Category: Birthdays

It’s the birthday of Pat Conroy. The author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini is 63 today. Four years ago NewMexiKen relayed a good story about Conroy’s introduction to literature at D.C.’s Gonzaga High School — We should both cherish it.

Today is Pat Sajak’s birthday. His wheel has spun for 62 years.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is 61 today.

And it’s the birthday of Mahalia Jackson, born on this date in 1911 (she died in 1972). As The New York Times noted in Ms. Jackson’s obituary:

“I been ‘buked and I been scorned/ I’m gonna tell my Lord/ When I get home/ Just how long you’ve been treating me wrong,” she sang in a full, rich contralto to the throng of 200,000 people as a preface to Dr. King’s “I’ve got a dream” speech.

The song, which Dr. King had requested, came as much from Miss Jackson’s heart as from her vocal cords. The granddaughter of a slave, she had struggled for years for fulfillment and for unprejudiced recognition of her talent.

She received the latter only belatedly with a Carnegie Hall debut in 1950. Her following, therefore, was largely in the black community, in the churches and among record collectors.

Although Miss Jackson’s medium was the sacred song drawn from the Bible or inspired by it, the words–and the “soul” style in which they were delivered–became metaphors of black protest, Tony Heilbut, author of “The Gospel Sound” and her biographer, said yesterday. Among blacks, he went on, her favorites were “Move On Up a Little Higher,” “Just Over the Hill” and “How I Got Over.”

Singing these and other songs to black audiences, Miss Jackson was a woman on fire, whose combs flew out of her hair as she performed. She moved her listeners to dancing, to shouting, to ecstasy, Mr. Heilbut said. By contrast, he asserted, Miss Jackson’s television style and her conduct before white audiences was far more placid and staid.

Today is the birthday

… of basketball coach Bobby Knight. He’s 68.

… of singer Helen Reddy. “I am woman, hear me roar” is a roaring 67.

… of author Anne Tyler (not to be confused with Ann Taylor). The Pulitzer winner (for Breathing Lessons) is 67.

Early in her career, she decided she did not want to be a public person, so she stopped giving readings and only does occasional interviews in writing. She said, “Any time I talk in public about writing, I end up not able to do any writing. It’s as if some capricious Writing Elf goes into a little sulk whenever I expose him.” Ann Tyler also said, “I want to live other lives. I’ve never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. It’s lucky I do it on paper. Probably I would be schizophrenic — and six times divorced — if I weren’t writing.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

… of basketball hall-of-famer Dave Cowens. The tenacious Celtic is 60.

… of Nancy Cartwright. The voice of Bart Simpson is 51.

Pablo Picasso was born on this date in 1881.

Charles Edward Coughlin was born on this date in 1891.

One of the first public figures to make effective use of the airwaves, Charles E. Coughlin, was for a time one of the most influential personalities on American radio. At the height of his popularity in the early 1930s, some 30 million listeners tuned in to hear his emotional messages. Many of his speeches were rambling, disorganized, repetitious, and as time went by, they became increasingly full of bigoted rhetoric. But as a champion of the poor, a foe of big business, and a critic of federal indifference in the face of widespread economic distress, he spoke to the hopes and fears of lower-middle class Americans throughout the country. Years later, a supporter remembered the excitement of attending one of his rallies: “When he spoke it was a thrill like Hitler. And the magnetism was uncanny. It was so intoxicating, there’s no use saying what he talked about…”

The American Experience

NewMexiKen once attended a sermon by Fr. Coughlin. I remember it only that I knew who he’d been thirty years earlier and that it had political undertones. The link above has more details about Coughlin’s career. The Talking History Archive has a Coughlin broadcast. Scroll down the page about 40%.

Today is the birthday

… of football hall-of-fame quarterback Yelberton Abraham “Y.A.” Tittle, 82.

