Category: Birthdays

Harry Belafonte is 83 today. Here is a little of what Bob Dylan wrote about Belafonte in Chronicles:

To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re a part of the human race. There never was a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children—everybody. He had that rare ability. Somewhere he had said that he didn’t like to go on television, because he didn’t think his music could be represented well on a small screen, and he was probably right. Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry—who could have kicked the shit out of all of them—couldn’t be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight. He even said he hated pop songs, thought they were junk. I could identify with Harry in all kinds of ways. Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he’d be headlining the joint. You’ve got to wonder how that would make somebody feel emotionally.

And Belafonte was about the best looking man on the planet too.

Ron Howard is 56 today. He’s been on TV and in the movies for more than 50 years and, of course, won an Oscar for best director for A Beautiful Mind. Howard has been married to Mrs. Howard since 1975 and is the older brother of TV and film character actor Ron Howard’s brother.

Today is also the birthday

… of Roger Daltrey. “Who?” you say. “Of The Who,” I say. He’s 66 and far too old for half-time shows.

… of Catherine Bach. “Who?” you say. “Daisy Duke of TV,” I say. She’s 56.

… of Oscar-winner and currently at least Penelope Cruz winner Javier Bardem. He’s 41.

… of Chris Webber, the basketball player who called timeout when his team had none left and down by just two points in the 1993 national championship game. That would be a technical foul. Two shoots. Both made. Down four. Oops. He’s 37 today.

Well-known Americans of the 20th century born on this date include band-leader Glenn Miller (1904), author Ralph Ellison (1914), poet Robert Lowell (1917), Mad magazine publisher William M. Gaines (1922) and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle (1926).

Also on March 1st, the Lindbergh infant son was kidnapped (1932), Richard Wright’s Native Son was published (1940), the Peace Corps was established (1961), Johnny Cash married June Carter (1968) and the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to execute an individual who had committed their crime before age 18 (Roper v. Simmons, 2005). They’ll reverse that one soon enough.

Lee, official brother of NewMexiKen, circumnavigator of the globe, Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker, and pretty darn good guitar player and woodworker celebrates his birthday today. Happy birthday, Brother.

… is the birthday of

… Gavin MacLeod. The captain of the Love Boat and Mary Tyler Moore’s wisecracking news writer is 79.

… Dean Smith. The hall-of-fame basketball coach is 79.

… Mario Andretti. He’s in the left lane with his blinker on at age 70.

… Bubba Smith. The football star turned actor is 65.

… Bernadette Lazzara, known to us as Bernadette Peters. The star of stage, screen and television (beginning at age 3) is 62 today. She’s won a Tony twice as Best Leading Actress in a Musical — “Song and Dance” and “Annie Get Your Gun.”

… Gilbert Gottfried, 55.

… John Turturro. The actor is 53.

… Colum McCann. The National Book Award winner for Let the Great World Spin is 45. According to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, “It’s a prize they’ve been giving out for 60 years, but he’s only the third non-American-born writer” to win. Click for more on McCann.

Linus Pauling was born on this date in 1901. Pauling won two Nobel Prizes.

Dr. Pauling received the prize for chemistry in 1954, as a result of his research into the nature of the chemical bond, the force that gives atoms the cohesiveness to form the molecules that in turn become the basis of all physical matter.

In 1962, at age 61, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. The award’s citation acclaimed him for his work since 1946 “not only against the testing of nuclear weapons, not only against the spread of these armaments, not only against their very use, but against all warfare as a means of solving international conflicts.”

Dr. Pauling was also said to have provided powerful impetus to others in achieving what many came to regard as the medical discovery of the century. That was the determination of the structure of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the genetic material in all living organisms.

To those who eventually won the race to solve DNA, Dr. Pauling was seen at the time as the closest rival. Had he been the victor, he, no doubt, would have been the recipient of a third Nobel Prize.

The New York Times

Two oldies, but goodies, and one oldie, but no longer so goody, share this birthday.

Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward is 80 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times.

Two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor is 78 today. Miss Taylor won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

Ralph Nader is 76.

Among others having a birthday today are Chelsea Clinton, 30, and Josh Groban, 29.

“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See?”

Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, born on this date in 1902.

“All I am doing is following what to me is the clear wording of the First Amendment that ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.’ As I have said innumerable times before, I simply believe that ‘no law’ means no law.”

Justice Hugo Black, born on this date in 1886.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,–
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o’er the ocean
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born on this date in 1807.

Today is the birthday

… of Antoine “Fats” Domino. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is 82.

They call him the Fat Man. With his easy-rolling boogie-woogie piano and smooth rhythm & blues vocals, Antoine “Fats” Domino put a New Orleans-style spin on what came to be known as rock and roll. A pianist, singer, and songwriter who was born in the Crescent City in 1928, Domino sold more records (65 million) than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley. Between 1950 and 1963, he cracked the pop Top Forty thirty-seven times and the R&B singles chart fifty-nine times. Domino’s biggest songs are as winning as his broad smile. They include “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blueberry Hill,” “I’m Walkin’,” “Blue Monday” and “Walking to New Orleans.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Mitch Ryder. He’s 65. No report on the ages of the Detroit Wheels.

… of Michael Bolton. The singer is 57. The former Initech computer programmer’s age isn’t known.

Johnny Cash was born on this date in 1932.

“To millions of fans, Johnny Cash is “the Man in Black,” a country music legend who sings in an authoritative baritone about the travails of working men and the downtrodden in this country. Lesser known is the fact that Johnny Cash was present at the birth of rock and roll by virtue of being one of the earliest signees to Sam Phillips’ Sun Records back in 1955. Cash was part of an elite club of rock and roll pioneers at Sun that included Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. The four were collectively referred to as “the Million Dollar Quartet” after an impromptu gathering and jam session at the Sun recording studio on December 4, 1956. What Cash and his group, the Tennessee Two, brought to the “Sun Sound” was a spartan mix of guitar, standup bass and vocals that served as an early example of rockabilly. Cash recorded a string of rockabilly hits for Sun that included “Cry, Cry, Cry,” “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line.” The latter was first of more than a dozen Number One country hits for Cash and also marked his first appearance on the national pop singles charts.

