Category: Birthdays

Today is the birthday

. . . of Gale Storm. My Little Margie is 88. That TV series ran 1952-1955. Storm’s real name was neither Gale, nor Margie (nor Susanna Pomeroy). It was Josephine Cottle.

… of Roger Corman. The filmmaker is 84 today.

. . . of Colin Powell. He’s 73. As NewMexiKen exited my office in 2001, I nearly ran into Secretary Powell and Condoleezza Rice walking down the hall after leaving one of Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force meetings. Powell is one of eight Secretaries of State that I’ve met or seen, but the only one I almost knocked down.

. . . of Michael Moriarty. He’s 69. Moriarty has won three Emmy awards, but none for playing Ben Stone in Law and Order despite five nominations. NewMexiKen liked Moriarty best as Henry “Author” Wiggen in Bang the Drum Slowly (with Robert De Niro). The IMDB mini biography for Moriarty says he’s 6-feet-4. Interestingly, the mini biography was written by Michael Moriarty.

Booker T. Washington was born on this date in 1856.

An incident of Dr. Washington’s life that stirred up a controversy throughout the country was the occasion of his dining at the White House with President Roosevelt on Oct. 16, 1901. Dr. Washington went to the White House at the invitation of the President, and, when the news was spread abroad, thousands, both North and South, who were moved by race prejudice or by a belief that social equality between blacks and whites had been encouraged, became angry. Most of the criticism fell upon Colonel Roosevelt, but the incident served also to injure Dr. Washington’s work in some parts of the South.

The New York Times

Spencer Tracy was born on this date in 1900. Tracy was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar nine times and won twice, for Captains Courageous and Boys Town. Tracy died in 1967.

Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on this date in 1908. As Bette Davis she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar 11 times, winning for Dangerous and Jezebel. Davis died in 1989.

Conductor Herbert von Karajan was also born on this date in 1908 and he, too, died in 1989.

Gregory Peck was born on this date in 1916. Peck was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar five times, winning for To Kill a Mockingbird. Mr. Peck also won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Peck died in 2003.

Joseph Lister was born on this date in 1827. His principle that bacteria must never enter a surgical incision was a breakthrough for modern surgery. Lister died in 1912.

. . . of Doris Day. She’s 87 today. Day had three number one hits on her own and was the vocalist with Les Brown for one of the great hits of all-time, “Sentimental Journey.” Her most famous other single, “What Ever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)” was a number two song in 1956. Day was nominated for the best actress Oscar for Pillow Talk.

. . . of primatologist Jane Goodall. She’s 76.

. . . of Marsha Mason; she’s 68. Mason is a four-time Oscar nominee for best actress — Cinderella Liberty, The Goodbye Girl, Chapter Two and Only When I Laugh.

. . . of Wayne Newton and Billy Joe Royal. They’re both 68. Each had exactly one top ten hit — Newton with “Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast” (reached number 4 in 1972) and Royal with “Down in the Boondocks” (reached number 9 in 1965). Of the two, Newton has surely done the better job of hanging on.

. . . of Tony Orlando, 66. Orlando had three number one hits in the early 70s: “Knock Three Times” as Dawn, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Rond the Ole Oak Tree” as Dawn Featuring Tony Orlando, and “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” as Tony Orlando and Dawn.

. . . of Richard Thompson. He’s 61 and he’s never had a top ten hit, however:

One of Britain’s most gifted guitarists and songwriters; Richard has been the mainstay of the folk rock scene for over 30 years. Whatever the size of his record sales, he has a reputation among his peers that is second to none. (BBC – Music)

. . . of Alec Baldwin. He’s 52. Baldwin was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for Cooler.

. . . of David Hyde Pierce. Frasier Crane’s brother Niles is 51.

. . . of Eddie Murphy. He’s 49. Murphy was 19 when he started with “Saturday Night Live.” Murphy was nominated recently for the best supporting actor Oscar.

Virgil “Gus” Grissom was born on this date in 1926. Grissom was the second American in space, a July 1961 suborbital flight that followed Alan Shepard’s similar flight and preceded John Glenn’s orbiting the earth in 1962. Grissom’s spacecraft sank upon landing, but after years of analysis, experts conceded it had not been due to any action or failure on Grissom’s part. Grissom flew in the first manned Gemini flight in 1965 — he was the first American to fly into space twice. He named the craft Molly Brown (as in unsinkable). When NASA objected, he renamed it Titanic. NASA relented but never used the name and stopped naming spacecraft for a time. Grissom died in the Apollo I fire in 1967.

