Category: Birthdays

Issac Hayes would have been 66 today.

Connie Chung is 62, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant 60, Al Roker 54, and Joan Allen 52.

Bill Clinton is 62 today.

… is the birthday of Fess Parker, the actor who played Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. He’s 84.

Parker and NewMexiKen have at least one thing in common. We had the same Russian language professor in college; Parker at Texas, NewMexiKen at Arizona. He was Professor Arthur Coleman and, as I remember it, he was the very first American Ph.D. ever in Slavic languages. By the time he showed up at Arizona in the early 1960s, Coleman was more-or-less retired, staying just one year as a visiting professor — as much character as educator, which is why we learned he’d taught Fess Parker.

Actor Robert Culp is 78 today. He was Bill Cosby’s sidekick (or Cosby was his) in the first TV series to feature an African-American, I Spy.

Frank Gifford is 78 today. Kathie Lee Gifford is 55 today.

One-time Oscar nominee for best supporting actress, Lesley Ann Warren is 62 today.

Oscar-winner James Cameron is 54. Cameron won, of course, for Titanic — writer, director, best picture.

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone is 50.

Best actress Oscar nominee Angela Bassett is 50 today too.

Supporting actor Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton is 48.

Steve Carrell is 45.

Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks is 36. Originally Emily Erwin (Robison is her married name), she and her sister Martie (now Maguire) founded the group with two other classmates. The other two left and the group added Natalie Maines as the lead singer in 1995.

Football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg was born on this date in 1862. Stagg, Skull and Bones at Yale, was on the first All-America team ever (1889). He coached most famously at the University of Chicago, 1892-1932. Stagg developed the man-in-motion and the lateral pass — and developed basketball as a five man game. He is in both the college football and basketball halls of fame.

Elvis Presley died 31 years ago today, he was 42. Margaret Mitchell died 59 years ago today, at age 48. Babe Ruth died 60 years ago today, he was 53. Robert Johnson died 70 years ago today, he was 27.

The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published 54 years ago.

… is Napoleon’s birthday. He was born August 15, 1769 (and died in 1821, at age 51). As an adult, Napoleon was just over 5-feet, 6-inches tall (1.686 m), about average for his countrymen at the time.

Four time Oscar nominee for best supporting actress (one win), Ethel Barrymore was born on this date in 1879.

Pulitzer-winning author Edna Ferber was born 120 years ago today. She’s known best for So Big (Pulitzer prize in 1924), Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace.

TV chef Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California, on this date in 1912.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is 70.

Pro Football Hall of Fame member Gene Upshaw is 63 today. Upshaw played for the Raiders, 1967-1981. (Ahh, the glory years.) Upshaw has had a second career as Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association since 1983.

Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth, is 58.

Grace, that is, actress Debra Messing, is 40.

Ben Affleck is 36.

The Wizard of Oz premiered 69 years ago tonight.

… of Earl Weaver. The former Orioles manager is 78.

… of Dash Crofts. The Crofts of Seals and Crofts is 70.

… of David Crosby. The Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash is 67. Mama Cass introduced Crosby, Stills and Nash to one another in 1968. Before that, of course, Mr. Crosby was in another Hall of Fame group, The Byrds.

… of Steve Martin, born in Waco, Texas, but grew up in Orange County, California. He’s 63 today.

… of Susan St. James. The wife of McMillan and Wife is 62. McMillan was played by Rock Hudson.

… of Danielle Steel. The author is 61.

… of Gary Larson. The Far Side cartoonist is 58.

… of Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Magic is 49, as is actress Marcia Gay Harden.

… of Susan Olsen. Cindy, of The Brady Bunch, is 47.

… of Halle Berry. The Academy Award winner is 42.

… of Ernest Thayer, the man who wrote “Casey at the Bat,” born on this date in 1863.

The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer

. . . is 82 today. Castro took control of Cuba in 1959.

NewMexiKen saw Castro give a speech outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1993. It was interesting to see the man who has been so much a focus of America for now nearly 50 years.

Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. (He says he was 12, but should have been 13 or 14.) “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter [back] because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.” Castro went on to say, “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you [FDR] don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.”

A copy of the letter is here.

Biography.com has more information about Castro.

If you know anything about mythology you probably learned about it first from Edith Hamilton, born on this date in 1867. Hamilton’s book Mythology, written after she had retired as a school head mistress, was published in 1942.

George Hamilton is 69 today.

Mark Knopfler is 59. Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.

Pete Sampras is 37.

Cantinflas, the great Mexican comedian, acrobat and musician — and bullfighter — was born on this date in 1911. His actual name was Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes. Cantinflas was Passepartout in Michael Todd’s 1956 Around the World in Eighty Days. In English-speaking countries, David Niven was billed as the star. Elsewhere Cantinflas took top billing — he was the highest paid actor in the world at the time. He saved the movie from the stiff Niven if you ask me.