Career record: 2,427 completions, 33,070 yards, 242 TDs, 13 games over 300 yards passing…Paced 1961, 1962, 1963 Giants to division titles…Threw 33 TD passes in 1962, 36 in 1963…NFL’s Most Valuable Player, 1961, 1963.

… of Bill Wyman. The Rolling Stones’ bassist (1962-1992) is 72.

… of F. Murray Abraham. The Oscar-winning best actor (Amadeus) is 69 today.

… of Kevin Kline. The Oscar-winning best supporting actor (A Fish Called Wanda) is 61 today.

Bob Kane, the cartoonist who created “Batman” was born on October 24, 1915. From his Times obituary in 1998:

In 1938 he started drawing adventure strips, ”Rusty and His Pals” and ”Clip Carson,” for National Comics. That same year, a comic-book hero called Superman appeared. Vincent Sullivan, the editor of National Comics, who also owned Superman, asked Mr. Kane and Mr. Finger to come up with a Supercompetitor. They developed Batman on a single weekend. Mr. Kane was 18 [23].

The first Batman strip came out in May 1939 in Detective Comics, one year after the debut of Superman. Batman’s first adventure was called ”The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.” And he was another kind of superhero entirely. Batman wasn’t as strong as Superman, but he was much more agile, a better dresser and had better contraptions and a cooler place to live.

He lived in the Batcave, drove the Batmobile, which had a crime lab and a closed-circuit television in the back, and owned a Batplane. He also kept a lot of tools in his utility belt, including knockout gas, a smoke screen and a radio.

”Since he had no superpowers, he had to rely only on his physical and his mental skills,” said Allan Asherman, the librarian of DC Comics.

Playwright and director Moss Hart was born on October 24th in 1904.

A distinguished librettist, director, and playwright who was particularly renowned for his work with George S. Kaufman. Hart is reported to have written the book for the short-lived “Jonica” in 1930, but his first real Broadway musical credit came three years later when he contributed the sketches to the Irving Berlin revue “As Thousands Cheer.” Subsequent revues for which he co-wrote sketches included “The Show Is On,” “Seven Lively Arts,” and “Inside USA.” During the remainder of the ’30s Hart wrote the librettos for “The Great Waltz” (adapted from the operetta “Waltzes of Vienna”), “Jubilee,” “I’d Rather Be Right” (with Kaufman), and “Sing Out the News” (which he also co-produced with Kaufman and Max Gordon). In 1941 he wrote one of his wittiest and most inventive books for “Lady in Dark,” which starred Gertrude Lawrence, and gave Danny Kaye his first chance on Broadway.

Thereafter, as far as the musical theater was concerned, apart from the occasional revue, Hart concentrated mostly on directing, and sometimes producing, shows such as Irving Berlin’s “Miss Liberty,” and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s smash hits “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.” He won a Tony Award for his work on “My Fair Lady.” His considerable output for the straight theater included “Light up the Sky,” “The Climate of Eden,” “Winged Victory,” and (with Kaufman) “Once in a Lifetime,” “You Can’t Take It With You” (for which they both won the Pulitzer Prize), and “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Hart also wrote the screenplays for two film musicals, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (1952) and the 1954 remake of A STAR IS BORN, starring Judy Garland. His absorbing autobiography, ACT ONE, was filmed in 1963 with George Hamilton as Hart and Jason Robards as Kaufman.

Broadway: The American Musical . Stars Over Broadway | PBS

Coast-to-coast telegraph service was completed on this date in 1861.

Thursday, October 24th, 1929 — Black Thursday — was the first of three most significant days (the others were Monday the 28th and Tuesday the 29th) of the stock market crash.

The iPod is 7-years-old today. It was introduced by Steve Jobs on October 23, 2001.

The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase “Open the pod bay door, Hal!”, which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Joseph N. Grasso of New Jersey had originally listed an “ipod” trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in July 2000 for Internet kiosks. The first ipod kiosks had been demonstrated to the public in New Jersey in March 1998, and commercial use began in January 2000. The trademark was registered by the USPTO in November 2003, and Grasso assigned it to Apple Computer, Inc. in 2005.