The actor Leslie Howard was born on this date in 1893. Most famous as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, Howard was nominated for two best acting Oscars earlier in his career. Wilkes’ was killed when his plane was shot down by German fighters during World War II.

. . . of Leon Russell. He’s 68.

The ultimate rock & roll session man, Leon Russell’s long and storied career includes collaborations with a virtual who’s who of music icons spanning from Jerry Lee Lewis to Phil Spector to the Rolling Stones. A similar eclecticism and scope also surfaced in his solo work, which couched his charmingly gravelly voice in a rustic yet rich swamp pop fusion of country, blues and gospel. . . . As a member of Spector’s renowned studio group, Russell played on many of the finest pop singles of the 1960s, also arranging classics like Ike & Tina Turner’s monumental “River Deep, Mountain High”; other hits bearing his input include the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Gary Lewis & the Playboys’ “This Diamond Ring,” and Herb Alpert’s “A Taste of Honey.”

allmusic

. . . of jazz-rock guitarist of Larry Coryell. He’s 67.

. . . of Linda Hunt. The actress won an Oscar for playing a man in The Year of Living Dangerously. She did not play a woman posing as a man, like Barbra Streisand in Yentl. She actually played a male part. Ms. Hunt is 65. NewMexiKen liked Hunt particularly as the barkeep/saloon-owner in Silverardo.

. . . of baseball hall-of-famer Don Sutton. He, too, is 65. Sutton had 324 victories, 3,574 strikeouts (fifth best all-time) and a career ERA of 3.26. Sutton never lost a turn in the starting rotation due to illness or injury. (That’s impressive.)

. . . of Emmylou Harris. She’s 63 today.

Though other performers sold more records and earned greater fame, few left as profound an impact on contemporary music as Emmylou Harris. Blessed with a crystalline voice, a remarkable gift for phrasing, and a restless creative spirit, she traveled a singular artistic path, proudly carrying the torch of “Cosmic American music” passed down by her mentor, Gram Parsons. With the exception of only Neil Young — not surprisingly an occasional collaborator — no other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring; even more than three decades into her career, Harris’ latter-day music remained as heartfelt, visionary, and vital as her earliest recordings.

allmusic

. . . of SVU Detective Elliot Stabler. Actor Christopher Meloni is 49.

The French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was born on April 2 in 1834. He is the creator of the Statue of Liberty. The statue’s face is said to be that of Bartholdi’s mother.

Walter Chrysler was born on this date in 1875.

After a successful career in the railroad industry that began as a sweeper, then a skilled machinist and finally the plant manager of the American Locomotive Company, Chrysler switched gears to enter the auto industry as the plant manager for Buick. After rising to the presidency of Buick, Chrysler moved to Willys-Overland in 1920, reorganizing and saving the company. While still at Willys-Overland, Chrysler was recruited to salvage the foundering Maxwell-Chalmers Company. After taking control of Maxwell’s assets and liabilities in June 1925, Chrysler became president of the company that bore his name, as did the automobiles manufactured by it. He remained as president until 1935, and served as chairman until his death in 1940.

Walter P. Chrysler Museum

In 1928 Chrysler was Time’s second-ever Person of the Year, following Lindbergh.

Today is the birthday

… of Annabella Sciorra. The actress is 46.

… of Peyton Manning. Number 18 is 34.

… of Keisha Castle-Hughes. The Oscar-nominated actress (Whale Rider) is 20.

Clyde Barrow was born 101 years ago today. He lived until 1934.

Ub Iwerks was born on this date in 1901.

Iwerks was Disney’s right hand man in the creation of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Disney would come up with the ideas, stories, and motivations, then Iwerks would bring it to life. Bringing Mickey Mouse to life, however, was no easy task and it required Iwerks to spit out 600 drawings every single day. Iwerks dedication, however, would soon payoff for him and Disney. The third Mickey Mouse cartoon that Disney directed and Iwerks animated, “Steamboat Willie,” would be the one that would catapult Mickey and Disney into stardom and household names.

Though Iwerks and Disney were colleagues since age 18, they spliit in 1930 after Iwerks signed a deal with a distributor that had failed to pay Disney. Walt and Roy Disney bought out Iwerks’ 20% ownership in Disney Brothers Productions. After attempting to establish his own studio, Iwerks returned to Disney in 1940. He is credited with combining live action with animation.

Source: An online essay, Ub Iwerks – The Early Disney Years.

