of Li’l Abner, was born 100 years ago today.

Seymour Cray, the developer of the super-computer was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, on this date in 1925.

The first Cray-1™ system was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a world-record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second (160 megaflops) and an 8 megabyte (1 million word) main memory.

Cray Inc.

Eight whole megabytes of main memory.

Cray died 1996, the result of injuries from a collision on I-25 at North Academy Boulevard near Colorado Springs.

It was on September 28th, 82 years ago today, that penicillin was discovered by British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming. Yay Fleming.

It’s the birthday of

… Jayne Meadows, Steve Allen’s widow. She’s 90. It was her sister Audrey Meadows that played Ralph Kramden’s wife Alice on The Jackie Gleason Show. Their real surname was Cotter and the sisters were born in Wu-ch’ang, Heilongjiang, China, to missionary parents. Jayne was in a few films and television programs, perhaps best remembered as a panelist on I’ve Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth. That’s her on the left in the photo.

… Arthur Penn, 88. The director was nominated for three best direction Oscars, but never won. The three were The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Alice’s Restaurant.

… Wilford Brimley. He’s 76 today. Brimley was 53-54 when he played the old guy in Cocoon.

… Baseball Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt. He’s 61.

An unprecedented combination of power and defense molded Mike Schmidt into one of the game’s greatest third basemen. The powerful right-handed hitter slugged 548 career home runs, belted 40 or more long balls in three separate seasons and hit 30 or more home runs 10 other times. He established a Major League record for third basemen by clouting 48 homers in 1980 and once hit four consecutive round-trippers in a single game in 1976. A three-time National League MVP, he was a 12-time All-Star, won 10 Gold Gloves and was named The Sporting News Player of the Decade for the 1980s.

Baseball Hall of Fame

… Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s 38.

… Avril Lavigne, 26.

William Conrad, one of the great voices of radio, was born on this date in 1920.

Conrad estimated that he appeared in over 7,500 roles on radio. He was regularly heard inviting listeners to “get away from it all” on CBS’ Escape. Conrad’s other radio credits include appearances on The Damon Runyon Theater, The Lux Radio Theater, Nightbeat, Fibber McGee and Molly and Suspense. For “The Wax Works,” a 1956 episode of Suspense, Conrad demonstrated his versatility by performing all the roles.

Conrad’s longest-running role was that of U.S. marshal Matt Dillon on the groundbreaking radio western Gunsmoke, which aired on CBS radio from 1952 to 1961.

When the golden age of radio was over, Conrad could be heard delivering the urgent narration for Jay Ward’s classic Bullwinkle Show. He later starred on the television series Cannon and Jake and the Fatman.

Radio Hall of Fame

Samuel Adams Beers are named for Sam Adams the brewer of beer and revolution, who was born on this date in 1722.

[Adams] was a failed businessman and a not-very-effective tax collector when the British passed the Sugar Act of 1764, and Adams finally found his purpose in life. He was one of the first members of the colonies to speak out against taxation without representation and one of the first people to argue for the colonies’ independence from Great Britain. He had a genius for agitating people. He organized riots and wrote propaganda, describing the British as murderers and slave drivers. He went on to become one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and participated in the Continental Congress. It was Samuel Adams, who said, “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

It’s the birthday of John Coltrane (1926), Ray Charles (1930) and Bruce Springsteen (1949).

It ought to be a holiday.

Not to mention, four-time Oscar nominee Mickey Rooney is 90, Julio Iglesias is 67, Emmy winner Mary Kay Place is 63, and seven-time Emmy nominee Jason Alexander is 51.

Further, many-time winner of an ALMA Award, Elizabeth Peña is 49. I liked her best in Lone Star.

Trane

“My music,” John Coltrane said, “is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being…” The grandson of ministers, he began his career in the blues clubs of Philadelphia, and throughout his career combined the sacred and the secular in the intense, earnest sound of his saxophone. His musical sermons, by turns somber and ecstatic, radiated his undying faith in music’s power to heal.