Wikipedia

Pele is 68 today.

Michael Crichton is 66.

Oscar-winning director Ang Lee is 54.

Dwight Yoakam is 52. Yoakam has been in a number of films — he was the nasty boyfriend in Sling Blade — but it’s country music that earned his fame.

With his stripped-down approach to traditional honky tonk and Bakersfield country, Dwight Yoakam helped return country music to its roots in the late ’80s. Like his idols Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Hank Williams, Yoakam never played by Nashville’s rules; consequently, he never dominated the charts like his contemporary Randy Travis. Then again, Travis never played around with the sound and style of country music like Yoakam. On each of his records, he twists around the form enough to make it seem like he doesn’t respect all of country’s traditions. Appropriately, his core audience was composed mainly of roots rock and rock & roll fans, not the mainstream country audience. Nevertheless, he was frequently able to chart in the country Top Ten, and he remained one of the most respected and adventurous recording country artists well into the ’90s.

allmusic

Weird Al Yankovic is 49.

Johnny Carson was born 83 years ago today. A little luck and many fewer cigarettes and he might be alive today. While he was alive, Carson would have been NewMexiKen’s choice for the person I’d most like to have dinner with.

John William Heisman was born on this date in 1869. He’s the guy the trophy is named after. The following milestones in Heisman’s career are excerpted from his 1936 obituary in The New York Times and put here in chronological order.

In 1888 he was a member of the Brown football team, and in 1889 of the Pennsylvania varsity football eleven.

He began his coaching career in 1892 at Oberlin College. In 1893 he coached all sports at the University of Akron. From 1895 to 1900 he coached football and baseball at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, and from 1900 to 1904 was coach at Clemson College.

From 1904 to 1920 he coached football, baseball and basketball at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he developed the famous “Golden Tornado” teams.

In 1908 he was director of athletics at the Atlanta Athletic Club. From 1910 to 1914 he was president of the Atlanta Baseball Association. In 1920 he coached football at the University of Pennsylvania and in 1923 filled the same position at Washington and Jefferson College. From 1924 to 1927 he was head football coach and director of athletics at Rice Institute, Houston, Texas.

In 1923 and 1924 he was president of the American Football Coaches Association.

For the last six years [before 1936] he had been physical director of the Downtown Athletic Club.

Curly Howard (Jerome Lester Horwitz) was born on this date in 1903.

80 67 66 52 49 1917

Whitey Ford

Steve Cropper

Judy Sheindlin (“Judge Judy”)

Carrie Fisher

Ken Watanabe

Dizzy Gillespie

NewMexiKen’s parents eloped 66 years ago today. She was a high school senior just turned 17. He was a 19-year-old sailor.

BTW, do you even know who Steve Cropper is?

According to the All Music Guide:

Probably the best-known soul guitarist in the world, Cropper came to prominence in the early ’60s, first with the Mar-Keys (“Last Night”), then as a founding member of Booker T. & the MG’s. A major figure in the Southern soul movement of the ’60s, Cropper made his mark not only as a player and arranger (most notably on classic sides by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Wilson Pickett) but as a songwriter as well, co-writing the classic “In the Midnight Hour.”

And Green Onions is the single greatest rock instrumental ever, period (Booker T. Jones, organ; Steve Cropper, guitar; Lewis Steinberg, bass; Al Jackson, drums). MG’s, by the way, stands for Memphis Group, not the car.

And Whitey Ford:

Edward Whitey Ford was the big-game pitcher on the great Yankees teams of the 1950s and early ’60s, earning him the moniker Chairman of the Board. The wily southpaw’s lifetime record of 236-106 gives him the best winning percentage (.690) of any 20th century pitcher. He paced the American League in victories three times, and in ERA and shutouts twice. The 1961 Cy Young Award winner still holds many World Series records, including 10 wins and 94 strikeouts, once pitching 33 consecutive scoreless innings in the Fall Classic.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Arthur Miller, the playwright (The Crucible, Death of a Salesman) and one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe, was born on this date in 1915.

n the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

American Masters

Rita Hayworth was born on this date in 1918.