Straddling the country, folk and rockabilly idioms, Johnny Cash has crafted more than 400 plainspoken story-songs that describe and address the lives of coal miners, sharecroppers, Native Americans, prisoners, cowboys, renegades and family men.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Betty Hutton was born on this date in 1921. She was Annie Oakley in the eponymous 1950 film, and the trapeze artist who saves the circus in The Greatest Show on Earth, still a fun movie to watch.

Jackie Gleason was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1916. One of the greats of early TV, known primarily now for his portrayal of bus driver Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners. He was in a number of films and received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in The Hustler. Gleason also won a Tony Award. “And away we go” was one of Gleason’s stock lines. It is also the inscription at his grave site.

Grover Cleveland Alexander was born on this date in 1887.

Suffering from epilepsy, haunted by his experiences in combat during World War I and shadowed by the dark side of alcoholism, Grover Cleveland Alexander was able to win 373 games during a 20-year major league career, the third highest total in major league history. He led the league in ERA on four occasions, wins in six different seasons, complete games six times and shutouts during seven campaigns. Alexander also won 30 or more games three consecutive seasons.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Alexander was portrayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1952 film “The Winning Team.”

John Harvey Kellogg was born on this date in 1852.

When he became a physician Dr. Kellogg determined to devote himself to the problems of health, and after taking over the sanitarium he put into effect his own ideas. Soon he had developed the sanitarium to an unprecedented degree, and he launched the business of manufacturing health foods. He gained recognition as the originator of health foods and coffee and tea substitutes, ideas which led to the establishment of huge cereal companies besides his own, in which his brother, W. K. Kellogg, produced the cornflakes he invented. His name became a household word.

The New York Times

There might have been something to it. Kellogg lived to be 91.

And William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was born on this date in 1846.

In a life that was part legend and part fabrication, William F. Cody came to embody the spirit of the West for millions, transmuting his own experience into a national myth of frontier life that still endures today.

Finally, in 1867, Cody took up the trade that gave him his nickname, hunting buffalo to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. By his own count, he killed 4,280 head of buffalo in seventeen months. He is supposed to have won the name “Buffalo Bill” in an eight-hour shooting match with a hunter named William Comstock, presumably to determine which of the two Buffalo Bill’s deserved the title.

Beginning in 1868, Cody returned to his work for the Army. He was chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry and took part in 16 battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869. For his service over these years, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, although this award was revoked in 1916 on the grounds that Cody was not a regular member of the armed forces at the time. (The award was restored posthumously in 1989).

All the while Cody was earning a reputation for skill and bravery in real life, he was also becoming a national folk hero, thanks to the exploits of his alter ego, “Buffalo Bill,” in the dime novels of Ned Buntline (pen name of the writer E. Z. C. Judson). Beginning in 1869, Buntline created a Buffalo Bill who ranked with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson in the popular imagination, and who was, like them, a mixture of incredible fact and romantic fiction.

Cody’s own theatrical genius revealed itself in 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized some of the most picturesque elements of frontier life: a buffalo hunt with real buffalos, an Indian attack on the Deadwood stage with real Indians, a Pony Express ride, and at the climax, a tableau presentation of Custer’s Last Stand in which some Lakota who had actually fought in the battle played a part. Half circus and half history lesson, mixing sentimentality with sensationalism, the show proved an enormous success, touring the country for three decades and playing to enthusiastic crowds across Europe.

In later years Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would star the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the first “King of the Cowboys,” Buck Taylor, and for one season, “the slayer of General Custer,” Chief Sitting Bull. Cody even added an international flavor by assembling a “Congress of Rough Riders of the World” that included cossacks, lancers and other Old World cavalrymen along with the vaqueros, cowboys and Indians of the American West.

Above from PBS – THE WEST.

CBS news veteran Bob Schieffer is 73.

Karen Grassle, the mom on Little House on the Prairie, is 66.

Tea Leoni is 44.

John Foster Dulles was born on this date in 1888. Dulles was Secretary of State under Eisenhower from 1953 until April 1959. He is the person for whom Washington Dulles International Airport is named.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born on this date in 1841. That’s Renoir’s “The Picture Book.”

Enrico Caruso was born in Naples on this date in 1873. The Writer’s Almanac had this to say about Caruso a few years back:

It’s the birthday of tenor Enrico Caruso, born in Naples, Italy (1873), the eighteenth of twenty-one children and the first to survive past infancy. He was determined to become a singer, but several teachers told him he had neither voice nor talent. He finally persuaded one teacher to let him observe other students’ lessons; eventually he was given his own private classes. Legend has it that when the young tenor was asked to sing as Rodolfo in La Bohème, he first had to get permission from Puccini himself. After listening to Caruso sing a few pages, Puccini allegedly leapt from his chair and cried, “Who sent you to me? God!?!” In 1902, Caruso made his debut in Rigoletto at London’s Covent Garden, and the following year at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He was engaged there continually for the next eighteen years. Caruso has often been called the greatest tenor of the twentieth century, known for his brilliant high notes and his dramatic interpretations. He was immensely popular, partly because he was the first major tenor to be recorded on gramophone records.

NewMexiKen had this about Caruso in 2004.

And it’s the birthday of Debby, official younger sister of NewMexiKen. Debby is a librarian, lecturer and author of children’s books. She also gets to play Iraqi-Afghani villager from time-to-time for military exercises. Two years ago when I wrote about her for her birthday, she was a budding cowgirl and school recess wrangler. Who else do you know that’s done all that? Happy birthday Debby.

