… was born on February 11, 1731, 277 years ago today.
Category: Birthdays
Individuals born on this date with an emphasis on American history and culture, including pop culture.
2-21
Today is the birthday
… of Blanche Elizabeth Hollingsworth Devereaux. Rue McClanahan is 75.
… of Richard Beymer. Tony from West Side Story is 70.
… of Mary Beth Lacey. Tyne Daly is 63.
… of 3CPO. Anthony Daniels is 63.
… of Alan Rickman. Professor Snape is 63.
… of Patricia Nixon Cox. The former first daughter is 63.
… of Frasier Crane. Kelsey Grammer is 54 today.
… of Mary Chapin Carpenter. Celebrating, and one hopes, feeling lucky, she’s 51 today.
… of Charlotte Church. The singer, who raised lots of money for PBS, and did even better for herself, is 23.
… of Ellen Page. Last year’s Oscar nominee is 22.
… of Corbin Bleu. He’s 20. Out of high school one hopes.
Erma Bombeck was born on this date in 1927. According to The Writer’s Almanac:
[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. I almost passed over Nin but figured if she was good enough for a Jewel song she was good enough for NewMexiKen.
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.
Toni Morrison
… winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 is 78 today. The following is from the press release announcing her selection:
“who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
“My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world”. These are the words of this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, the American writer Toni Morrison, in her book of essays “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992). And she adds, “My project rises from delight, not disappointment…”
Toni Morrison is 62 years old, and was born in Lorain, Ohio, in the United States. Her works comprise novels and essays. In her academic career she is a professor in the humanities at the University of Princeton, New Jersey.
She has written six novels, each of them of great interest. Her oeuvre is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation. One can delight in her unique narrative technique, varying from book to book and developed independently, even though its roots stem from Faulkner and American writers from further south. The lasting impression is nevertheless sympathy, humanity, of the kind which is always based on profound humour.
“Song of Solomon” (1978) with its description of the black world in life and legend, forms an excellent introduction to the work of Toni Morrison. Milkman Dead’s quest for his real self and its source reflects a basic theme in the novels. The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games. His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots. This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.
“Beloved” (1987) continues to widen the themes and to weave together the places and times in the network of motifs. The combination of realistic notation and folklore paradoxically intensifies the credibility. There is enormous power in the depiction of Sethe’s action to liberate her child from the life she envisages for it, and the consequences of this action for Sethe’s own life.
In her latest novel “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison uses a device which is akin to the way jazz itself is played. The book’s first lines provide a synopsis, and in reading the novel one becomes aware of a narrator who varies, embellishes and intensifies. The result is a richly complex, sensuously conveyed image of the events, the characters and moods.
As the motivation for the award implies, Toni Morrison is a literary artist of the first rank. She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the lustre of poetry.
The Writer’s Almanac, as they often do, had some insight in 2004 about Toni Morrison:
She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She later said, “It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.” She joined a small writing group, and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969). She wrote most of it in the mornings and on weekends while she was working as an editor for Random House and raising her children on her own. …
Morrison said, “[Writing] stretches you . . . [and] makes you stay in touch with yourself. . . . It’s like going under water for me, the danger. Yet I’m certain I’m going to come up.”
Wallace Stegner
In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.
NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists several times, but repeats them each year — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born 100 years ago today.
Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.
TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett
TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis
His father was a schemer who was constantly moving the family from place to place, hoping to strike it rich in one of the Western boomtowns. He watched as his father tried and failed to plant a farm in North Dakota, tried and failed to run a lunchroom in the backwoods of Washington state, sold bootleg liquor in Great Falls, Montana, poured the family’s savings into an invention that was supposed to detect gold in the ground, and finally bought a piece of redwood forest in California, only to cut it all down and sell it for firewood. By the time Stegner was 20, he had lived in more than 20 different houses, including, at one point, a derailed dining car. But though he had a tough childhood, Stegner grew to love the great open wilderness of the American West.
. . .
He’d already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, “I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.
Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow.
The Writer’s Almanac (2007)
17 February 2009
Today is the birthday
… of Jim Brown, 73. 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.)
“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, 46 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, 84.
… of Rene Russo, 55.
… of Lou Diamond Phillips, 47.
… of Paris Hilton, 28 today. Age now surpassing apparent IQ. 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.