Two-time presidential candidate and loser (1944, 1948) Thomas E. Dewey was born on this date in 1902.

One of the most successful silent film actors, Roscoe Arbuckle was born on this date in 1887. In fact, Fatty Arbuckle had the first million dollar deal in Hollywood. Arbuckle died of a heart attack at age 46 just as his career was recovering from a scandal and trial in 1921 that had echoes in the recent Duke case. Charged with rape that lead to a woman’s death, he was acquitted in a third trial after two hung juries, but he had been convicted by the press and his career was slow to resume.

Eric Weiss was born on this date in 1874.

Whatever the methods by which Harry Houdini deceived a large part of the world for nearly four decades, his career stamped him as one of the greatest showmen of modern times. In his special field of entertainment he stood alone. With a few minor exceptions, he invented all his tricks and illusions, and in certain instances only his four intimate helpers knew the solution. In one or two very important cases Houdini, himself, alone knew the whole secret.

Houdini was born on March 24, 1874. His name originally was Eric Weiss and he was the son of a rabbi. He did not take the name Harry Houdini until he had been a performer for many years. Legend has it that he opened his first lock when he wanted a piece of pie in the kitchen closet. It is certain that when scarcely more than a baby he showed skill as an acrobat and contortionist, and both these talents helped his start in the show business and his later development as an “escape king.”

The New York Times

The Times’ obituary is really quite interesting.

Stephen Sondheim is 80 today. Sondheim has an Oscar, Tonys, Grammys and a Pulitzer. I’d be happy having written just one of his lyrics, “Send in the Clowns” for example, but there are “I Feel Pretty,” “Maria,” and “Tonight” just to name three from West Side Story.

William Shatner is 79.

Edith Grossman is 74. Grossman is the translator of Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, Spaniard Julián Ríos, Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero, and all of Colombian Gabriel García Márquez’s books. She has also translated Don Quixote, still considered by many the greatest novel ever.

Then a Latin American writer whom she translated, Julián Ríos, told her: “Don’t be afraid. Translate it the way you translate everybody else because he’s the most modern writer we have.” And besides, she realized, “Don Quixote is not essentially a puzzle for academics, a repository of Renaissance usage, a historical monument, or a text for the classroom. It is a work of literature.” And so she went to work on it.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is 62. Webber has an Oscar, Tonys, Grammys and a knighthood. Cats, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Phantom of the Opera. Webber composed the music; Sir Tim Rice was the lyricist.

Wolf Blitzer is 62.

Bob Costas is 58.

Reese Witherspoon is 34.

Ferris and Rosie each turn 48 today. That’s Matthew Broderick and Rosie O’Donnell.

Ronaldinho is 30.

Adrian Peterson is 25.

Benito Pablo Juárez García was born on this date in 1806. Juárez was five times President of Mexico, the first indigenous national to serve. He was a reformer, resisted the French occupation in 1865 and is considered one of Mexico’s great political leaders.

Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany, on this date in 1685. “Music…should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul; where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamor and ranting.”

Today is the birthday

… of Carl Reiner. He’s 88. From the Encyclopedia of Television:

Carl Reiner is one of the few true Renaissance persons of 20th-century mass media. Known primarily for his work as creator, writer and producer of The Dick Van Dyke Show–one of a handful of classic sitcoms by which others are measured–Reiner has also made his mark as a comedian, actor, novelist, and film director.

… of Barney Miller, who’s 79. That’s Hal Linden.

… of Hockey hall-of-famer Bobby Orr, 62.

… of four-time Oscar nominee William Hurt, 60. He won best actor for Kiss of the Spider Woman.

The Fabulous Thunderbirds’ Jimmie Vaughan (Stevie Ray’s brother) is 59.

Two-time Oscar nominee Shelton Lee is 53. His mother called him Spike.

Holly Hunter is 52. Miss Hunter has been nominated for an Academy Award four times, twice for best actress and twice for supporting actress. She won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Piano in 1993. She has also won Emmys for Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and Roe vs. Wade.

Kathy Ireland is 47.

Kurt Russell is 59 today.

John Sebastian is 66.

Oscar-nominee (for Forrest Gump) Gary Sinise is 55.

Rob Lowe is 46.

Mia Hamm is 38.

Author Gary Paul Nabhan is 58 today.

He dropped out of high school, but he ended up going back to college and studying environmental science and botany. He said that coming from an Arab family, he was attracted to the desert, so he moved to Arizona when he was 19. And he was fascinated by all the ways that food was a part of life there — for ranchers, Native Americans, immigrants.