Today is the birthday

… of Abe Vigoda. Fish on Barney Miller and Sal Tessio of The Godfather is 89.

… of Steven Hill. Adam Schiff, my favorite D.A. on Law and Order, is 88.

… of Dominic Chianese. Uncle Junior on The Sopranos is 79.

… of Edward James Olmos, 63.

… of Apple’s Steve Jobs, hitting the double-nickel today.

[Jobs] dropped out of college after a semester, went to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, returned a devout Buddhist, experimented with LSD, and then got a job with a video game maker, where he was in charge of designing circuit board for one of the company’s games.

He co-founded Apple Computers, and in a commercial during the Super Bowl in January 1984 he unveiled the Macintosh. The commercial was filled with allusions to George Orwell’s 1984. The Macintosh was the first small computer to catch on with the public that used a graphical user interface, or GUI (sometimes pronounced “gooey”). In the past, computers were run by text-based interfaces, which meant that a person had to type in textual commands or text labels to navigate their computers. But with a graphical user interface, people could simply click on icons instead of typing in hard-to-remember, precise text commands.

The graphic user interface revolutionized computers, and it’s on almost all computers today. It’s on a whole lot of other devices as well, like fancy vending machines and digital household appliances and photocopying machines and airport check-in kiosks. And graphical user interface is what’s used with iPods, another of Apple’s wildly successful products.

Jobs once said, “I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Eddie Murray, the Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, and Paula Zahn, the broadcaster, are each half of 108 today.

Chester Nimitz, Admiral of the Fleet, was born on this date in 1885. This from his obituary in 1966:

When Admiral Nimitz took over the Pacific Fleet on Dec. 31, 1941, many of its ships lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, sunk by the Japanese in the surprise attack of Dec. 7 on Hawaii.

Without haste–Admiral Nimitz always proceeded with care–he directed the deployment of such carriers and cruises as were left, to hold the line until that moment perhaps two years away, when new battleships could be ready.

With Adm. Ernest King, chief of naval operations, President Roosevelt and the Navy’s other strategy planners, Admiral Nimitz had to undergo the anguish of being unable to answer the cry of soldiers trapped on Bataan:

“Where’s the fleet?”

When the new battleships, cruisers, carriers and destroyers did arrive, Admiral Nimitz and the Navy cleared the seas of Japanese warships in a series of spectacular naval battles.

Eight months after announcing on New Year’s Day that 1945 would be a sad year for the Japanese, Admiral Nimitz sat at a table on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2 to sign the Japanese capitulation.

Baseball great Honus Wagner was born on this date in 1874.

One of the Hall of Fame’s five original inductees in 1936, Honus Wagner combined rare offensive and defensive excellence throughout a 21-year career. Despite his awkward appearance – stocky, barrel-chested and bow-legged – the longtime Pirates shortstop broke into the big leagues by hitting .344 in 1897 with Louisville, the first of 17 consecutive seasons of hitting over .300, including eight as the National League batting champion. Wagner compiled a lifetime average of .329, and the Flying Dutchman also stole 722 bases, while leading the league in thefts on five occasions.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Winslow Homer was born on this date in 1836. The painting is his “Coming Storm” (1901). Click for larger version.

From the late 1850s until his death in 1910, Winslow Homer produced a body of work distinguished by its thoughtful expression and its independence from artistic conventions. A man of multiple talents, Homer excelled equally in the arts of illustration, oil painting, and watercolor. Many of his works—depictions of children at play and in school, of farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey—have become classic images of nineteenth-century American life. Others speak to more universal themes such as the primal relationship of man to nature.

Source: The National Gallery of Art, which has a fine online Winslow Homer exhibit.

Today is the birthday

… of Blanche Elizabeth Hollingsworth Devereaux. Rue McClanahan is 75 today.

… of Tyne Daly, 64.

… of Anthony Daniels. 3CPO is 64.

… of Alan Rickman. Professor Snape is 64.

… of Patricia Nixon Cox. The former first daughter is 64.

… of Frasier Crane. Kelsey Grammer is 55 today.

… of Mary Chapin Carpenter. Celebrating, and one hopes, feeling lucky, she’s 52 today.

… of Ellen Page. The one-time Oscar nominee is 23.

… of Corbin Bleu. He’s 21.

Erma Bombeck was born on this date in 1927. According to The Writer’s Almanac had this in 2004:

[Bombeck] became famous for her humor column called “At Wits End”, about the daily madness of being a housewife. She knew she wanted to be a journalist from the eighth grade, and she had a humor column in her high school newspaper. She got a job at the Dayton Journal-Herald writing obituaries and features for the women’s page, but when she married a sportswriter there, she chose to quit her job and stay home with the kids. She spent a decade as a fulltime mother, and then in 1964 she decided she had to start writing again or she would go crazy. She said, “I was thirty-seven, too old for a paper route, too young for social security, and too tired for an affair.”

She got a column at a small Ohio paper and wrote about the daily trials and tribulations of the average housewife. Within a few years, she was one of the most popular humor columnists in America.

NewMexiKen thought Bombeck funniest when she really was a a full-time mom. When she became rich and famous the humor often seemed more contrived and strained. But then I’d rather be rich and famous than funny, too.

Anaïs Nin was born on this date in 1903 and named Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell. I almost passed over the French author, but figured if she was good enough for a Jewel song she was good enough for NewMexiKen. Anaïs Nin was French born of Cuban parents.

The great classical guitarist Andrés Segovia was born on this date in 1893. This from his obituary in The New York Times in 1987.