The movie producer Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12th in 1881. Known for his extravaganzas (e.g., The Ten Commandments), DeMille won his only Oscar for The Greatest Show on Earth.

And it’s the birthday of Zerna Sharp, born in Hillisburg, Indiana, on this date in 1889. According to The Writer’s Almanac a few years back, Ms. Sharp is the woman who —

invented the characters Dick and Jane to help teach children how to read…Sharp’s idea was to use pictures and repetition to teach children new words. She took her idea to Dr. William S. Gray, who had been studying the way children learn to read, and he hired her to create a series of textbooks. She didn’t write the books, but she created the characters Dick, Jane, their sister Sally, their dog Spot, and their cat Puff. Each story introduced five new words, one on each page.

… was born on this date in 1921. Haley was the author of two publishing phenomena — The Autobiography of Malcolm X (6 million copies) and Roots, which was not only a best-seller, but led to one of the most successful television series ever. Nearly half the people in the country watched the last episode in January 1977. Haley won a special Pulitizer for Roots, “the story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.”

NewMexiKen co-chaired a symposium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1979, that included Haley. He was a very self-possessed and self-assured speaker, confident yet pleasant and informal. He spoke for some time without notes, telling the story about the story — that is, how he learned about his family. Along with the Archivist of the U.S. and the program co-chairman, I sat on the stage behind Haley as he spoke and could see the rapture on the faces of his listeners. To an audience of genealogists this was the Sermon on the Mount.

Subsequently it bothered me to learn he plagarized sections of the book and possibly fudged some of the genealogy. Clearly, that wasn’t right. Even so, the good his work did in educating both black and white America (and I include both books) was a legacy of major proportion.

Haley, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard 1939-1959, before becoming a full-time writer, died of a heart attack in 1992. The Coast Guard has named a cutter for him.

Lucille Ball was born on this date in 1911. NewMexiKen once read that Ms. Ball’s image had been seen more times by more people than that of any other person in history.

Miss Ball, noted for impeccable timing, deft pantomime and an endearing talent for making the outrageous believable, was a Hollywood legend: a contract player at RKO in the 1930’s and 40’s who later bought the studio with Desi Arnaz, her first husband.
. . .

The elastic-faced, husky-voiced comedian was a national institution from 1951 to 1974 in three series and many specials on television that centered on her ”Lucy” character. The first series, ”I Love Lucy,” was for six years the most successful comedy series on television, never ranking lower than third. The series, on CBS, chronicled the life of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, a Cuban band leader played by Mr. Arnaz, who was Miss Ball’s husband on and off screen for nearly 20 years.

The New York Times

If Lucy isn’t enough for a holiday, how about Andy Warhol? He was born Andrew Warhola on this date 80 years ago.

His father was a Czechoslovakian immigrant and a coal miner. His mother was extremely protective, and she let him spend all his time as a child drawing copies of Maybelline advertisements.

He got a job as an advertising illustrator in New York City in the 1950s, but he wanted to be a serious artist. One day, he got the idea to start painting pictures of advertisements, movie stars, and other popular images. He made silk-screened pictures of Campbell’s soup cans and sculptures of Brillo boxes, and his style became known as Pop Art.

Though he was surrounded by hard-partying rock stars and artists, he lived with his mother, and he went to a Catholic church almost every Sunday. His friends said that he never took drugs and only drank occasionally.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Or maybe one of America’s foremost historians, Richard Hofstadter, born on this date in 1916. Sam Tanenhaus, writing two years ago in a review of a Hofstadter biography:

At his death in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was probably this country’s most renowned historian, best known as the originator of the “consensus” school, whose measured siftings of the American past de-emphasized conflict — whether economic, regional or ideological — and highlighted instead the nation’s long tradition of shared ideas, principles and values.

This school had a limited shelf life, but Hofstadter’s work has outlived it, owing to the clarity and nuance of his thought and his talent for drawing parallels between disparate episodes in our national narrative, almost always bringing the argument around to the concerns of midcentury America. “I know it is risky,” he acknowledged in 1960, “but I still write history out of my engagement with the present.” The gamble, of course, was whether questions so pressing in his time would continue to engage later generations. To a remarkable extent they have, and so Hofstadter remains relevant — in some respects more relevant than ever.

Marcia Brady (Maureen McCormick) is 52 today.

… of author P.D. James. Phyllis Dorothy James is 88.

… of Tony Bennett. He’s 82.

… of Martin Sheen, 68. Sheen won one Golden Globe for West Wing, but no Emmys. He did win an Emmy once for a guest role on Murphy Brown.

… of Martha Stewart, 67.

… of hockey hall-of-famer Marcel Dionne and of Jay North (TV’s Dennis the Menace). They’re 57.

… of Randy Scruggs, 55.