Excerpt from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Author Penelope Lively is 77 today. According to The Writer’s Almanac, she is “the only writer who has ever won both the Carnegie Medal (for outstanding children’s books) and the Booker Prize (for fiction written for adults).” Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe won the Carnegie Medal. Her Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize.

It’s the birth date of two greats who died young — Nat “King” Cole (1919-1965) and Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993).

Bobby Jones was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1971.

In the decade following World War I, America luxuriated in the Golden Era of Sports and its greatest collection of super-athletes: Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in baseball, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing, Bill Tilden in tennis, Red Grange in football and Bobby Jones in golf.

Many of their records have been broken now, and others are destined to be broken. But one, sports experts agree, may outlast them–Bobby Jones’s grand slam of 1930.

Jones, an intense, unspoiled young man, started early on the road to success. At the age of 10, he shot a 90 for 18 holes. At 11 he was down to 80, and at 12 he shot a 70. At 9 he played against men, at 14 he won a major men’s tournament and at 21 he was United States Open champion.

At 28 he achieved the grand slam–victories in one year in the United States Open, British Open, United States Amateur and British Amateur championships. At that point, he retired from tournament golf.

A nation that idolized him for his success grew to respect him even more for his decision to treat golf as a game rather than a way of life. This respect grew with the years.

The New York Times

Today is the birthday

… of Jerry Lewis. He’s 84.

… of Erik Estrada of ”CHiPS.” Ponch is 61.

… of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli’s son Wolfgang Van Halen. He’s 19.

The individual most responsible for the U.S. Constitution was born on this date in 1751. That’s James Madison.

“No government any more than an individual will long be respected without being truly respectable.”

… is the birthday

… of D.J. Fontana, Elvis Presley’s drummer for 14 years, is 79.

… of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She’s 77.

… of Judd Hirsch. He’s 75.

… of Beach Boy Mike Love. He’s 69. Love is the cousin of brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson.

Subsequently, the band has intermittently released new albums and toured like clockwork every summer while making headlines for various extracurricular mishaps: the accidental drowning death of Dennis Wilson in 1983; the legal battles over Brian’s conservatorship between elements in the Beach Boys’ camp and his control-oriented (and since-deposed) psychologist, Eugene Landy; and Mike Love’s lawsuit against Brian, wherein he claimed to have coauthored certain Beach Boys songs credited to Brian alone. Burdened by these and myriad other subplots, the Beach Boys at time seemed to be rock and roll’s longest-running soap opera. At the same time, they’ve been responsible for some of the most perfect harmonies and gorgeous melodies in rock and roll history, and it is for this vast accumulation of timeless music for which they will ultimately be remembered and celebrated.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Sylvester Stewart. He’s 67.

Sly and the Family Stone took the Sixties ideal of a generation coming together and turned it into deeply groove-driven music. Rock’s first integrated, multi-gender band became funky Pied Pipers to the Woodstock Generation, synthesizing rock, soul, R&B, funk and psychedelia into danceable, message-laden, high-energy music. In promoting their gospel of tolerance and celebration of differences, Sly and the Family Stone brought disparate audiences together during the latter half of the Sixties. The group’s greatest triumph came at the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. During their unforgettable nighttime set, leader Sly Stone initiated a fevered call-and-response with the audience of 400,000 during an electrifying version of “I Want to Take You Higher.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Ry Cooder. He’s 63.

… of Fabio. He’s 49.

… of Steelers coach Mike Tomlin. He’s 38.

… of Eva Longoria Parker, desperate at turning 35.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the U.S., was born on this date in 1767.

Quincy Jones and Michael Caine are 77 today.

Jones has 79 Grammy nominations and 27 wins to his credit. He produced “Thriller,” which has sold more than 100 million copies.

Caine has six Oscar nominations and two wins, both for best supporting actor — Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules. His first best actor nomination was for Alfie in 1967; his most recent for The Quiet American 36 years later.

Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1879. The following is from his New York Times obituary in 1955.

In 1904, Albert Einstein, then an obscure young man of 25, could be seen daily in the late afternoon wheeling a baby carriage on the streets of Bern, Switzerland, halting now and then, unmindful of the traffic around him, to scribble down some mathematical symbols in a notebook that shared the carriage with his infant son, also named Albert.

Out of those symbols came the most explosive ideas in the age-old strivings of man to fathom the mystery of his universe. Out of them, incidentally, came the atomic bomb, which, viewed from the long-range perspective of mankind’s intellectual and spiritual history may turn out, Einstein fervently hoped, to have been just a minor by-product.