The guitarist himself summed up his life’s goals in an interview with The New York Times when he was 75 years old: ”First, to redeem my guitar from the flamenco and all those other things. Second, to create a repertory – you know that almost all the good composers of our time have written works for the guitar through me and even for my pupils. Third, I wanted to create a public for the guitar. Now, I fill the biggest halls in all the countries, and at least a third of the audience is young – I am very glad to steal them from the Beatles. Fourth, I was determined to win the guitar a respected place in the great music schools along with the piano, the violin and other concert instruments.”

The Washington Monument was dedicated on this date in 1885. Malcolm X was shot and killed on this date in 1965.

Sidney Poitier is 83 today.

American Masters from PBS sums it up nicely:

More than an actor (and Academy-Award winner), Sidney Poitier is an artist. A writer and director, a thinker and critic, a humanitarian and diplomat, his presence as a cultural icon has long been one of protest and humanity. His career defined and documented the modern history of blacks in American film, and his depiction of proud and powerful characters was and remains revolutionary.

Lilies of the Field — with Poitier’s Oscar winning performance — has been one of NewMexiKen’s favorites since it was released nearly 50 years ago. If you don’t know the film, you should.

Ansel Adams was born on this date in 1902.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Mr. Adams combined a passion for natural landscape, meticulous craftsmanship as a printmaker and a missionary’s zeal for his medium to become the most widely exhibited and recognized photographer of his generation.

His photographs have been published in more than 35 books and portfolios, and they have been seen in hundreds of exhibitions, including a one-man show, ”Ansel Adams and the West,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979. That same year he was the subject of a cover story in Time magazine, and in 1980 he received the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

In addition to being acclaimed for his dramatic landscapes of the American West, he was held in esteem for his contributions to photographic technology and to the recognition of photography as an art form.

The New York Times Obituary

The Ansel Adams Gallery

Horror and science fiction writer Richard Matheson is 84 today.

“When people talk about genre, I guess they mention my name first, but without Richard Matheson I wouldn’t be around. He is as much my father as Bessie Smith was Elvis Presley’s mother.” … He wrote for television shows, including The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, and he wrote more than 20 novels and 100 short stories. His most famous books include I Am Legend (1954), The Shrinking Man (1956), later retitled The Incredible Shrinking Man, and What Dreams May Come (1978).

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Nancy Wilson is 73. Buffy Sainte-Marie is 69. Sandy Duncan is 64. J. Geils is 64, as well. Patty Hearst is 56. Charles Barkley is 47. And Cindy Crawford is 44.

Today is the birthday

… of William “Smokey” Robinson, born in Detroit 70 years ago today.

Some Smokey Robinson trivia:

• The nickname Smokey was given him as a child by an uncle.
• The Robinsons were neighbors of the Franklins; Smokey is two years older than Aretha.
• They both attended Detroit’s Northern Senior High School (as did NewMexiKen’s mom).
• Smokey wrote both “My Guy” and “My Girl.”
• Bob Dylan called Smokey “America’s greatest living poet.”
• Smokey has written more than 4,000 songs.

… of author Amy Tan, 58 today.

When Tan was 15, her father and older brother both died of brain tumors, within six months of each other. Her mother became convinced spirits were cursing the family, and she moved Tan and her younger brother to Switzerland. Tan continued to rebel against her mother, who wanted her to become a part-time concert pianist and a full-time brain surgeon. Instead, Tan became an English and linguistics major, and fell in love with an Italian. She and her mother didn’t speak for six months.

Tan worked as a freelance business writer, working 90-hour weeks to keep up with demand. But she eventually realized she was addicted to work she didn’t like. She went into counseling and began writing short stories.

When her mother went into the hospital in 1985, Tan promised herself that if her mother survived, she would take her to China and learn her mother’s stories. It was a trip that would change Tan’s perspective. She said later, “When my feet touched China, I became Chinese.”

Tan’s short stories became The Joy Luck Club (1989), a novel about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their relationships with their American-born daughters. It was an instant best seller and was made into a film. Tan has written five novels, all best sellers, including The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001). Her most recent novel is Saving Fish from Drowning (2005).

The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

… of Jeff Daniels, 55. Daniels has been nominated for several acting awards, most recently for The Squid and the Whale.

… of “Family Ties” actress Justine Bateman. Mallory Keaton is 44.

… of Benicio Del Toro. The supporting actor Oscar winner, for Traffic, is 43. Del Toro was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar again for 21 Grams.

Author Carson McCullers was born on in Columbus, Georgia, on this date in 1917.

Her most famous novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940, delves into the “lonely hearts” of four individuals—an adolescent girl, an embittered radical, a black physician, and a widower who owns a cafe—struggling to find their way in a Southern mill town during the Great Depression.

Library of Congress

The great jockey Eddie Arcaro was born on this date in 1916.

Today is the birthday

… of Helen Gurley Brown, 88.

… of Oscar winner George Kennedy. Dragline is 85. Kennedy won the best supporting actor Oscar for that role in Cool Hand Luke.

… of Toni Morrison, “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” That’s what they said when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

… of the woman who broke up the Beatles. She’s 77 today. That’s Yoko Ono.

… of Cybill Shepherd. She’s 60.

… of Vinnie Barbarino. He’s 56 today. So are Vincent Vega, Chili Palmer, Michael, Buford ‘Bud’ Uan Davis, Tod Lubitch, Danny Zuko and Tony Manero. And so is John Travolta.

… of the letter turner. Vanna White is 53 today.

… of one-time Oscar nominee Matt Dillon, 46.

… of Andre Romelle Young. Dr. Dre is 45.

… of Molly Ringwald. She’s 42.

Wallace Stegner was born on this date in 1909.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published February 18, 1885.

Today is the birthday

… of Jim Brown, 74. Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. (Which makes him the second greatest athlete born on this date.)