Coltrane fell under the spell of Charlie Parker at age 18 and dedicated himself to a practice regime that sometimes found him asleep, fingers still ghosting the keys. He first gained fame as a member of Miles Davis’s classic quintet in 1955, worked with Thelonious Monk, then took the lessons he’d learned from those masters and became a leader in his own right — and the most admired, most influential and most adventurous saxophonist of the 1960s.

“There is never any end,” Coltrane said. “There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that … we can give … the best of what we are.”

Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame

The Genius

Many musicians possess elements of genius, but only one — the great Ray Charles — so completely embodies the term that it’s been bestowed upon him as a nickname. Charles displayed his genius by combining elements of gospel and blues into a fervid, exuberant style that would come to be known as soul music. While recording for Atlantic Records during the Fifties, the innovative singer, pianist and bandleader broke down the barriers between sacred and secular music. The gospel sound he’d heard growing up in the church found its way into the music he made as an adult. In his own words, he fostered “a crossover between gospel music and the rhythm patterns of the blues.” But he didn’t stop there: over the decades, elements of country & western and big-band jazz have infused his music as well. He is as complete and well-rounded a musical talent as this century has produced.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Boss

Bruce Springsteen ranks alongside such rock and roll figureheads as Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Just as those artists shaped popular music, Springsteen served as a pivotal figure in its evolution with his rise to prominence in the mid-Seventies. Early on, he was touted as one of several heirs to Bob Dylan’s mantle. All of these would-be “new Dylans”-who also included Loudon Wainwright, John Prine and Elliott Murphy-rose above the hype, but Springsteen soared highest, catapulting himself to fame on the unrestrained energy of his live shows, the evocative power of his songwriting, and the direct connection he forged with his listeners.

Springsteen lifted rock and roll from its early Seventies doldrums, providing continuity and renewal at a point when it was sorely in need of both. During a decade in which disco, glam-rock, heavy-metal and arena-rock provided different forms of escape into fantasy, Springsteen restored a note of urgency and realism to the rock and roll landscape.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected,and steppin’ out over the line
Oh-Oh, Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, was born on this date in 63 BCE.

Lewis and Clark arrived back in St. Louis from their saunter to the Pacific on September 23, 1806.

Tommy Lasorda, the former Dodgers manager, is 83 today.

Former University of Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson is 76.

Harry’s daughter Shari is 56 and Pat’s daughter Debby is 54. Belafonte and Boone, respectively.

Joan Jett is 52.

I saw him dancin’ there by the record machine
I knew he must a been about seventeen
The beat was goin’ strong
Playin’ my favorite song
An’ I could tell it wouldn’t be long
Till he was with me, yeah me, singin’

I love rock n’ roll
So put another dime in the jukebox, baby
I love rock n’ roll
So come an’ take your time an’ dance with me

Chachi is 49. That’s Scott Baio.

Ronaldo Luiz Nazario de Lima, the Brazilian football star, is 34.

John Houseman was born on this date in 1902. This from the Times obituary when Houseman died in 1988:

John Houseman, who spent more than half a century in the theater as an influential producer and director but who did not achieve fame until, at the age of 71, he portrayed a crusty law school professor in the film ”The Paper Chase” and its subsequent television series, died of spinal cancer yesterday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 86 years old and despite his failing health had been working on various projects until three days ago.

Professor Kingsfield, the role he played in ”The Paper Chase,” led to another well-known part, that of a haughty spokesman for a brokerage house in its television commercials, delivering the lines: ”They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.”

Houseman won a supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of Professor Kingsfield.

Nathan Hale was hanged by the British as a spy on this date in 1776. Hale was in fact spying on the British for General Washington — he had volunteered for the duty.

A statue of Nathan Hale is located between the [CIA] Auditorium and the Original Headquarters Building. Hale was the first American executed for spying for his country. This statue is a copy of the original work created in 1914 for Yale University, Nathan Hale’s alma mater. The Agency’s statue was erected on the grounds in 1973, 200 years after his graduation from Yale.