The holiday is Washington’s Birthday, not Presidents’ Day
The federal holiday today — the reason there is no mail delivery — is Washington’s Birthday.*
If there had been a calendar on the wall the day George Washington was born, it would have read February 11, 1731. In 1752, Britain and her colonies converted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use today. The change added 11 days and designated January rather than March as the beginning of the year. Accordingly, Washington’s birthday became February 22, 1732.
The federal holiday was celebrated on February 22 from its approval in 1879** until legislation in 1968 designated the third Monday of February the official day to celebrate Washington’s birthday. In 1971, when the 1968 Act went into effect, President Nixon proclaimed the holiday Presidents’ Day, to commemorate all past presidents, not just Washington and Lincoln. This was never intended or authorized by Congress; even so, it gained a strong hold on the public consciousness.
The states are not obliged to adopt federal holidays, which only affect federal offices and agencies. While most states have adopted Washington’s Birthday, a dozen of them officially celebrate Presidents’ Day. A number of the states that celebrate Washington’s Birthday also recognize Lincoln’s Birthday as a separate legal holiday.
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg has more and there is a history of the making of the holiday in By George, IT IS Washington’s Birthday!.
14 weeks until the next holiday.
* There is no state holiday today in New Mexico. The state chooses to celebrate Presidents’ Day the day after Thanksgiving.
** Washington’s Birthday was the fifth federal holiday. Only New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day preceded it.
February 16th is the birthday
… of Richard Ford. The Pulitzer-winning novelist is 65.
When asked what his advice is for aspiring writers, Ford said, “Try to talk yourself out of it. As a life, it’s much too solitary, it makes you obsessive, the rewards seem to be much too inward for most people, and too much rides on luck. Other than that, it’s great.”
The Writer’s Almanac (2007)
Among my favorites lines from Ford, from Independence Day:
“Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing’s worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.”
… of LeVar Burton. Kunta Kinte is 52.
… of Ice-T. Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola is 51. 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 50.
… of Jerome Bettis. “The Bus” is 37.
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.
Chuck Yeager
The first person to break the sound barrier is 86 today.
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, with two ribs broken two nights before in a drunken horseback ride. The plane, Glamorous Glennis, is hanging from the Air & Space Museum ceiling. Glennis was Mrs. Yeager.
Yeager told his story in Popular Mechanics in 1987. Good reading.
Yeager is the basis for the character played by Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff. Glennis was played by Barbara Hershey.
In his wonderful book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe explains that West Virginian Yeager is the reason why all airline pilots talk with a drawl — to be like Yeager, “the most righteous of all the posessors of the right stuff.”
200
Our greatest president was born 200 years ago today. It seems a good reason to read, once again, some of his most meaningful words — read them slowly and meticulously, perhaps almost saying them aloud as he did.
The Address at Gettysburg (November 19, 1863):
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
And, from his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865):
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln
… were born 200 years ago today.
February 12th ought to be a national holiday
Even without including Lincoln (and Darwin) today deserves national holiday status. It’s the birthday of Bill Russell for heaven’s sake! And Omar Bradley.
Bill Russell is 75. Back-to-back NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco, 1955-1956 — 55 consecutive wins. Eleven NBA championships with the Celtics in 13 years, 1957-1969 — Russell was the only player there for all 11. Simply the greatest winner in basketball history. (And the best laugh.)
Today is also the birthday
… of Joe Garagiola, 83.
… of author Judy Blume. She’s 71.
… of Ray Manzarek. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is 70.
The Doors formed in the summer of 1965 around Morrison and Manzarek, who’d met at UCLA’s film school. A year later the group signed with Elektra Records, recording six landmark studio LPs and a live album for the label. They achieved popular success and critical acclaim for their 1967 debut, The Doors (which included their eleven-minute epic “The End” and “Light My Fire,” a Number One hit at the height of the Summer of Love), and all the other albums that followed.
… of actress Maud Adams. Octopussy is 64.
… of Arsenio Hall, 54.
… of Josh Brolin, 41. I wonder if his stepmom will sing “Happy Birthday” to him.
… of actress Christina Ricci. Wednesday Addams is 29.
Lorne Greene (aka Ben Cartwright) was born on this date in 1915.