Brown played only nine seasons for the Cleveland Browns — and led the NFL in rushing eight times. He averaged 104 yards a game, a record 5.2 yards a pop. He ran for at least 100 yards in 58 of his 118 regular-season games (he never missed a game). He ran for 237 yards in a game twice, scored five touchdowns in another game and four times scored four touchdowns. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards in seven seasons, scorching opponents for 1,527 yards in one 12-game season and 1,863 in a 14-game season.

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

… of Michael Jordan, 47 today.

Jordan was the ranked the top athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. Here’s what they had to say: Michael Jordan transcends hoops.

“What has made Michael Jordan the First Celebrity of the World is not merely his athletic talent,” Sports Illustrated wrote, “but also a unique confluence of artistry, dignity and history.”

… of Oscar-nominee Hal Holbrook, 85. Here he is as Mark Twain in 1967.

… of Rene Russo, 56.

… of Lou Diamond Phillips, 48.

… of Paris Hilton, 29 today. She’s a walking argument for keeping the inheritance tax.

H.L. Hunt was born on this date in 1889. Hunt was a Texas oil tycoon who, among other things, fathered 14 children with three women, including two that he was married to simultaneously.

Lamar Hunt, one of those 14, was one of the founders of the American Football League and owner of the Dallas Texans (who became the Kansas City Chiefs).

[Lamar] Hunt may not have looked it, but he had a lot of money. His father, the legendary H.L. Hunt, had a fortune estimated at $600 million, which may not seem all that impressive in today’s era of billionaires but made him one of the nation’s richest men at the time.

It was the elder Hunt who came up with the best-remembered quote from the AFL era. After his son reportedly lost $1 million in his first season, H.L. was asked how long Lamar could keep doing that. According to various reports, he said Lamar would go broke in about 150 years if he kept it up.

And it was on February 17, 1801, that Thomas Jefferson was elected president and not Aaron Burr.

Republican Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams by a margin of 73 to 65 electoral votes. When presidential electors cast their votes, however, they failed to distinguish between the office of president and vice president on their ballots. Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr each received 73 votes. With the votes tied, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. There, each state voted as a unit to decide the election.

Still dominated by Federalists, the sitting Congress loathed to vote for Jefferson—their partisan nemesis. For six days, Jefferson and Burr essentially ran against each other in the House. Votes were tallied over thirty times, yet neither man captured the necessary majority of nine states. Eventually, a small group of Federalists, led by James A. Bayard of Delaware, reasoned that a peaceful transfer of power required the majority choose the President, and a deal was struck in Jefferson’s favor.

Library of Congress: Today in History

Pulitizer-winner Edward J. Larson has a recent book on the subject — A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign.

Today is the birthday

… of Richard Ford. The Pulitzer-winning novelist is 66.

Richard Ford writes out almost everything in longhand, with a Bic pen. Before he started to write The Lay of the Land, he spent six months filling a three-ring binder with notes, placing his notes in sections marked “realty” or “Frank” or “New Jersey.” And he keeps all his notes and manuscripts in the freezer, so that if the house burns down, he might not lose all his work.

Above excerpted from longer piece at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

… of LeVar Burton. Kunta Kinte is 53.

… of Ice-T. Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is 52. His real name is Tracy Marrow and his son is Tracy Marrow Jr., not Ice-T Jr.

… of John McEnroe. The tennis hall-of-famer is 51.

… of Jerome Bettis. “The Bus” is 38.

Edgar Bergen was born on this date in 1903.

Born in Decatur, Michigan in 1903, Edgar Bergen developed a talent for ventriloquism at a young age. When Bergen asked a local carpenter to create a dummy, the wisecracking Charlie McCarthy was born. The duo began their career as talent show headliners, performing in Chicago while Bergen attended Northwestern University. Bergen eventually left Northwestern to concentrate on performing, but Charlie received an honorary degree from the school in 1938, a “Master of Innuendo and Snappy Comebacks.”

Bergen and McCarthy made their radio debut on Rudy Vallee’s Royal Gelatin Hour in 1936 and were an instant success. In 1937, they were given their own show for Chase & Sanborn. Almost immediately, The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show became one of radio’s highest-rated programs, a distinction it enjoyed until it left the air in 1956.

During the show’s two decades on the air, Bergen added new characters to the show, including the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd and the man-hungry spinster Effie Klinker. Today, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd and Effie Klinker are on permanent display at the Radio Hall of Fame.

Edgar Bergen died on October 1, 1978. He is, of course, the father of actress Candice Bergen.

Radio Hall of Fame

Henry Adams was born on this date in 1838. Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams (Lincoln’s ambassador to Great Britain), grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams. After serving as his father’s secretary in England, Henry decided on a life as a journalist and historian, writing histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations but being best known perhaps for his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams (1907), which won a Pulitzer Prize and remains highly regarded. Adams died in 1918.

Today is the birthday

… of actor Allan Arbus. Major Sidney Friedman of M*A*S*H is 92.

… of Melissa Manchester. She’s 59.

… of Jane Seymour. Dr. Quinn, Jewelry Woman, is an open-hearted 59.

… of Matt Groening. He’s 56.

It’s the birthday of cartoonist Matt Groening, . . . born in Portland, Oregon (1954). He decided to move to Los Angel[e]s after college to try to make it as a writer. He lived in a neighborhood full of drug dealers and thieves, and got a job ghostwriting the memoirs of an 88-year-old filmmaker. After that, he worked at a convalescent home, a waste treatment plant, and a graveyard.

He started writing a comic strip based on his daily troubles called “Life in Hell.” When a television producer asked Groening to create a TV show, Groening decided to invent a cartoon family that would be the exact opposite of all the fictional families that had ever been on American television. He named the parents after his own parents, Homer and Marge, and he named the two sisters after his own sisters, Lisa and Maggie. He chose the name Bart for the only son because it was an anagram of the word “brat.”