There is no known portrait of Nathan Hale; this life-size statue portrays what little written description there is of him. The statue captures the spirit of the moment before his execution – a 21-year-old man prepared to meet his death for honor and country, hands and feet bound, face resolute, and his eyes on the horizon. His last words, “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” circle the base around his feet.

He stands vigilant guard on the Agency and is a continuing reminder to its employees of the duties and sacrifices of an intelligence officer.

Central Intelligence Agency

And it’s my baby brother’s birthday. Happy birthday, John.

Larry Hagman, who dreamt of Jeannie before moving to Dallas, is 79 today.

Leonard Cohen is 76.

There are few artists in the realm of popular music who can truly be called poets, in the classical, arts-and-letters sense of the word. Among them are Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs. Leonard Cohen heads this elite class. In fact, Cohen was already an established poet and novelist before he turned his attention to songwriting. His academic training in poetry and literature, and his pursuit of them as livelihood for much of the Fifties and Sixties, gave him an extraordinary advantage over his pop peers when it came to setting language to music. Along with other folk-steeped musical literati, Cohen raised the songwriting bar.
. . .

In his notes for The Essential Leonard Cohen, writer Pico Iyer noted, “The changeless is what he’s been about since the beginning…Some of the other great pilgrims of song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the cross. With Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper.”

Cohen’s artistic outlook might best be expressed in his own words with this lyric from “Anthem”: On Anthem (1992), he wrote: “There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.” He remarked, “That’s the closest thing I could describe to a credo. That idea is one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Leonard Cohen, Live in London

Bill Murray is 60. Nominated for an Oscar for Lost in Translation, NewMexiKen still thinks Murray’s best effort was as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day.

Faith Hill is 43.

Owen and Andrew Wilson’s brother Luke is 39 today.

September 21st is an important date in fantasy literature. Stephen King is 63 today. He was born on H.G. Wells’ birthday (1866-1946) and on the 10th anniversary of the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit (1937).

Henry Lewis Stimson was born on September 21st in 1867. He served in five presidential administrations and had been appointed U.S. Attorney by another, Theodore Roosevelt. Most of his service was after he was 60.

As President Truman’s senior adviser on military use of atomic energy, Henry L. Stimson made the deciding recommendation to drop the first atomic bomb, one of the most significant events in the history of mankind.

In addition to this great responsibility, Mr. Stimson assumed heavy burdens as President Hoover’s Secretary of State (1929-1933) and again as Secretary of War in the cabinets of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman (1940-1945). His unusually long period of public life which established him as an elder statesman in the American scene included an earlier period (1911-1913) as President Taft’s Secretary of War, then a relatively minor post.

When he was in his late seventies Mr. Stimson was the civilian administrative head of a victorious army of more than 10,000,000, the largest ever raised by the United States.

New York Times Obituary (1950)

414 years ago today (1596) Spain named Juan de Oñate governor of the colony of Nuevo México. 226 years ago today (1784) the nation’s first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, began publication. The Library of Congress has a little more about each.

Anne Meara is 81 today. She’s been married to Jerry Stiller 56 years. They were a comedy team in the 1960s. Miss Meara was last seen in Sex and the City: The Movie. She’s the mom of Amy and Ben Stiller.

Sophia Loren is 76. Miss Loren was nominated twice for the best actress Oscar, winning in 1962 for La ciociara. The film was called Two Women in the U.S.

Hockey hall-of-famer Guy LaFleur is 59.

Rick Nelson’s twin sons Gunnar and Matthew are 43 today. Their dad was 45 when he died in a plane crash.

Author and political activist Upton Sinclair was born on September 20th in 1878.

In addition to Aidan turning seven …

Bill Medley is 70 today. Medley was the Righteous Brother with the deep voice. It was he who sang the opening verse in the great, great classic “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” It was the late Bobby Hatfield, the tenor, who generally took the lead on Righteous Brother songs.

Hall of Fame ballplayers Duke Snider and Joe Morgan were born on this date — Snider is 84, Morgan 67. When I think of Morgan I think of an interview during a World Series in the early 1970s. Howard Cossell asked Morgan, “What does it feel like to know you are the best person in the world at what you do?”