Omar Bradley, the G.I General, was born on this date in 1893.
Except for his original division assignments, Bradley won his wartime advancement on the battlefield, commanding American soldiers in North Africa, Sicily, across the Normandy beaches, and into Germany itself. His understated personal style of command left newsmen with little to write about, especially when they compared him to the more flamboyant among the Allied commanders, but his reputation as a fighter was secure among his peers and particularly with General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, who considered him indispensable.
Self-effacing and quiet, Bradley showed a concern for the men he led that gave him the reputation as the “soldier’s general.” That same concern made him the ideal choice in 1945 to reinvigorate the Veterans Administration and prepare it to meet the needs of millions of demobilized servicemen. After he left active duty, both political and military leaders continued to seek Bradley’s advice. Perhaps more importantly, he remained in close touch with the Army and served its succeeding generations as the ideal model of a professional soldier.
And it’s the birthday of artist Thomas Moran, born on this date in 1837. The National Gallery of Art has an outstanding online exhibit on Moran. Click the image for a larger replica of his classic painting Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Thomas Alva Edison
… was born in Milan, Ohio, on this date in 1847.
Edison’s stature has diminished since his death; technology has evolved so much since then. But he was still a hero when he died in 1931. These are the sub-headlines from his obituary in The New York Times:
World Made Over By Edison’s Magic
He Did More Than Any One Man to Put Luxuries Into the Lives of the Masses
Created Millions Of Jobs
Electric Light, the Phonograph, Motion Pictures and Radio Improvements Among Gifts
Lamp Ended “Dark Ages”
He Held the Miracle of Menlo Park, Produced on a Gusty Night 50 Years Ago, His Greatest Work
The Undiscovered World of Thomas Edison is an informative and interesting essay from the December 1995 Atlantic Monthly.
February 11th
Today is the birthday
… of actor Leslie Nielsen. Lt. Frank Drebin is 83.
… of Conrad Janis. Mindy’s father on Mork and Mindy is 81.
… of Tina Louise. Ginger, the movie star from Gilligan’s Island, is 75.
… of Burt Reynolds. Bandit is 73. Burt — his real name is Burton Reynolds — was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for Boogie Nights.
… of Gerry Goffin. Married to Carole King while they were still teenagers, Goffin is 70.
Songwriting partners Gerry Goffin and Carole King composed a string of classic hits and cherished album tracks for a variety of artists during the Sixties. A brief sampling: “Up On the Roof” (the Drifters), “One Fine Day” (the Chiffons), “I’m Into Something Good” (Herman’s Hermits), “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” (the Shirelles), “Take Good Care of My Baby” (Bobby Vee), “Chains” (the Cookies), “Don’t Bring Me Down” (the Animals), “Take a Giant Step” (the Monkees) and “Goin’ Back” (the Byrds). The prolific duo, who remained married for much of the Sixties, even tapped their babysitter to sing one of the songs they’d written, and the result was a Number One hit and a new dance craze: “The Loco-Motion,” by Little Eva.
… of Sheryl Crow. She’s 47.
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I’m not the only one
All I wanna do is have some fun
Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard
… of Governor Sarah Palin. Grandma Palin is 45.
… of Jennifer Aniston. She’s 40.
… of Q’orianka Kilcher. Pocahontas in The New World is 19.
2-9-9
Today is the birthday
… of Roger Mudd, 81.
… of Nobel Prize-winner J.M. Coetzee. He’s 69.
… of Carole King. Tonight You’re Mine Completely, You Give Your Love So Sweetly — at 67.
… of Joe Pesci. Tommy DeVito is no longer a “yute,” he’s 66.
… 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 65 today.
… of Mia Farrow. The former Mrs. André Previn, Mrs. Frank Sinatra and significant other of Woody Allen is 64.
… of Senator Jim Webb, 63.
… of Travis Tritt. He’s 46. Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares).
… of Julie Warner. Vialula is 44 today. Seems like an occasion to watch Doc Hollywood.
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.
Feb 4
43
Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
… was born in Salzburg on this date in 1756. Theophilus—or Gottlieb—or Amadé means “loved by God.” As an adult Mozart signed Wolfgang Amadé Mozart or simply Mozart. In the family he was known as Wolfgangerl or Woferl.