Critics immediately praised The Simpsons, because it was in some ways more realistic than any other American sitcom. Homer was fat, bald, and stupid; he drank a lot, worked at a nuclear power plant, and occasionally strangled his son. His wife, Marge, was an obsessive-compulsive housewife with a blue beehive hairdo. The characters were frequently selfish, rude, and mean to one another, and the show often took on dark subjects like suicide, adultery, and environmental disaster. The Simpsons went on to become the most popular and longest-running sitcom in America.

Matt Groening said, “Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians — for the Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids.

The Writers Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

Harold Arlen was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, New York, on this date in 1905. A short list from the more than 400 tunes written by Harold Arlen:

• Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive
• Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
• Come Rain Or Come Shine
• Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
• Hooray For Love
• It’s Only A Paper Moon
• I’ve Got the World on A String
• One For My Baby
• Over The Rainbow
• Stormy Weather
• That Old Black Magic

Arlen worked with many lyricists through the years, most notably Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer and even Truman Capote. Harburg, for example, wrote the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz songs. Though it’s the lyrics we most remember, it’s the melody that makes a song memorable. That was Arlen.

John Barrymore, Drew’s grandpa, was born on this date in 1882. John is the sibling of Lionel and Ethel Barrymore. Considered the greatest American Shakespearean actor of his time, John Barrymore’s later career was hampered (and shortened) by alcoholism.

“There are lots of methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass and some cracked ice.”

Susan B. Anthony was born on this date in 1820. As The New York Times said in her obituary in 1906, “Susan Brownell Anthony was a pioneer leader of the cause of woman suffrage, and her energy was tireless in working for what she considered to be the best interests of womankind.”

The domain youtube.com was registered five years ago today.

Hugh Downs is 89. Downs was the host of The Today Show from 1962-1971; before that he was Jack Paar’s sidekick on The Tonight Show from 1957-1962. He also hosted the NBC daytime quiz show Concentration from 1958-1969. That’s right, at one point he was doing all three. And even before all that he was the announcer for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, one of television’s earliest hits beginning on NBC in 1949. And many other shows.

The Bradys’ mom and stepmom, Florence Henderson, is 76.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is 68.

Carl Bernstein of Woodward and Bernstein is 66.

Magician-comedian Teller is 62. Raymond Joseph Teller was his given name, but Teller is now in fact his legal name. He is one of just a few Americans with one name on his passport (according to Wikipedia).

Michael Doucet of Beausoleil is 59.

Meg Tilly is 50.

Jack Benny was born as Benjamin Kubelsky on this date in 1894. In The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, the entry for The Jack Benny Program on radio runs for eight pages. And then he was on television. Truly one of the great stars of the mid-20th century. NewMexiKen realizes how corny the jokes and skits would sound now — how corny they undoubtedly were then — but tucked among my fond memories is being at my Great Grandmother’s house in Rensselaer, New York, nearly 60 years ago. I was sick, so stayed home with Gram that Sunday evening while the rest of the family socialized. She had to be in her seventies; I no more than five or six. We listened to The Jack Benny Program on radio. And all I can remember is how hard we laughed.

Oregon entered the union as the 33rd state on February 14, 1859.

Arizona entered the union as the 48th state on February 14, 1912.

Today is the birthday

… of Roger Mudd, 82.

… of Nobel Prize-winner J.M. Coetzee. He’s 70.

… of Carole King. Tonight You’re Mine Completely, You Give Your Love So Sweetly — at 68.

… of Joe Pesci. Tommy DeVito is no longer a “yute,” he’s 67.

… of Barbara Lewis. Baby I’m Yours and I’ll be Yours Until the Stars Fall from the Sky — or until she’s 66.

… of Alice Walker. One assumes her birthday cake is The Color Purple as she turns 66 today.

… of Mia Farrow. The former Mrs. André Previn, Mrs. Frank Sinatra and significant other of Woody Allen is 65.

… of Senator Jim Webb, 64.

… of Travis Tritt. He’s 47. Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares).

… of Julie Warner. Vialula is 45 today.

Bill Veeck ,the man who brought a dwarf (Eddie Gaedel) to bat in the major leagues, was born on this date in 1914. Veeck was owner of three different major league franchises (Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox) and created many of the publicity innovations we take for granted today. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991. As told in the first chapter of Veeck’s autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck: “When Eddie went into that crouch, his strike zone was just about visible to the naked eye. I picked up a ruler and measured it for posterity. It was 1-1/2 inches. Marvelous.”

Samuel J. Tilden was born on this date in 1814. Along with Andrew Jackson in 1824 and Albert Gore in 2000, Tilden in 1876 shares the honor of winning the popular vote and having the electoral vote stolen from him.

Isaac Donald Everly is 73 today (Phil Everly was 71 last month). The brothers broke up in 1973 and did not speak to each other until they reunited in 1983.

Garret Morris of “Saturday Night Live” is 73 today.

Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons” is 72.

Lisa Marie Presley is 42.

Four-time Oscar winner for best director John Ford was born on this date.

It’s the birthday of American movie director John Ford, born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine (1895), the youngest of 13 children. He made more than 120 films, most of them Westerns. On the sets of his movies he wore old khaki pants, tennis shoes with holes in the toes, a worn-out fedora, and a dirty scarf around his neck. He always had poor eyesight. He started wearing an eye patch like a pirate after he went blind in one eye. He usually worked with a glass of brandy in his hand and was always smoking a cigar.

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Clark Gable was born on this date in 1901. He won the Best Actor award in 1935 for It Happened One Night. He was nominated for Best Actor for Mutiny of the Bounty and Gone With the Wind.

Langston Hughes was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1967.