… of quarterback Tom Brady, 31.

… of Evangeline Lilly, 29 today. Maybe now she can be found.

Ernie Pyle was born on this date in 1900. Until he was killed by enemy fire in April 1945, Pyle “blogged” World War II for millions of Americans.

From The New York Times obituary.

Ernie Pyle was haunted all his life by an obsession. He said over and over again, “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.”

No man could have been less justified in such a fear. Word of Pyle’s death started tears in the eyes of millions, from the White House to the poorest dwellings in the country.

President Truman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt followed his writings as avidly as any farmer’s wife or city tenement mother with sons in service.

Mrs. Roosevelt once wrote in her column “I have read everything he has sent from overseas,” and recommended his writings to all Americans.

For three years these writings had entered some 14,000,000 homes almost as personal letters from the front. Soldiers’ kin prayed for Ernie Pyle as they prayed for their own sons.

NewMexiKen has before posted this quote from Pyle, but why not do so again on his birthday, and because there’s no place like home.

Yes, there are lots of nice places in the world. I could live with considerable pleasure in the Pacific Northwest, or in New England, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or in Key West or California or Honolulu. But there is only one of me, and I can’t live in all those places. So if we can have only one house — and that’s all we want — then it has to be in New Mexico, and preferably right at the edge of Albuquerque where it is now. Ernie Pyle, January 1942

Pyle’s home on Girard SE is now a branch of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library System.

Eight-time Oscar nominee for best actor, Peter O’Toole is 76 today.

Director-writer-producer Wes Craven is 69.

Kathy Lennon of the Lennon Sisters is 65.

Eddie Munster, aka actor Butch Patrick, is 55.

Emmy-winner, for Angels in America, and Weeds star Mary Louise Parker is 44 today. Parker played Amy Gardner on West Wing.

Actress Myrna Loy was born on this date in 1905. IMDB has her listed for an incredible 138 roles, beginning with silent films when she was the femme fatale, but more famously as the witty, urbane Nora Charles in The Thin Man movies. NewMexiKen liked her in The Best Years of Our Lives, a film everyone should see. It won seven Academy Awards in 1946.

Author James Baldwin was born on this date in 1924.

After writing a number of pieces that were published in various magazines, Baldwin went to Switzerland to finish his first novel. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans was unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN has long been considered an American classic. Throughout the rest of the decade, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing NOTES OF A NATIVE SON (1955) and GIOVANNI’S ROOM (1956). Dealing with taboo themes in both books (homosexuality and interracial relationships, respectively), Baldwin was creating socially relevant and psychologically penetrating literature. (American Masters | PBS)

James Butler Hickok was killed while playing poker in Deadwood 131 years ago today. American Heritage has An Interview with Jeff Morey, an expert on Wild Bill and the frontier.

William Clark, of Lewis and Clark, was born on this date in 1770. He died in 1838.

Francis Scott Key was born on August 1st in 1779.

Richard Henry Dana was born on August 1st in 1815.

Herman Melville was born on August 1st in 1819. The Writer’s Almanac had a brief little bio last year that included this:

Melville started Moby-Dick in the winter of 1850 and finished in the summer of 1851, writing all day every day without eating until four or five o’clock in the evening. When it was finally printed, he handed one of the first copies of the book to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne in a tavern, and later said that that was the best day of his life. But Moby-Dick was a total flop. Melville’s readers wanted adventure stories, and Moby-Dick was an adventure story, but the adventure was obscured by the language. It takes more than a hundred pages before the characters even get on the boat. The book got terrible reviews, and nobody read it.

But if Moby-Dick was a financial failure, Melville’s next book, Pierre (1852), fared even worse. Melville eventually gave up on writing fiction and turned to poetry, which he had to publish himself. He spent the last 20 years of his life working as a customs inspector. It wasn’t until the 1920s that his work was rediscovered.

Robert Todd Lincoln, the first child of Abraham Lincoln and the only one to survive to adulthood, was born on this date in 1843. He died in 1926. (Lincoln’s son Eddie was born in 1846 and died in 1850. Son Willie died at age 12 in 1862. Son Tad (Thomas) died at age 18 in 1871.)

Jerry Garcia was born on this date in 1942. He died in 1995.

Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) is 43 today.

The best-selling author ever is 43 today. That’s J.K. Rowling, who has sold about 400 million Harry Potter books.

Edd “Kookie Kookie lend me your comb” Byrnes is 75 today.

Blues guitarist Buddy Guy is 72.

Oscar nominee (direction and co-writer, The Last Picture Show) Peter Bogdanovich is 69.

Paul Anka is 67. Anka is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is 61

Oscar best actor nominee Laurence Fishburne is 47.

Lisa Kudrow is 45.

Two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank is 34.

The Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel was born on this date in 1890.