It seems wrong to write about an immortal’s death on his birthday but the facts are more complex, of course than the movie Amadeus. According to a December 2003 article at Guardian Unlimited:
…Mozart’s death, as one respected musical journal wrote, was almost certainly caused not by poison but by “arduous work and fast living among ill-chosen company”.
It was only after Mozart’s demise that Salieri began to have any real reason to hate him. Unlike that of any before him, Mozart’s music kept on being performed. Cut down at the peak of his powers – and with the added frisson of whispered rumours that he might have been murdered – he became the first composer whose cult of celebrity actually flourished after his death.
Salieri, however, had outlived his talent. He wrote almost no music for the last two decades of his life. Instead he spent time revising his previous works. He did have an impressive roster of pupils: Beethoven, Schubert, Meyerbeer and Liszt – not to mention Franz Xaver Mozart, his supposed adversary’s young son. But the composer who had once been at the vanguard of new operatic ideas was not necessarily teaching his students to be similarly innovative…
So how did this respected musician become the rumoured murderer of the great Mozart? Nobody knows for certain. But in his final weeks Mozart is reported to have believed he had been poisoned, and had gone so far as to blame hostile Italian factions at the Viennese court. People put two and two together and pointed the finger at Salieri. And who could resist a story this good? Certainly not his fellow composers. There are mentions of it in Beethoven’s Conversation Books. Weber, Mozart’s father-in-law, had heard it by 1803, and cold-shouldered Salieri ever after. And 20 years later it was still doing the rounds; Rossini joked about it when he met Salieri in 1822.
As the rumour gathered strength, all denials only served to reinforce it. Then, in 1823, Salieri – hospitalised, terminally ill and deranged – is said to have accused himself of poisoning Mozart. In more lucid moments he took it back. But the damage was done. Even if few believed the ramblings of a confused old man, the fact that Salieri had “confessed” to Mozart’s murder gave the rumour some semblance of validity.
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart is a delightful Mozart website.
January 27th
Chief Justice John Roberts 54 today is. If Roberts had only informed Obama he was going to talk like Yoda, they might have gotten through the oath of office OK.
The actor James Cromwell is 69. Among his many roles, Cromwell was the farmer in Babe. The role earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Who was the lead in that film — the pig?
Mikhail Baryshnikov is 61.
Keith Olbermann is 50.
Sultry-voiced Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies is 48.
Peter Fonda’s daughter Bridget is 45.
Jerome Kern was born on this date in 1885.
Kern and his wife returned to America, where he enhanced the scores of European musicals and worked as a rehearsal pianist. Then he met Oscar Hammerstein II, who became a lifelong friend, and the two collaborated on Show Boat in 1927. This musical gave us the songs “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” In 1933, Kern and Hammerstein produced Roberta, which included the famous song “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”
Kern moved to Hollywood in 1935, and he enjoyed success there. He wrote “The Way You Look Tonight” for the movie Swing Time, and the song won an Academy Award. In 1941, Kern and Hammerstein wrote “The Last Time I Saw Paris” because Paris had just been occupied by Nazi Germany, and that song also won an Academy Award.
Kern died in 1945 with Hammerstein at his side. At the memorial service, Hammerstein said of his friend Jerome Kern, “He stimulated everyone. He annoyed some. He never bored anyone at any time.”
January 23rd
Today is the birthday
… of U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. The Senator is 85.
… of actress Jeanne Moreau. She’s 81. Moreau is best known for French New Wave films Jules and Jim (1962) and The Bride Wore Black (1968). Roger Ebert:
This is ridiculous, I told myself. You’ve interviewed Ingmar Bergman. Robert Mitchum. John Wayne. You got through those okay. Why should you be scared of Jeanne Moreau? Simply because she’s the greatest movie actress of the last 20 years? Simply because she’s made more good films for great directors than anybody else? Simply because something in her face and manner has fascinated you since you sat through “Jules and Jim” twice in a row? She’s only human; it’s not like she’s a goddess.
But I suspected that she was.
… of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. The poet and playwright is 79.
… of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, 56.
… of Princess Caroline of Monaco, 52.