Unfortunately for Joe — and us — he’s not the best person in the world at what he does now, which is comment during baseball broadcasts.

A graceful center fielder with a picture-perfect swing, Duke Snider was the biggest bat in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ potent lineup of the 1950s. He hit 40 or more homers five consecutive times and led all batters in home runs and RBIs during the ’50s. The Duke of Flatbush hit four homers in two different World Series (1952 and ’55), clouting a total of 11 Series home runs and 26 Series RBIs.

Baseball Hall of Fame

A fierce competitor renowned for his baseball smarts, Joe Morgan could single-handedly beat opposing teams with his multifaceted skills. A two-time National League MVP in 1975 and ’76, he was a terror on the basepaths, topping the 40-steal plateau nine times during his career. His skilled batting eye enabled him to lead the National League in on-base percentage and walks four times each. Morgan also packed considerable power into his compact frame, hitting 449 doubles and 268 home runs.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Roger Angell, the wonderful writer known foremost for his essays on baseball in The New Yorker — at which he too has often been the best in the world at what he did — is 90 today.

And [Angell] said: “The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the Field of Dreams thing, gives me a pain. I hated that movie. It’s mostly fake. You look back into the meaning of old-time baseball, and really in the early days it was full of roughnecks and drunks. They beat up the umpires and played near saloons. In Field of Dreams there’s a line at the end that says the game of baseball was good when America was good, and they’re talking about the time of the biggest race riots in the country and Prohibition. What is that? That dreaminess, I really hated that.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Adam West, TV’s Batman, is 80. David McCallum, Man from U.N.C.L.E’s Illya Kuryakin and NCIS’s Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard, is 77. Randolph Mantooth of Emergency is 65.

Trisha Yearwood is 46.

Ellen Naomi Cohen was born on September 19th in 1941. Raised in Baltimore and Alexandria, Virginia, we came to know her as Cass Elliot. (Cohen attended the same Alexandria high school as Jim Morrison, Scott McKenzie and John Phillips, George Washington High School. GWHS became a middle school when Alexandria integrated its schools and TC Williams High School was opened — you know, the Titans, remember them?)

The first thing you noticed about Cass was her face. It was an amazing face: fast and funny and beautiful. She was a big, eat the world, pass the bourbon, soft kind of woman who came to New York to make it on Broadway, but to quote Cass: “There wasn’t much call for a three hundred pound ingenue”, and when Barbara Streisand started showing up at the same auditions, Cass started singing the blues.

[W]e’re all just lying around vegging out watching TV and discussing names for the group. “The New Journeymen” was not a handle that was going to hang on this outfit. John was pushing for “The Magic Cyrcle”. Eech, but none of us could come up with anything better, then we switch the channel and, hey, it’s the Hell’s Angels on this talk show . . .

And the first thing we hear is: “Now hold on there, Hoss. Some people call our women cheap, but we just call them our Mamas.” Cass jumped up: “Yeah ! I want to be a Mama.” And Michelle is going: “We’re the Mamas! We’re the Mamas!” OK. I look at John. He’s looking at me going : “The Papas ?” Problem solved. A toast ! To The Mamas and The Papas. Well, after many, many toasts …

Above two quotes from Denny Doherty, Dream A Little Dream.

Mama Casa died in 1974. Keith Moon of The Who died in the same flat four years later.

(Been listening to Mama Cass sing while writing this. She was a wonderful singer. Try Dream a Little Dream of Me.)

The Mary Tyler Show debuted on this date 40 years ago.

213 years ago today (1777) Continental soldiers under General Horatio Gates defeated the British at Saratoga, New York. A second battle was fought at Saratoga on October 17, 1777. American victory in the battles turned the war in the colonists favor and helped persuade the French to recognize American independence and provide military assistance.

Robert Blake is 77 today.

James Gandolfini is 49.

Frankie Avalon is 70. (Annette will be 68 next month.)

Coach Rick Pitino is 58.

Baseball hall-of-famer Ryne Sandberg is 51.