Montgomery Clift was born on October 17 in 1920. Clift was nominated for the best actor Oscar three times and supporting actor once. He played Prewitt, the bugler who won’t box, in From Here to Eternity.

It’s also the birthday

… of Jimmy Breslin. The columnist is 78.

… of Margot Kidder. Lois Lane is 60.

… of George Wendt. Norm is 60.

Sam: What’ll you have Normie?
Norm: Well, I’m in a gambling mood Sammy. I’ll take a glass of whatever comes out of that tap.
Sam: Looks like beer, Norm.
Norm: Call me Mister Lucky.

… of country singer Alan Jackson; he’s 50.

… of golfer Ernie Els, 39.

And of Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem. He’s 36.

Angela Lansbury is 83 today. Lansbury was 36 when she played 34-year-old Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate. For that alone she deserved the Academy Award nomination she received; it was her third supporting actress nomination.

Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass is 81.

Suzanne Somers turns 62 today. (No NewMexiKen’s kids, you’re still not allowed to watch Three’s Company.)

Tim Robbins is 50 today. Robbins won a supporting actor Oscar for Mystic River and received a best director nomination for Dead Man Walking. Hard to beat his portrayal of Andy Dufresne, though.

John Mayer is 31 today.

Nobel and Pulitizer Prize winner Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16th in 1888.

Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity. O’Neill’s disdain for the commercial realities of the theater world he was born into led him to produce works of importance and integrity.

American Masters

John Brown began his famous raid on this date in 1859:

Late on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one armed followers stole into the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept. The men–among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave–hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an “army of emancipation” to overturn the institution of slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Col. Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town’s United States arsenal and its rifle works.

The upper hand which nighttime surprise had afforded the raiders quickly eroded, and by the evening of October 17, the conspirators who were still alive were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on October 18 to storm the building.

Library of Congress

Marie Antoinette’s head became estranged from the rest of her body on this date in 1793.

Today is the birthday

… of Lee Iacocca. The former Ford executive and Chrysler chairman is back on television in ads at 84.

… of Barry McGuire. The rock/folk singer is 73. NewMexiKen suspects the “Eve of Destruction” is even closer at hand.

… of Linda Lavin. Television’s “Alice” is 71.

… of Penny Marshall. The actress turned director is 66.

… of Jim Palmer. The baseball hall-of-famer is 63. We don’t see him in those underwear ads as often anymore. Palmer won World Series games in three decades (1966, 1970 and 1971, 1983).

… of Richard Carpenter. Karen’s brother is 62.

… of Emeril Lagasse. The TV chef is 49.

… of Sarah Ferguson. She’s 49.

… of Dominic West, foremost of The Wire, 39.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith was born 100 years ago today. Galbraith once wrote a speech for President Lyndon Johnson. Galbraith was a very prominent economist and not a speech writer, but he worked diligently on the draft and was impressed with what he produced. It was given to LBJ who, out of respect for the economist, told him personally what he thought. “Ken,” LBJ said. “Writing a speech is a lot like wetting your pants. What feels warm and comforting to you can just seem cold and sticky to everyone else.” Galbraith died in 2006.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was born 91 years ago today. By the time of his death in 2006 Schlesinger had become a celebrity — a person known mostly for being well-known — but he was the winner of two Pulitizer Prizes in history — The Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days.