… of Mariska Hargitay. Jayne Mansfield’s daughter is 45. (She was in the car when her mother was killed in 1967.) Ms. Hargitay plays Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
It’s the birthday of Humphrey Bogart, born on this day in 1899. Bogart was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Casablanca, The Caine Mutiny and The African Queen; he won for The African Queen. According to The Writer’s Almanac (2004):
[Bogart] was expelled from Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy and immediately joined the Navy to fight in World War I, serving as a ship’s gunner. One day, while roughhousing on the ship’s wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, and a splinter became lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar, as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became one of his most distinctive onscreen qualities.
And, born on this date in 1910, was Django Reinhardt. the first significant jazz figure in Europe — and the most influential European in jazz to this day. Play Jazz Guitar.com has some interesting background:
A violinist first and a guitarist later, Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt grew up in a gypsy camp near Paris where he absorbed the gypsy strain into his music. A disastrous caravan fire in 1928 badly burned his left hand, depriving him of the use of the fourth and fifth fingers, but the resourceful Reinhardt figured out a novel fingering system to get around the problem that probably accounts for some of the originality of his style. According to one story, during his recovery period, Reinhardt was introduced to American jazz when he found a 78 RPM disc of Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues” at an Orleans flea market. He then resumed his career playing in Parisian cafes until one day in 1934 when Hot Club chief Pierre Nourry proposed the idea of an all-string band to Reinhardt and Grappelli. Thus was born the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, which quickly became an international draw thanks to a long, splendid series of Ultraphone, Decca and HMV recordings.
The Red Hot Jazz Archive has some on-line recordings of the Quintette of the Hot Club of France.
Edouard Manet, an artist whose works include both the Realist and Impressionist traditions of 19th-century France, was born on this date in 1832. Click here to view Manet’s painting “On the Beach” (1873) and here for his painting of Monet in his floating studio (1874).
January 17th
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is 45 today.
January 16th
Author William Kennedy is 81 today.
His first novel, The Ink Truck, came out in 1969, and didn’t sell very well. He began writing a series of novels about a big, down-at-heel Irish family full of storytellers and brawlers. One of these novels, Ironweed (1984), is about a derelict on the run from his past. Thirteen publishers rejected it because they thought no one would want to read about bums. But it was published, and it won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pen/Faulkner award, all in the same year.
Kennedy made it big at age 56.
Dian Fossey is 77 today.
She lived alone for 18 years, studying mountain gorillas in the cold, rainy mountains of Rwanda. She was the first person ever approached by gorillas in the wild, and she would sit with them for hours while they swatted her gently with leaves and played with her hair. She wrote a book about her experience called Gorillas in the Mist (1983).
Fossey made it big at age 51.
Albert Pujols is 29 today. Pujols made it big at age 21.
Also having birthdays today, Marilyn Horne (75), A.J. Foyt (74), Ronnie Milsap (66), Debby Allen (59), Sade (50) and Kate Moss (35).
Dizzy Dean was born 99 years ago today.
Jay Hanna Dizzy Dean, the brash Cardinals fireballer, burst upon the big league scene in 1932 and averaged 24 wins over his first five full campaigns. A winner of four consecutive National League strikeout crowns, Diz was 30-7 in 1934 (the last National League pitcher to record 30 wins) when he and his brother Paul led the Gashouse Gang to the World Championship. A broken toe suffered in the 1937 All-Star Game led to an arm injury that eventually shortened his playing days. He later embarked on a successful broadcasting career.
Ethel Merman was born 101 years ago today.
Martin Luther King Jr.
… was born 80 years ago today.
Many may question some of King’s choices and perhaps even some of his motives, but no one can question his unparalleled leadership in a great cause, or his abilities with both the spoken and written word.
There are 10 federal holidays, but only four of them are dedicated to one man: one for Jesus, one for the man given credit for discovering our continent, one for the military and political founder George Washington, and one for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
December 10, 1964
Library of Congress
01/10
Today is the birthday
… of Willie McCovey. “Stretch,” a baseball hall-of-famer, is 71.
TOP LEFT-HANDED HOME RUN HITTER IN N.L.
HISTORY WITH 521. SECOND ONLY TO LOU GEHRIG
WITH 18 CAREER GRAND SLAMS. LED N.L. IN HOMERS
THREE TIMES AND RBI’S TWICE. N.L. ROOKIE OF
YEAR IN 1959, MVP IN 1969 AND COMEBACK PLAYER
OF THE YEAR IN ’77. TEAMED WITH WILLIE MAYS
FOR AWESOME 1-2 PUNCH IN GIANTS’ LINEUP.