Dazzling defensive flair and a tremendous knack for power enabled Ryne Sandberg to join the list of greats at second base. As the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1984, Sandberg led the Chicago Cubs to their first postseason appearance since 1945. His amazing range and strong, accurate throwing arm, led to nine consecutive Gold Glove Awards at the keystone position, and helped him pace NL second basemen in assists seven times, and in fielding average and total chances four times each. With the bat, Sandberg launched 282 career home runs, and in 1990 he become the first second baseman since Rogers Hornsby in 1922 to hit 40 homers in a single-season.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Jada Pinkett Smith is 39.

Lance Armstrong is 39 today, too.

Greta Garbo was born on September 18, 1905. This is from her New York Times obituary in 1990:

The finest element in a Garbo film was Garbo. She invariably played a disillusioned woman of the world who falls hopelessly and giddily in love. Tragedy is often imminent, and her tarnished-lady roles usually required her to die or otherwise give up her lover. No one could suffer like Garbo.

Mysterious and aloof, she appealed to both men and women, and she exerted a major influence on women’s fashions, hair styles and makeup. On screen and off, she was a remote figure of loveliness.

Garbo’s career spanned only 19 years. In 1941, at the age of 36, she made the last of her 27 movies, a slight comedy called ”Two Faced Woman.” She went into what was to be temporary retirement, but she never returned to the screen.

Actor Jack Warden was born on this date in 1920. Warden was nominated twice for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar — for Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. NewMexiKen liked him best as juror # 7 in 12 Angry Men.

Eighty years ago today the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System went on the air with 16 stations. 27-year-old William S. Paley bought it a week later, dropped Phonograph from the name, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The first edition of The New York Times was published on September 18, 1851.

President George Washington laid the cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol on September 18 in 1793.

… because it’s the birthday of the Constitution and Hank Williams. And also these folks.

Football hall-of-fame inductee George Blanda is 83 today. I’m surprised he doesn’t suit up. Blanda played his last game on January 4, 1976, the 1975 AFC Championship. He was 48.

Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter is 71.

Coach Phil Jackson is 65. Lots of good people born in 1945 (and we are not Baby Boomers, we are War Babies).

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is 59. That’s Cassandra Peterson.

Rita Rudner is 57. Some Rudner-isms:

• “Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love. I’d stepped in it a few times.”
• “I got kicked out of ballet class because I pulled a groin muscle. It wasn’t mine.”
• “I know I want to have children while my parents are still young enough to take care of them.”
• “I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don’t know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes I see a really great outfit, I’ll break up with someone on purpose.”
• “We’ve begun to long for the pitter-patter of little feet — so we bought a dog. Well, it’s cheaper, and you get more feet.”

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was born on September 17, 1935. The Writer’s Almanac had a good little essay a few years ago that you could just go read. It begins:

Ken Kesey … was born on this day in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He was a champion wrestler in high school and voted most likely to succeed. He married his high school sweetheart and almost went to Hollywood to be an actor and then accepted a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford, where, as part of a VA experiment, for $75 a day, which was good money, he became one of the first Americans to be exposed to a new drug called LSD.

Maureen Connolly was born on this date in 1934. Connolly was the first woman to win the tennis grand slam (1953). She died of cancer at age 34.

The 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, was born 103 years ago today.

William Carlos Williams was born on this date in 1883. Williams was a physician and poet.

He thought that poetry shouldn’t be full of fancy allusions and abstract ideas, and that there should be “no ideas but in things.” His poems were inspired by the townspeople of Rutherford, especially his patients. A lot of his patients didn’t even know that their hardworking doctor — who delivered more than 2,000 babies — spent his nights and weekends writing poems. Those poems were published in books that include Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and the epic five-volume poem Paterson (1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958) about Paterson, New Jersey, the nearest city to his hometown of Rutherford.

The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

David Dunbar Buick was born on September 17th in 1854. Didn’t know Buick was someone’s name, did you?

B.B. King is 85 today. Many more B.B. Many more.