Before Schlesinger, historians thought of American democracy as the product of an almost mystical frontier or agrarian egalitarianism. The Age of Jackson toppled that interpretation by placing democracy’s origins firmly in the context of the founding generation’s ideas about the few and the many, and by seeing democracy’s expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections. More than any previous account, Schlesinger’s examined the activities and ideas of obscure, ordinary Americans, as well as towering political leaders. While he identified most of the key political events and changes of the era, Schlesinger also located the origins of modern liberal politics in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and in their belief, as he wrote, that future challenges “will best be met by a society in which no single group is able to sacrifice democracy and liberty to its interests.”

Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Seems pertinent enough today.

Mario Puzo was born on October 15th in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac told us this in 2004:

[Puzo is] best known as the author of the novel The Godfather (1969), which was made into a movie in 1972. People had written novels and made movies about the mafia before, but the mafia characters had always been the villains. Puzo was the first person to write about members of the mafia as the sympathetic main characters of a story. The son of Italian immigrants, he started out trying to write serious literary fiction. He published two novels that barely sold any copies. He fell into debt, trying to support his family as a freelance writer. One Christmas Eve, he had a severe gall bladder attack and took a cab to the hospital. When he got out of the cab, he was in so much pain that he fell into the gutter. Lying there, he said to himself, “Here I am, a published writer, and I am dying like a dog.” He vowed that he would devote the rest of his writing life to becoming rich and famous. The Godfather became the best-selling novel of the 1970s, and many critics credit Puzo with inventing the mafia as a serious literary and cinematic subject. He went on to publish many other books, including The Sicilian (1984) and The Last Don (1996), but he always felt that his best book was the last book he wrote before he became a success – The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), about an ordinary Italian immigrant family.

Puzo died in 1999.

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson was born on October 15, 1872. The 59-year-old president and widower Woodrow Wilson married the 43-year-old widow Mrs. Galt in 1915. (Michael Douglas was 51 and Annette Benning 37 when they played a fictional “first couple” in the 1995 film The American President.)

[President Wilson’s] health failed in September 1919; a stroke left him partly paralyzed. His constant attendant, Mrs. Wilson took over many routine duties and details of government. But she did not initiate programs or make major decisions, and she did not try to control the executive branch. She selected matters for her husband’s attention and let everything else go to the heads of departments or remain in abeyance. Her “stewardship,” she called this. And in My Memoir, published in 1939, she stated emphatically that her husband’s doctors had urged this course upon her.

The White House

Mrs. Wilson lived until 1961.

Today is the birthday

… of John Wooden. The Wizard of Westwood is 98.

… of former surgeon general C. Everett Koop. Guess he knew what he was talking about because he’s 92 today.

… of Roger Moore. The oldest of the James Bonds in 81.

… of former Nixon White House Counsel and convicted multiple felon John Dean, 70 today.

… of Ralph Lauren. The founder of Polo is 69.

… of the judge of Night Court, Harry Anderson, who is 56 today.

… of Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks. She’s 34.

… of Usher. He’s 30.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II and the 34th president of the United States, was born in Denison, Texas, on this date in 1890.

NewMexiKen is the third in a line of four Kenneths. The first Kenneth, my eponymous grandfather, was born on this date in 1899.

Today is the birthday

… of Margaret Thatcher, 83.

… of Melinda Dillon. That’s the mom in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She’s 69. Dillon was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar for that role and for her part in Absence of Malice.

… of Paul Simon. He’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” at 67.

Paul Simon is among the most erudite and daring songsmiths in popular music. After the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel in 1970, Simon embarked on a fruitful solo career that’s been notable for lyrical acuity, impeccable musicianship and stylistic daring. While Simon and Garfunkel worked largely (but not exclusively) in the folk idiom, Simon the solo artist has roamed wherever his muse has taken him – and that has literally meant around the world. His is not so much a conventional career in music as an odyssey of discovery using “intuitive flashes, synaptic leaps and shorthand logic” (in Simon’s own words) to help him on his way.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Demond Wilson. Sanford’s son is 62.

… of Sammy Hagar, 61.