With those symbols Dr. Einstein was building his theory of relativity. In that baby carriage with his infant son was Dr. Einstein’s universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe, in which the conventional universe–existing in absolute three-dimensional space and in absolute three-dimensional time of past, present and future–vanished into a mere subjective shadow.

Dr. Einstein was then building his universe in his spare time, on the completion of his day’s routine work as a humble, $600-a-year examiner in the Government Patent Office in Bern.

A few months later, in 1905, the entries in the notebook were published in four epoch-making scientific papers. In the first he described a method for determining molecular dimensions. In the second he explained the photo-electric effect, the basis of electronics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. In the third, he presented a molecular kinetic theory of heat. The fourth and last paper that year, entitled “Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” a short article of thirty-one pages, was the first presentation of what became known as the Special Relativity Theory.

Today is the birthday

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Mike Stoller. He’s 77.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock and roll songs: “Hound Dog” (originally cut by Big Mama Thornton in 1953 and covered by Elvis Presley three years later), “Love Potion No. 9” (the Clovers), “Kansas City” (Wilbert Harrison), “On Broadway” (the Drifters), “Ruby Baby” (Dion) and “Stand By Me” (Ben E. King). Their vast catalog includes virtually every major hit by the Coasters (e.g., “Searchin’,” “Young Blood,” “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak” and “Poison Ivy”). They also worked their magic on Elvis Presley, writing “Jailhouse Rock,” “Treat Me Nice” and “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)” specifically for him. All totaled, Presley recorded more than 20 Leiber and Stoller songs.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Leiber wrote the lyrics. Stoller wrote the music.

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Neil Sedaka. He’s 71.

Singer, songwriter, and pianist Neil Sedaka enjoyed two distinct periods of commercial success in two slightly different styles of pop music: first, as a teen pop star in the late ’50s and early ’60s, then as a singer of more mature pop/rock in the 1970s. In both phases, Sedaka, a classically trained pianist, composed the music for his hits, which he sang in a boyish tenor. And throughout, even when his performing career was at a low ebb, he served as a songwriter for other artists, resulting in a string of hits year in and year out, whether recorded by him or someone else. For himself, he wrote eight U.S. Top Ten pop hits, including the chart-toppers “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Bad Blood.” The most successful cover of one of his compositions was Captain & Tennille’s recording of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” another number one.

All Music

… of William H. Macy. He’s 60. Macy was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for his performance in Fargo.

Percival Lowell was born March 13th in 1855. Lowell is credited with the discovery of Pluto, but Pluto isn’t even mentioned in his obituary. The foremost “discovery” of Professor Lowell’s career concerned Mars. The following is an excerpt from his obituary in 1916:

The great controversy among astronomers, in which he played a leading part, began in 1907 after his announcement that the observations made by his astronomical station, the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., proved that Mars was inhabited. Professor Lowell had put the theory forward tentatively as early as 1895. Many eminent astronomers in this country and Europe accepted his conclusions of 1907 as unassailable. Others were skeptical. Professor Lowell continued from year to year to produce fresh evidence in favor of his theory by his observations at Flagstaff, where is located the best astronomical plant in the world for the observation of Mars.

Professor Lowell’s theory begins with the demonstration that the primary requisites for human life exist on the planet–water, heat, and atmosphere. His positive proof of the existence of human life on Mars is the network of lines which mark certain areas of the planet’s face, indicating the digging of artificial canals, which would require an intelligence and engineering skill as great or greater than that possessed by the inhabitants of this earth.

The New York Times

The playwright Edward Albee is 82 today.

Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 of the “Get Smart” TV series, is 77.

James Taylor is 62 today. He’s seen a lot of fire and he’s seen a lot of rain by now.

Liza Minnelli is 64.

Jon Provost is 60. Who? Timmy on Lassie.

Courtney B. Vance is 50.

Dave Eggers is 40.

While he was in college at the University of Illinois, his mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Then, just after his mother went through severe stomach surgery, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, both of his parents were dead. Eggers was just 21 years old.

Of the experience of losing both of his parents so suddenly, Eggers later said, “On the one hand you are so completely bewildered that something so surreal and incomprehensible could happen. At the same time, suddenly the limitations or hesitations that you might have imposed on yourself fall away. There’s a weird, optimistic recklessness that could easily be construed as nihilism but is really the opposite. You see that there is a beginning and an end and that you have only a certain amount of time to act. And you want to get started.”