King doesn’t play chords or slide; instead, he bends individual strings till the notes seem to cry. His style reflects his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta and coming of age in Memphis. Seminal early influences included such bluesmen as T-Bone Walker (whose “Stormy Monday,” King has said, is “what really started me to play the blues”), Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bukka White. A cousin of King’s, White schooled the fledgling guitarist in the idiom when he moved to Memphis. King also admired jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. Horns have played a big part in King’s music, and he’s successfully combined jazz and blues in a big-band context.

“I’ve always felt that there’s nothing wrong with listening to and trying to learn more,” King has said. “You just can’t stay in the same groove all the time.” This willingness to explore and grow explains King’s popularity across five decades in a wide variety of venues, from funky juke joints to posh Las Vegas lounges.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Betty Joan Perske is 86. As Lauren Bacall she was nominated for best actress in a supporting role for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces. Bacall was 20 when she married Humphrey Bogart (he was 45) and just 32 when he died. She was married to Jason Robards from 1961-1969.

Columbo, Peter Falk, is 83.

George Chakiris is 78. You know, Bernardo.

Elgin Baylor is 76.

Had Elgin Baylor been born 25 years later, his acrobatic moves would have been captured on video, his name emblazoned on sneakers, and his face plastered on cereal boxes. But he played before the days of widespread television exposure, so among the only records of his prowess that remain are the words of those who saw one of the greatest ever to play.

NBA.com

Mickey Rourke is 58. But doesn’t look a day older than 78. Rourke, of course, got his one Oscar nomination for The Wrestler (and his performance was magnificent).

Robin Yount is 55.

Robin Yount was a productive hitter who excelled in the field at two of baseball’s most challenging positions – shortstop and center field. Playing his entire 20-year career with the Milwaukee Brewers, he collected more hits in the 1980s than any other player and finished with an impressive career total of 3,142. An every day major leaguer at age 18, Yount earned MVP awards at two positions and his 1982 MVP campaign carried the Brewers to the World Series.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

David Copperfield is 54. If he was truly magic, he’d turn himself into 34.

Jennifer Tilly is 52. Tilly received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for Bullets Over Broadway. Better yet she was the voice of Celia, Mike’s love interest, in Monsters, Inc.

Marc Anthony is 42.

Amy Poehler is 39.

Today is the birthday

… of Jackie Cooper; he’s 88. Cooper’s first appearance in film was in 1929; his last 60 years later. He played Perry White in the Superman films but his real fame was as a child actor, most notably Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1934). He was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Skippy in 1931. This is the role where the director got him to cry on camera by telling Jackie (falsely) that his dog had just been run over by a car.

… of baseball hall-of-famer Gaylord Perry, 72.

Gaylord Perry achieved two of pitching’s most magical milestones with 314 wins and 3,534 strikeouts. Distracting and frustrating hitters through an array of rituals on the mound, he was a 20-game winner five times and posted a 3.10 lifetime ERA. With the Giants in 1968, Perry no-hit the Cardinals and starter Bob Gibson. An outstanding competitor, he won Cy Young Awards in 1972 with Cleveland and with San Diego in ’78, becoming the first pitcher to win the award in both leagues.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

But, more importantly —

Gaylord Perry, one of the premier pitchers of his generation, won 314 games and struck out 3524 batters, but his place in baseball history rests mainly with his notorious use of the spitball, or greaseball, which defied batters, humiliated umpires, and infuriated opposing managers for two decades. But make no mistake: he was also a brilliant craftsman with several excellent pitches in his repertoire, a hurler whose mastery of the spitter provided the batter yet another thing to think about as the pitch sailed toward the plate. After the game, he sheepishly denied any wrongdoing, slyly grinning like a poker player who knows he’s one step ahead of everyone else.

The Baseball Biography Project

From the same source:

During a playoff game in 1971, a television reporter briefly sat down with the Perry family during a game Gaylord was pitching. After a few polite questions, Allison, Perry’s five-year-old daughter was asked, “Does your daddy throw a grease ball?” Not missing a beat, she responded, “It’s a hard slider.”