However, Van Halen bounced back strong following Roth’s departure. The group recruited Sammy Hagar, who sang and played guitar. Hagar had started out with the hard-rock group Montrose and had a highly successful solo career. He fit well with Van Halen, with whom he was more personally compatible than his predecessor. In fact, the newly harmonious group scored its first Number One album with 5150, on which Hagar handles lead vocals.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Marie Osmond. She’s 49!

… of Jerry Rice. He’s 46.

… of Kate Walsh, 41. And yes, that’s her in the Cadillac ads. “The real question is, when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?”

… of skater Nancy Kerrigan. She’s 39.

… of Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen is 37.

The woman known as Molly Pitcher was born on October 13, 1754.

An Artillery wife, Mary Hays McCauly (better known as Molly Pitcher) shared the rigors of Valley Forge with her husband, William Hays. Her actions during the battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778 became legendary. That day at Monmouth was as hot as Valley Forge was cold. Someone had to cool the hot guns and bathe parched throats with water.

Across that bullet-swept ground, a striped skirt fluttered. Mary Hays McCauly was earning her nickname “Molly Pitcher” by bringing pitcher after pitcher of cool spring water to the exhausted and thirsty men. She also tended to the wounded and once, heaving a crippled Continental soldier up on her strong young back, carried him out of reach of hard-charging Britishers. On her next trip with water, she found her artilleryman husband back with the guns again, replacing a casualty. While she watched, Hays fell wounded. The piece, its crew too depleted to serve it, was about to be withdrawn. Without hesitation, Molly stepped forward and took the rammer staff from her fallen husband’s hands. For the second time on an American battlefield, a woman manned a gun. (The first was Margaret Corbin during the defense of Fort Washington in 1776.) Resolutely, she stayed at her post in the face of heavy enemy fire, ably acting as a matross (gunner).

For her heroic role, General Washington himself issued her a warrant as a noncommissioned officer. Thereafter, she was widely hailed as “Sergeant Molly.” A flagstaff and cannon stand at her gravesite at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A sculpture on the battle monument commemorates her courageous deed.

Fort Sill History

Art Tatum was born on October 13th in 1909.

It’s hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum’s piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, “I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.”

NPR : Art Tatum

Leonard Alfred Schneider was born on this date in 1925. We know him as Lenny Bruce.

On April 1, 1964, four New York City vice squad officers attended Bruce’s performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. The officers arrested Bruce and owner Howard Solomon following Bruce’s 10:00 P.M. show. Assistant District Attorney Richard Kuh presented a grand jury with a typed partial script of Bruce’s performance including references to Jackie Kennedy trying to “save her ass” after her husband’s assassination, Eleanor Roosevelt’s “nice tits,” sexual intimacy with a chicken, “pissing in the sink,” the Lone Ranger sodomizing Tonto, and St. Paul giving up “fucking” for Lent. The jury indicted Bruce on the obscenity charge. The trial before a three-judge court in New York City that followed stands as a remarkable moment in the history of free speech. Both the prosecution and defense presented parades of well-known witnesses to either denounce Bruce’s performance as the worst sort of gutter humor or celebrate it as a powerful and insightful social commentary. Among the witnesses testifying in support of Bruce were What’s My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, sociologist Herbert Gans, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. In the end, the censors won. Voting 2 to 1, the court found Bruce guilty of violating New York’s obscenity laws and sentenced him to “four months in the workhouse.”

Famous Trials: The Lenny Bruce Trial

Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966.

Today is the birthday

… of Elmore Leonard. He’s 83. Leonard on his Rules of Writing — “These rules I picked up along the way to help me remain invisible while I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.” (Quotation from If You Can’t Do It Well, Don’t Do It.)

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

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

… of Joan Cusack. The actress is 46. She’s been nominated for the best actress in a supporting role Oscar twice, Working Girl and In & Out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today is the birthday

… of Peter Coyote, the actor. He’s 67. Coyote does a lot of voice-over and narration. He’s the one that sounds a lot like Henry Fonda. He’s appeared in more than 100 films and television shows (including recently in “Commander in Chief”), though he began acting only at age 39. He tested for the part of Indiana Jones.