Eggers had to drop out of college to become the guardian of his 8-year-old younger brother. They moved to San Francisco, and Eggers used the insurance money from his parents’ deaths to start his own magazine with some high school friends. They called their publication Might Magazine, because the liked the fact that the word “might” conveyed both strength and hesitation. The magazine developed a cult following for the way it satirized the magazine format. Each issue included an erroneous table of contents, irrelevant footnotes, and fictional error retractions. In one issue, they wrote, “On page 111, in our ‘Religious News Round-up,’ we reported that Jesus Christ was a deranged, filthy protohippy. In fact, Jesus Christ was the son of God. We regret the error.” To raise money for the magazine, they sold the contents of their recycle bins to readers.

Excerpt above from The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

If you have never read Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, stop what you’re doing, get a copy and read it. NOW!

I’ve also been told that Eggers new book, Zeitoun is a must read.

Jean-Louise Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on this date in 1922.

The story about how Kerouac composed On the Road is well-known: He cut up strips of tracing paper so that they’d fit in the typewriter, and taped them all together so he wouldn’t have to interrupt his flow of writing to adjust or add paper. He wrote the whole thing from start to finish in three weeks, with no paragraph breaks and minimal punctuation; and when he got up from his typewriter, he had in his hands a 119-foot-long scroll of a book that defined his generation.

The Writer’s Almanac

The above is an excerpt. Click the link for a better look at how the book was created.

Today Rupert Murdoch is 79 and Justice Antonin Scalia is 74. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Ralph Abernathy was born on this date in 1926. Abernathy was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend and associate and assumed leadership of the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when King was killed in 1968. Abernathy was with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis that day. This photo of the two was taken in 1961.

Lawrence Welk was born in North Dakota on this date in 1903. He died in 1992.

One of television’s most enduring musical series, The Lawrence Welk Show, was first seen on network TV as a summer replacement program in 1955. Although the critics were not impressed, Mr. Welk’s show went on to last an astonishing 27 years. His format was simple: easy-listening music, what he referred to as “champagne music,” and a “family” of wholesome musicians, singers, and dancers.

The show ran on ABC for the first 16 years and was known in the early years as The Dodge Dancing Party. ABC canceled the show in 1971, not because of lack of popularity, but because it was “too old” to please advertisers. ABC’s cancellation did little to stop Welk, who lined up more than 200 independent stations for a successful syndicated network of his own.
. . .

There were many show favorites throughout the years including the Lennon Sisters, who were brought to his attention by his son Lawrence Jr. who was dating Dianne Lennon in 1955. Other favorites included the Champagne Ladies (Alice Lon and Norma Zimmer); accordionist Myron Floren, who was also the assistant conductor; singer-pianist Larry Hooper; singers Joe Feeney and Guy Hovis; violinist Aladdin; dancers Bobby Burgess and Barbara Boylan; and Welk’s daughter-in-law, Tanya Falan Welk.

Most of the regulars stayed with the show for years, but a few moved on–or who were told to move on by Mr. Welk. In 1959, for example, Welk fired Champagne Lady Alice Lon for “showing too much knee” on camera. After receiving thousands of protest letters for his actions, he attempted to have Alice return, but she refused.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Joyce Van Patten is 76, Mickey Gilley is 74 and Charles Gibson is 67.

Juliette Binoche is 46. Sigh.

Webster, that is Emmanuel Lewis, is 39.

Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space, was born on March 9th in 1934.

Until the morning of April 12, 1961, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was no better known than any of the other 1,200 or so Gagarins living in the Moscow area.

But that morning, Yuri Gagarin, then 27 years old, sat cramped in the cockpit of a Vostok space capsule as it was launched from a pad at Baykonur, in Kazakhstan.

At 9:07 A.M., the capsule went into orbit around the earth and Yuri Gagarin became the world’s first man in space. His flight represented an epochal scientific and technological achievement for the Russians.

In both the Soviet Union and the West, it was realized that Cosmonaut Gagarin had begun a new chapter in history, one in which man had dared cross the threshold of the universe.

The New York Times

Gagarin died in an aircraft accident in 1968.

It’s also Natalie’s birthday. Happy birthday, Natalie.

John McPhee is 79 today.

When he was in high school, his English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Ever since he took that class, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work and has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.

He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about the geology of America, Annals of the Former World (1998).

In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Reportedly McPhee almost never writes more than one single-spaced page a day. It adds up. He’s published more than two dozen books.