… of Jessye Norman, 65 today. From a biographical essay by the Kennedy Center:

Jessye Norman is one of the most celebrated artists of our century. She is also among the most distinguished in a long line of American sopranos who refused to believe in limits, a shining member of an artistic pantheon that has included Rosa Ponselle, Maria Callas, Leontyne Price and now this daughter of Augusta, Georgia. “Pigeonholing,” said Norman, “is only interesting to pigeons.” Norman’s dreams are limitless, and she has turned many of them into realities in a dazzling career that has been one of the most satisfying musical spectacles of our time.

… of Tommy Lee Jones. He’s 64. Jones has been nominated for the Best Supporting Actor twice, winning for The Fugitive, but not for JFK. And he was nominated for best actor for In the Valley of Elah, a fine, fine performance. NewMexiKen liked Jones also in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Jones and Harvard roommate Al Gore were the inspiration for Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal’s best-seller Love Story.

… of Oliver Stone, also 64. Stone has been nominated for ten Oscars and won three — he won for writing for Midnight Express and for best director for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.

Coach Pete Carroll is 59. Dan Marino is 49.

County music immortal Roy Acuff was born on this date in 1903.

Roy Claxton Acuff emerged as a star during the early 1940s. He helped intensify the star system at the Grand Ole Opry and remained its leading personality until his death. In so doing, he formed the bridge between country’s rural stringband era and the modern era of star singers backed by fully amplified bands. In addition, he co-founded Acuff-Rose Publications with songwriter Fred Rose, thus laying an important cornerstone of the Nashville music industry. For these and other accomplishments he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1962 as its first living member.

Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum

Humorist Robert Benchley was born on this date in 1889. In 2005 The Writer’s Almanac said:

He started writing humor as a kid in school. Assigned to write an essay about how to do something practical, he wrote one called “How to Embalm a Corpse.” When he was assigned to write about the dispute over Newfoundland fishing rights from the point of view of the United States and Canada, he instead chose to write from the point of view of the fish.

He’s the grandfather of Peter Benchley, author of Jaws.

Agatha Christie was born on this date in 1890. Three years ago The Writer’s Almanac had this (and more):

During World War I, she was working as a Red Cross nurse, and she started reading detective novels because, she said, “I found they were excellent to take one’s mind off one’s worries.” She grew frustrated with how easy it was to guess the murderer in most mysteries, and she decided to try to write her own. That book was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) about a series of murders at a Red Cross hospital.

Christie’s first few books were moderately successful, and then her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926. That same year, Christie fled her own home after a fight with her husband, and she went missing for 10 days. There was a nationwide search, and the press covered the disappearance as though it were a mystery novel come to life, inventing scenarios and speculating on the possible murder suspects, until finally Christie turned up in a hotel, suffering from amnesia. During the period of her disappearance, the reprints of her earlier books sold out of stock and two newspapers began serializing her stories. She became a household name and a best-selling author for the rest of her life.

William Howard Taft, both president and later chief justice of the United States, was born on September 15, 1857:

In 1900, President William McKinely appointed Taft chair of a commission to organize a civilian government in the Philippines which had been ceded to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War. From 1901 to 1904 Taft served successfully as the first civilian governor of the Philippines. In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt named Taft secretary of war.

After serving nearly two full terms, popular Teddy Roosevelt refused to run in 1908. Instead, he promoted Taft as the next Republican president. With Roosevelt’s help, Taft handily defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Throughout his presidency, Taft contended with dissent from more liberal members of the Republican party, many of whom continued to follow the lead of former President Roosevelt.

Progressive Republicans openly challenged Taft in the Congressional elections of 1910 and in the Republican presidential primaries of 1912. When Taft won the Republican nomination, the Progressives organized a rival party and selected Theodore Roosevelt to run against Taft in the general election. Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican vote and helped elect Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

From 1921 until 1930, Taft served his country as chief justice of the Supreme Court. In an effort to make the Court work more efficiently, he advocated passage of the 1925 Judges Act enabling the Supreme Court to give precedence to cases of national importance.

Library of Congress

James Fenimore Cooper was born on September 15th in 1789.