… of “Chicken George.” Actor Ben Vereen is 62. He played Alex Haley’s ancestor, “Chicken George,” in Roots.

… of singer John Prine, 62.

… of David Lee Roth, 54.

… of Tanya Tucker, 50.

… of Bradley Whitford. He’s 49.

… of Brett Favre. He’s 39.

… of Dale Earnhardt Jr. He’s 34.

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

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

American Masters

Thelonious Monk was born on this date in 1917.

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

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

Monk died in 1982.

John Lennon should have been 68 today.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Jackson Browne is 60.

Jackson Browne has been both an introspective, cerebral songwriter and a politically attuned voice of conscience. He emerged in the early Seventies as a soul-baring young folksinger whose songs dealt with riddles of romance and existence. In his middle period he became a more extroverted rock and roller. Later work grew more topical in nature as Browne sang of political and social realities within and beyond our borders.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Robert Wuhl is 57. Wuhl, known most recently for Arli$$, shared in two Emmys for writing for the Academy Awards show (1991, 1992). NewMexiKen liked him best as the coach in Bull Durham.

“Okay, well, uh… candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she’s registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let’s get two! Go get ’em.”

Tony Shalhoub, Monk, is 55.

Guillermo del Toro, writer-director-producer of El Laberinto del fauno, is 44.

Annika Sorenstam is 38.

Sean Lennon is 33.

Charles Walgreen was born on this date in 1873. Yes, he’s the man who began the Walgreen’s drug store chain, starting in Chicago. It was a Walgreen’s soda fountain employee who invented the malted milkshake in 1922, which puts him right up there with Edison as far as NewMexiKen is concerned.

And Bruce Catton was born on this date in 1899.

Bruce Catton was fifty when he began work on the first two of what would become thirteen books on the Civil War – Mr. Lincoln’s Army, (1951) followed one year later by Glory Road. His debut was hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “military history at its best.” He “combines the scholar’s appreciation of the Grand Design with a newsman’s keenness for meaningful vignette,” said Newsweek. Catton immersed himself in a vast range of primary materials, especially the diaries, letters and anecdotal reports of soldiers on the ground, which gave his books from the outset their unique, “you are there” ambience.

In 1954, Catton became the first editor of American Heritage Magazine in Washington, where he remained as Senior Editor until his death in 1978.

“There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work,” wrote Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of the magazine, “that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”

Neil Baldwin

My god but we’re all getting old.

Today Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan, is 69; Jesse Jackson 67; Chevy Chase 65; Sigourney Weaver 59; and Stephanie Zimbalist 52. Even Matt Damon is 38.

Eddie Rickenbacker was born on this date in 1890.

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times

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

Mary Badham is 56 today. You know her as Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. She was nine going-on 10 when they made the film and she received a best supporting actress Oscar nomination. Badham has just five other film and TV credits.

Yo-Yo Ma is 53.

Sherman Alexie was born 42 years ago today on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

The book that made him famous was his first collection of short stories called The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). He adapted it into a screenplay for the movie Smoke Signals (1998). Smoke Signals was the first commercial feature film entirely written, directed, and acted by Native Americans. His newest book is a young adult novel called The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007).

He said, “Indians have a way of surviving. But it’s almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language, and land rights. It’s the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn’t take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins.”

The Writer’s Almanac

Alexie’s books and stories are good stuff, and the movie delightful.

Cornell University welcomed its first students 140 years ago today.

It’s the birthday

… of gothic author Anne Rice, 67. She is said to have sold 100 million books.

… of Susan Sarandon. The five-time nominee for best actress (she won for Dead Man Walking) is 62 today.

… of Alicia Silverstone, probably not as clueless at 32.

Charlton Heston would have been 84 today. Heston won the best actor Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959), his only nomination.