Mr. Hughes was sometimes characterized as the “O. Henry of Harlem.” He was an extremely versatile and productive author who was particularly well known for his folksy humor.

In a description of himself written for “Twentieth Century Authors, a biographical dictionary, Mr. Hughes wrote:

“My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Henry Armstrong.”

“I live in Harlem, New York City,” his autobiographical sketch continued. “I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.”

The New York Times

Victor Herbert was born Dublin on this date in 1859.

He studied music in Germany, where he became a cellist and composer for the court in Stuttgart and joined the faculty of the Stuttgart Conservatory of Music. In 1886, he and his wife, opera singer Therese Foerster, immigrated to New York where they worked for the Metropolitan Opera and became active in the musical life of the city.

Herbert, a composer of symphonic music and chamber string pieces, joined the faculty of the National Conservatory of Music. In 1893, he became leader of the 22nd Regiment Band of New York after the death of the celebrated Patrick S. Gilmore. Herbert wrote a number of marches while he was the leader of the band.

From 1898 to 1904 he directed the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and then formed the Victor Herbert Orchestra which performed lighter music. Herbert was most famous as a composer of light operetta. Between 1894 and 1924 he composed more than forty comic operettas which had lengthy runs on Broadway and on tour around the country. His best known remains Babes in Toyland, which opened in 1903, a fantasy inspired by Frank L. Baum’s popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Library of Congress

Today is the birthday

… of Carol Channing. Broadway’s Dolly Gallagher Levi is 89.

… of Ernie Banks. The baseball hall-of-famer is 79. Let’s play two.

… of composer Philip Glass. He’s 73.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Philip Glass: Biography

… of Queen Beatrix. She’s 72. Do you know what country is she queen of?

… of Nolan Ryan. The baseball hall-of-famer is 63.

… of KC. He’s 59. And his band was?

Minnie Driver is 40. Justin Timberlake is 29.

Suzanne Pleshette, Emily on the ”The Bob Newhart Show” and Annie (the teacher) in The Birds, would have been 73 today. She died two years ago.

Jean Simmons would have been 81 today; she died nine days ago. The actress was in such classic films as The Robe, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry and was twice nominated for an Oscar — Hamlet (supporting) and The Happy Ending (leading).

Norman Mailer was born 87 years ago today. He died in November 2007. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Mailer.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on this date in 1919.

As a competitor, Robinson was the Dodgers’ leader. In his 10 seasons, they won six National League pennants–1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956. They lost another in the 1951 playoff with the New York Giants, and another to the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the 1950 season.

In 1949, when he batted .342 to win the league title and drove in 124 runs, he was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player Award. In 1947, he had been voted the rookie of the year.

“The only way to beat the Dodgers,” said Warren Giles, then the president of the Cincinnati Reds, later the National League president, “is to keep Robinson off the bases.”

He had a career batting average of .311. Primarily a line drive hitter, he accumulated only 137 home runs, with a high of 19 in both 1951 and 1952.

But on a team with such famous sluggers as Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Roy Campanella, who was also black, he was the cleanup hitter, fourth in the batting order, a tribute to his ability to mover along teammates on base.

But his personality flared best as a baserunner. He had a total of 197 stolen bases. He stole home 11 times, the most by any player in the post-World War II era.

The New York Times

Thomas Merton was born on this date in 1915. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Merton.

John O’Hara was born on this date in 1905.

[O’Hara] went on to become one of the most popular serious writers of his lifetime, writing many best-selling novels, including Appointment in Samarra (1934) and A Rage to Live (1949). Most critics consider his best work to be his short stories, which were published as the Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984). He holds the record for the greatest number of short stories published by a single author in The New Yorker magazine.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

And Pearl Zane Grey, the first American millionaire author, was born on this date in 1872. Here’s a previous NewMexiKen entry on Grey.

Jules Feiffer is 81 today.

He said of his childhood: “The only thing I wanted to be was grown up. Because I was a terrible flop as a child. You cannot be a successful boy in America if you cannot throw or catch a ball.” He decided early on that he wanted to be a comic-strip artist, and when he was a teenager, he went to work for cartoonist Will Eisner. Then, he started drawing his own cartoons in the pages of The Village Voice. His strip in The Village Voice was one of the first cartoon strips to deal with adult themes such as sex, politics, and psychiatry. For most of his career, he has drawn and written all of his work in Central Park, which he considers his office.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Bob Uecker is 75.

Scott Glenn is 69 today.

One-time Oscar nominee David Strathairn is 61.

Lucinda Williams is 57.

Eddie Van Halen is 55.

Ellen DeGeneres is 52.

Wayne Gretzky is 49.

Paul Newman was born 85 years ago today. Newman was nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar eight times, winning for The Color of Money in 1986, but not for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, or Nobody’s Fool. He was also nominated for the Best Supporting Actor for Road to Perdition at age 78.

The most overrated — especially by himself — person in American history was born on this date in 1880. That’s Douglas MacArthur.

Julia Morgan was born in San Francisco on January 26, 1872.

Miss Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in civil engineering. During her tenure at Berkeley, Morgan developed a keen interest in architecture which is thought to have been fostered by her mother’s cousin, Pierre Le Brun, who designed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in New York City. At Berkeley one of her instructors, Bernard Maybeck, encouraged her to pursue her architectural studies in Paris at the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts.

Arriving in Paris in 1896, she was initially refused admission because the Ecole had never before admitted a woman. After a two-year wait, Julia Morgan gained entrance to the prestigious program and became the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture. While in Paris, Morgan also found a mentor in her professor, Bernard Chaussemiche, for whom she worked as a drafter.