Micky Dolenz of the Monkees is 65 today.

Baseball hall-of-famer Jim Rice is 57.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born on this date in 1841. Three times wounded in the Civil War, Holmes survived to become a prominent legal scholar, Chief Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932. He is considered one of the greatest of the Supreme Court justices.

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States, Baer v. United States, 249 U.S. 52 (1919).

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting, Abrams et al. v. United States, 250 U.S. 630 (1919).

… a bunch of stuff happened and a bunch of people were born but, frankly, none of it or them interest NewMexiKen much.

Other than maybe, the fact that Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz is 39 today.

Oh, and Jenna Fischer is 36.

It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell received patent No. 174,465 for the telephone. He filed for his patent on the same day as a Chicago electrician named Elisha Gray filed for a patent on basically the same device. Bell only beat Gray by two hours.

It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly. Darrow based the game on an earlier game called “The Landlord’s Game,” which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie to teach people about the evils of capitalism.

It was on this day in 1917 that the Victor Talking Machine Company released the first jazz record in American history. There were various terms for this new music. It was called “ratty music,” “gut-bucket music,” and “hot music.” Historians aren’t sure how it came to be called jazz, but it’s believed that the word may have come from a West African word for speeding things up. It was also a slang term for sex.

The first band to record jazz was The Original Dixieland Jass Band, an all-white group led by an Italian-American cornetist from New Orleans.

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Leslie Marmon Silko is 62 today.

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She has said that her writing has at its core “the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed-blood person.” As she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, she learned the stories and culture of the Laguna people from her great-grandmother and other female relatives. After receiving her B. A. in English at the University of New Mexico, she enrolled in the University of New Mexico law school but completed only three semesters before deciding that writing and storytelling, not law, were the means by which she could best promote justice. She married John Silko in 1970. Prior to the writing of Ceremony, she published a series of short stories, including “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” She also authored a volume of poetry, Laguna Woman: Poems, for which she received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry.

In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wrote Ceremony. Initially conceived as a comic story abut a mother’s attempts to keep her son, a war veteran, away from alcohol, Ceremony gradually transformed into an intricate meditation on mental disturbance, despair, and the power of stories and traditional culture as the keys to self-awareness and, eventually, emotional healing. Having battled depression herself while composing her novel, Silko was later to call her book “a ceremony for staying sane.” Silko has followed the critical success of Ceremony with a series of other novels, including Storyteller, Almanac for the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement of Ceremony that first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.

Penguin Reading Guides

Ceremony is required reading.

It’s also the birthday

… of actor Dean Stockwell. He’s 74. IMDb lists 190 credits for Stockwell, going back to 1945. He received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination in 1989 for Married to the Mob.

… of Penn Jillette. Penn of Penn & Teller has hit the double nickel.

… of Eva Mendes. She’s 36.

Patsy Cline died in a plane crash on this date in 1963. She was 30. John Belushi was found dead from a drug overdose on this date in 1982. He was 33.

NPR and This American Life‘s Ira Glass is 51 today.

He was 19, had just finished his freshman year of college, and was looking for a summer job with an ad agency or a TV station. He searched all over Baltimore and couldn’t find anything, but someone at a rock ‘n’ roll station knew someone at NPR’s headquarters in Washington and gave Ira a phone number and said, “They’re kind of a new organization, so call.”

He managed to talk his way into an internship despite the fact he’d never once listened to public radio. He started out as a tape cutter and as a desk assistant, graduated from Brown University, and continued working for public radio as newscast writer, editor, producer of All Things Considered, reporter, and substitute host.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Jean Harlow was born on this date in 1911. She was in 36 films before her death at age 26.

Jean displayed talent in both her sensual and comedic performances, but she initially captivated fans with her trendsetting platinum blonde hair. As she gained fame, peroxide sales in the United States skyrocketed. Botched attempts to look like Jean forced thousands of women to cut their hair. Hollywood producers of the past had consistently cast dark-haired women to play the parts of vixens, but Jean emerged as the first star to incorporate the platinum blonde look into her acting.

The Official Site of Jean Harlow

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on this date in 1847. His family moved to Canada when he was 22 and he himself to Boston at age 24 to become a professor at Boston University. He was a teacher of the deaf and and his experiments with electrically reproducing speech lead to the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell lived to see the telephonic instrument over which he talked a distance of twenty feet in 1876 used, with improvements, for the transmission of speech across the continent, and more than that, for the transmission of speech across the Atlantic and from Washington to Honolulu without wires. The little instrument he patented less than fifty years ago, scorned then as a joke, was when he died the basis for 13,000,000 telephones used in every civilized country in the world. The Bell basic patent, the famed No. 174,465, which he received on his twenty-ninth birthday and which was sustained in a historic court fight, has been called the most valuable patent ever issued.