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

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

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

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

American Masters | PBS

Frederic Remington was born on October 4th in 1861.

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

American Masters | PBS

Photo of sculpture from Amon Carter Museum.

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

As the Library of Congress tells it:

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

Gore Vidal is 83 today.

Steve Reich is 72. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross in The New Yorker explain Reich’s compostitions:

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

The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” Here’s that report. (RealPlayer)

Chubby Checker is 67. His version of “The Twist” was number one in both 1960 and 1962.

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

My good senator, Jeff Bingaman, is 65 today.

Roy is 64.

In their three-plus decades in Las Vegas, Siegfried & Roy have performed for more than 25 million people. Through the years, they have seen many changes in the city’s entertainment scene, some of which they were personally responsible for. The illusionists opened the door to family entertainment, setting a standard in stage extravaganzas that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the world.

Lindsey Buckingham is 59. For years I thought Lindsey was Stevie and Stevie was Lindsey.

Keb’ Mo’ is 57.

Dave Winfield is 57.

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

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Dennis Eckersley is 54.

Dennis Eckersley blazed a unique path to Hall of Fame success. During the first half of his 24-year big league career, Eck won over 150 games primarily as a starter, including a no-hitter in 1977. Over his final 12 years, he saved nearly 400 games, leading his hometown Oakland A’s to four American League West titles and earning both Cy Young and MVP honors in 1992. The only pitcher with 100 saves and 100 complete games, Eckersley dominated opposing batters during a six-year stretch from 1988 to 1993, in which he struck out 458 while walking just 51.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Al Sharpton is 54.

Donna Moss is 39. That’s Janel Moloney of The West Wing.

Not only is Gwen Stefani not a “Hollaback Girl,” at 39 one might say she’s not even a girl.

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

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

John Ross was born on October 3rd in 1790.

He spent his early life trying to design a new government for the Cherokees, based on the U.S. government, with a constitution and three separate but equal branches and democratically elected leaders. He respected the American justice system so much that when the state of Georgia tried to force Cherokees off their land, John Ross chose not to go to war, but instead took Georgia to court. It was the first time that an Indian tribe had ever sued the U.S. over treaty rights, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The case was decided in 1832, and Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in his opinion that the state of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over Cherokees and therefore could not force the Cherokees to leave their land. But President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the decision. He said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Six years later, 15,000 Cherokees were forced out of their homes at gunpoint by American soldiers, gathered together in camps and then forced to walk to the new “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi, an event that became known as The Trail of Tears. The camps had horrible hygienic conditions, and an epidemic of dysentery killed an estimated 8,000 Cherokees, including John Ross’s wife.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

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

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

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

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

The New York Times

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

Maury Wills is 76 today. Wills stole 104 bases in 1962 to break Ty Cobb’s 47-year-old record. So far, that hasn’t been enough to get him into the Hall of Fame.

Don McLean is 63.

Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer’s day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.

Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they’ll listen now.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz is 59.

Gordon Sumner is 57. You know, Sting.

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in the fields of gold

So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in the fields of gold

Lorraine Bracco is 54.

Graham Greene was born on October 2nd in 1904.

Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just 500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. And at that pace, he managed to publish 26 novels, as well as numerous short stories, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and travel books. He said, “We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

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

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

Football hall-of-fame inductee George Blanda is 81 today. I’m surprised he doesn’t suit up. Blanda played his last game on January 4, 1976, the 1975 AFC Championship. He was 48.

Supreme Court Justice David Souter is 69.

Coach Phil Jackson is 63. Lots of good people born in 1945 (and we are not Baby Boomers, we are War Babies).

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is 57. That’s Cassandra Peterson.

Rita Rudner is 52.

Ken Kesey was born on September 17, 1935. The Writer’s Almanac had a great little essay last year that you should just go read. It begins:

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

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

The 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, was born 101 years ago today.

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

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

The Writer’s Almanac

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