… of Scott McKenzie. So “if you’re going to San Francisco” wish Scott a happy 70th birthday.
… of Rod Stewart. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is 64.
Rod Stewart can be regarded as the rock generation’s heir to Sam Cooke. Like Cooke, Stewart delivers both romantic ballads and uptempo material with conviction and panache, and he sings in a warm, soulful rasp. A singer’s singer, Stewart seemed made to inhabit the spotlight. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)
… of William Sanderson. The character actor (E.B. Farnum in “Deadwood,” Larry on “Newhart,” Lippy in “Lonesome Dove”) is 61.
… of George Foreman. The boxing hall-of-famer and cook is 60. Foreman has five daughters and five sons and has named all of the sons George — George Jr., George III, George IV, George V, and George VI.
… of Patricia Mae Andrzejewski. Pat Benatar is 56. She won four consecutive Grammy awards in the 1980s for “Best Rock Vocal Performance, Female.”
… of Shawn Colvin. The singer is 53.
Shawn Colvin is one of the bright spots of the so-called “new folk movement” that began in the late ’80s. And though she grew out of the somewhat limited “woman with a guitar” school, she has managed to keep the form fresh with a diverse approach, avoiding the clichéd sentiments and all-too-often formulaic arrangements that have plagued the genre. In less than a decade of recording, Colvin has emerged as a songcraftsman with plenty of pop smarts, which has earned her a broad and loyal following. (All Music Guide)
Jake Delhomme is 34 today but I hope Kurt Warner has the better day.
Had he not smoked, the historian and author Stephen Ambrose might have been 73 today.
January 9th
Today is the birthday
… of Judith Krantz, 81. She published her first novel at age 50.
… of Bart Starr. The hall-of-fame quarterback is 75.
… of Dick Enberg. The sportscaster is 74 (oh, my!).
… of Joan Baez. The singer is 68.
… of Jimmy Page. The Led Zeppelin rocker is 65.
Combining the visceral power and intensity of hard rock with the finesse and delicacy of British folk music, Led Zeppelin redefined rock in the Seventies and for all time. They were as influential in that decade as the Beatles were in the prior one. Their impact extends to classic and alternative rockers alike. Then and now, Led Zeppelin looms larger than life on the rock landscape as a band for the ages with an almost mystical power to evoke primal passions. The combination of Jimmy Page’s powerful, layered guitar work, Robert Plant’s keening, upper-timbre vocals, John Paul Jones’ melodic bass playing and keyboard work, and John Bonham’s thunderous drumming made for a band whose alchemy proved enchanting and irresistible. “The motto of the group is definitely, ‘Ever onward,’” Page said in 1977, perfectly summing up Led Zeppelin’s forward-thinking philosophy. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)
… of Brenda Gayle Webb. Loretta Lynn’s little sister Crystal Gayle is 58.
… of J.K. Simmons. He’s 54. He’s seen on The Closer and Law & Order as Dr. Skoda, and was terrific, I thought, as Juno’s dad.
… New York Times Pulitizer Prize winning book critic Michiko Kakutani is 54 today.
… of Dave Matthews. He’s 42.
Gilligan (and Maynard Krebs) was born on this date in 1935. Bob Denver died in 2005.
Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, on this date in 1913.
The stripper Gypsy Rose Lee was born Rose Louise Hovick on this date in 1914, or January 8, 1911, or February 9, 1911.
Toyota made its first appearance in the U.S. at the Los Angeles Auto Show 50 years ago today. Datsun (Nissan), too.
Richard Nixon
… was born in Yorba Linda, California, on this date in 1913.
NewMexiKen was contacted by the staff working with Richard Nixon on his memoirs, RN, many years ago. I was asked to see if I could determine — from among the Nixon papers in my custody — the time of day he was born. As I remember it, my research was inconclusive. Someone else’s must have been helpful. The memoirs begin:
I was born in a house my father built. My birth on the night of January 9, 1913, coincided with a record-breaking cold snap in our town of Yorba Linda, California.
Nixon, by the way, did not use his middle name or initial. Though you always see him referred to as Richard M. Nixon, he himself signed as Richard Nixon and he titled his memoir RN.