Although the inventor of many contrivances which he regarded with as much tenderness and to which he attached as much importance as the telephone, a business world which he confessed he was often unable to understand made it assured that he would go down in history as the man who made the telephone. He was an inventor of the gramophone, and for nearly twenty years was engaged in aeronautics. Associated with Glenn H. Curtiss and others, whose names are now known wherever airplanes fly, he pinned his faith in the efficacy for aviation of the tetrahedral cell, which never achieved the success he saw for it in aviation, but as a by-product of his study he established an important new principle in architecture.

The New York Times (1922)

Author Tom Wolfe is 80 today.

“I can’t read him because he’s such a bad writer,” Irving said of Wolfe. When Solomon added that “Bonfire of the Vanities” author Wolfe is “having a war” with Updike and Mailer, Irving dismissed the notion out of hand: “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”

Irving described Wolfe’s novels as “yak” and “journalistic hyperbole described as fiction … He’s a journalist … he can’t create a character. He can’t create a situation.”

Salon Books

Author John Irving is 68 today.

Reached through his publisher, Wolfe responded in writing. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” he asked about Irving. “Because he, like Updike and Mailer, has panicked. All three have seen the handwriting on the wall, and it reads: ‘A Man in Full.'”

If the literary trio don’t embrace “full-blooded realism,” Wolfe warns, “then their reputations are finished.” He also offers Irving some additional literary advice: “Irving needs to get up off his bottom and leave that farm in Vermont or wherever it is he stays and start living again. It wouldn’t be that hard. All he’d have to do is get out and take a deep breath and talk to people and see things and rediscover the fabulous and wonderfully bizarre country around him: America.”

Salon Books

Mikhail Gorbachev is 79.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Lou Reed is 68.

The influence of the Velvet Underground on rock greatly exceeds their sales figures and chart numbers. They are one of the most important rock and roll bands of all time, laying the groundwork in the Sixties for many tangents rock music would take in ensuing decades. Yet just two of their four original studio albums ever even made Billboard’s Top 200, and that pair – The Velvet Underground and Nico (#171) and White Light/White Heat (#199) – only barely did so. If ever a band was “ahead of its time,” it was the Velvet Underground. Brian Eno, cofounder of Roxy Music and producer of U2 and others, put it best when he said that although the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many albums, everyone who bought one went on to form a band. The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, U2, R.E.M., Roxy Music and Sonic Youth have all cited the Velvet Underground as a major influence.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Jon Bon Jovi, New Jersey’s second most famous rock-and-roller, is 48.

Daniel Craig is 42.

Chris Martin of Coldplay is 33.

Ben Roethlisberger is 28. Reggie Bush is 25.

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) was born 106 years ago today.

A big study came out in the 1950s called “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” It was by an Austrian immigrant to the U.S., an education specialist who argued that the Dick and Jane primers being used to teach reading in grade school classrooms across America were boring and, worse, not an effective method for teaching reading. He called them “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers,” which went “through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting middle-class, middle-income, middle-IQ children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading ‘Look, look’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Come, come’ or ‘See the funny, funny animal.'”

A publisher at Random House thought that maybe a guy named Dr. Seuss, who’d published a few not-well-known but very imaginative children’s books, might be able to write a book that would be really good for teaching kids how to read. A publisher invited Dr. Seuss to dinner and said, “Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!”

Dr. Seuss spent nine months composing The Cat in the Hat. It uses just 220 different words and is 1,702 words long. He was a meticulous reviser, and he once said: “Writing for children is murder. A chapter has to be boiled down to a paragraph. Every word has to count.”

Within a year of publication, The Cat in the Hat was selling 12,000 copies a month; within five years, it had sold a million copies. Dr. Seuss has sold more books for Random House Publishing than any other writer in its history.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

When Geisel/Seuss was awarded an honorary degree from Princeton in 1985, the entire graduating class stood and recited Green Eggs and Ham.

Green Eggs and Ham is the third largest selling book in the English language — ever.

Green Eggs and Ham à la Sam-I-Am

1-2 tablespoons of butter or margarine
4 slices of ham
8 eggs
2 tablespoons of milk
1-2 drops of green food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of pepper