Soon after her graduation from the Ecole, Julia Morgan returned to her native San Francisco and began working for architect John Galen Howard. At the time Howard was the supervising architect of the University of California’s Master Plan, the commission of which he won by default from Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Morgan worked on the Master Plan drawing the elevations and designing the decorative details for the Mining Building built in memory of George Hearst. During this time Morgan also designed the Hearst Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus.
…

Over the course of the next 28 years, Morgan supervised nearly every aspect of construction at Hearst Castle including the purchase of everything from Spanish antiquities to Icelandic Moss to reindeer for the Castle’s zoo. She personally designed most of the structures, grounds, pools, animal shelters and workers’ camp down to the minutest detail. Additionally, Morgan worked closely with Hearst to integrate his vast art collection into the structures and grounds at San Simeon. She also worked on projects for Hearst’s other properties including Jolon, Wyntoon, Babicore, the “Hopi” residence at the Grand Canyon, the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Memorial Gymnasium at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Examiner Building, several of his Beverly Hills residences and Marion Davies’ beach house in Santa Monica.

Hearst Castle

Today is Etta James’ birthday. Tell Mama, Etta James is 72 today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2wuVp00-o

Jerry Wexler, Atlantic Records’ legendary producer, describes Etta James as “the greatest of all modern blues singers…the undisputed Earth Mother.” Her raw, unharnessed vocals and hot-blooded eroticism has made disciples of singers ranging from Janis Joplin to Bonnie Raitt. James’ pioneering 1950s hits – “The Wallflower” and “Good Rockin’ Daddy” – assure her place in the early history of rock and roll alongside Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles. In the Sixties, as a soulful singer of pop and blues diva compared with the likes of Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday, James truly found her musical direction and made a lasting mark.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Miss James was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, same year as Creedence, Cream, the Doors, Sly and the Family Stone, Van Morrison and Dick Clark if you still need a clue.

At Last

Alicia Keys is 29.

I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying
When she was born in Hell’s Kitchen, I was living down the line
I’m wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be
I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee
— Bob Dylan, “Thunder on the Mountain”

Songs in A Minor

Dean Jones is 79.

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25th in 1882.

Charles Curtis was born in Kansas on this date in 1860. Curtis was the 31st vice president of the United States, serving under President Herbert Hoover, 1929-1933. Curtis is the first person with non-European ancestry to ever serve as President or Vice President. His mother was part Kansa or Kaw, Osage and Potawatomi and part French. Curtis had a one-eighth Indian blood quantum.

And, Happy Birthday to Rob, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen.

Jack Nicklaus is 70 today.

“There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Today is 201st anniversary of Poe’s birth. Since 1949 a mysterious individual has been visiting Poe’s grave in Baltimore every year early on the morning of January 19th, toasting Poe and leaving behind the Cognac and three roses. That person did not show up this year.

‘Poe Toaster’ Is a No-Show – ArtsBeat Blog

Also, Poe Toaster tribute is ‘nevermore’ – Baltimore Sun.

Today is the birthday

… of Jean Stapleton. Edith Bunker is 87. She won three Emmys and two Golden Globes in that role.

… of Tippi Hedren. The actress in Hitchcock’s The Birds is 80.

… of Phil Everly. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee (with older brother Don) is 71.

Phil and Don transformed the Appalachian folk, bluegrass and country sounds of their Kentucky boyhood into a richly harmonized form of rock and roll. The sons of entertainers Margaret and Ike Everly, a traveling country and western team, the Everly Brothers performed as part of the family act on radio and in concert. On their own, they sang beguilingly of adolescent romance in crisp, shimmering voices. With Don taking the melody and Phil harmonizing above him, the Everlys released a steady string of hit records between 1957-1962 that crossed over from country to pop and even R&B charts.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Shelley Fabares. Donna Reed’s television daughter is 66.

… of Dolly Parton. She’s 64.

With their strong feminine stances in the 1960s and 1970s, Dolly Rebecca Parton, along with fellow female pioneers Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, revolutionized the world of country music for women performers. Then Parton took her crusade a step farther by crossing over to the pop world—landing on the cover of Rolling Stone, achieving pop hits, and starring in a series of Hollywood movies. Along the way, however, she ultimately lost much of her core country audience, to the point that in 1997 she dissolved her fan club, which had been one of the staunchest in country music. But Parton’s career—and her appeal to fans of hard country—was far from over. Beginning in 1999 she returned to the music of her youth and began rebuilding a tradition-minded fan base with a series of critically acclaimed bluegrass albums.

Country Music Hall of Fame

… of Desi Arnaz Jr. Little Ricky, Lucille Ball’s TV son, also first appeared 57 years ago today, on I Love Lucy about 12 hours after Desi Jr. was born.

… of comedian Paul Rodriguez, 55.

… of Katey Sagal. The Married…With Children mom is 56.

… of Paul Rodriguez, 55.

… of Drea de Matteo. The actress who was whacked on The Sopranos is 38.

Paul Cezanne was born on this date in 1839. Click Cezanne painting of Chrysanthemums for larger version.

… was born in Stratford, Virginia, on this date in 1807, the son of Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee and Ann Hill Carter Lee.

In 1810 the Lee family moved to Alexandria, then in the District of Columbia. The Lee’s lived first at 611 Cameron, but from 1811 or 1812 at 607 Oronoco.

Lee graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1829, second in his class and reputedly the only cadet to this day to have no demerits on his record. Lee married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, great granddaughter of Martha Washington, at Arlington House in 1831. Arlington House was in the District of Columbia from the time it was constructed until 1847 when the Virginia portion of the District of Columbia was receded to Virginia.

So, although Lee supposedly supported preservation of the Union that his father and uncles had helped create and opposed slavery, and although his residence had been in Virginia no more than 17 of his 54 years, in 1861 he turned down command of the Union forces to remain loyal to Virginia.

I suggest that this nullified his record of no demerits.