MANAGED NEW YORK YANKEES 1949-1960.
WON 10 PENNANTS AND 7 WORLD SERIES WITH
NEW YORK YANKEES. ONLY MANAGER TO WIN
5 CONSECUTIVE WORLD SERIES 1949-1953.
PLAYED OUTFIELD 1912-1925 WITH BROOKLYN,
PITTSBURGH, PHILADELPHIA, NEW YORK AND
BOSTON N.L. TEAMS. MANAGED BROOKLYN
1934-1936, BOSTON BRAVES 1938-1943,
NEW YORK METS 1962-1965.

A few Casey-isms:

“Can’t anybody here play this game?”

“Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa.”

“He’d (Yogi Berra) fall in a sewer and come up with a gold watch.”

One of the most remarkable Americans, Henry Ford, was born on this date in 1863. The following is and excerpt from Mr. Ford’s New York Times obituary in 1947:

Renting a one-story brick shed in Detroit, Mr. Ford spent the year 1902 experimenting with two- cylinder and four-cylinder motors. By that time the public had become interested in the speed possibilities of the automobile, which was no longer regarded as a freak. To capitalize on this interest, he built two racing cars, the “999” and the “Arrow,” each with a four-cylinder engine developing eighty horsepower. The “999,” with the celebrated Barney Oldfield at its wheel, won every race in which it was entered.

The resulting publicity helped Mr. Ford to organize the Ford Motor Company, which was capitalized at $100,000, although actually only $28,000 in stock was subscribed. From the beginning Mr. Ford held majority control of this company. In 1919 he and his son, Edsel, became its sole owners, when they bought out the minority stockholders for $70,000,000.

In 1903 the Ford Motor Company sold 1,708 two-cylinder, eight horsepower automobiles. …

With this material he began the new era of mass production. He concentrated on a single type of chassis, the celebrated Model T, and specified that “any customer can have a car painted any color he wants, so long as it is black.” On Oct. 1, 1908, he began the production of Model T, which sold for $850. The next year he sold 10,600 cars of this model. Cheap and reliable, the car had a tremendous success. In seven years he built and sold 1,000,000 Fords; by 1925 he was producing them at the rate of almost 2,000,000 a year.

He established two cardinal economic policies during this tremendous expansion: the continued cutting of the cost of the product as improved methods of production made it possible, and the payment of higher wages to his employes. By 1926 the cost of the Model T had been cut to $310, although it was vastly superior to the 1908 model. In January, 1914, he established a minimum pay rate of $5 a day for an eight-hour day, thereby creating a national sensation. Up to that time the average wage throughout his works had been $2.40 a nine-hour day.

The entire obituary is really rather fascinating reading.

Douglas Brinkley’s Wheels for the World (2003) is considered a good biography of Ford and the Ford Motor Company.

Catherine Howard married Henry VIII on this date in 1540. She was Mrs. VIII number five.

Maximilien Robespierre got nicked with his razor on this date in 1794. Witnesses said Robespierre died within seconds of the guillotine blade severing his head from his neck but, after viewing A Tale of Two Cities, Dr. Senator Bill Frist was certain guillotine victims “respond to visual stimuli.”

Beatrix Potter was born on this date in 1866.

Beatrix Potter thought she might become a scientist, but when she wrote a paper to present to the Royal Botanic Gardens, she was turned away because only men were allowed to present. So she continued to make detailed drawings of animals and plants, and she continued to refuse the suitors her parents brought home for her, because she didn’t want to be a Victorian housewife and raise children and have no time left for her own interests.

In 1893, Potter sent an illustrated letter to the child of her former governess, and it was in that letter that Peter Rabbit made his debut. She liked creating animal characters, writing and illustrating their stories. So she decided to write children’s books, but for years publishers didn’t take her seriously.

You’ll have to read the rest at The Writer’s Almanac.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on this date in 1929.

“Dollar Bill,” Bill Bradley is 65 today.

Sally Struthers and Georgia Engel are each 60 today.

Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela is 54. Venezuela supplies about 6% of U.S. daily oil consumption.

An earthquake in China killed an estimated 242,000 people 32 years ago today.

Today is the birthday

… of television producer Norman Lear. He’s 86. Lear brought a revolution to TV when he introduced All in the Family in 1971. Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Maude, One Day At a Time and other shows were also his.

… of Jerry Van Dyke, 77.

… of Bugs Bunny, who made his first featured appearance in a cartoon released on this date in 1940, A Wild Hare. Bugs was modeled on Groucho Marx with a carrot instead of a cigar — and with a Brooklyn accent.

… of Bobbie Gentry; she is 64. No word yet on what it was she and Billy Joe threw off the Tallahatchee bridge.

… of Peggy Fleming, 60 today. Miss Fleming won her gold medal for figure skating at the 1968 Winter Olympics.

… of A-Rod. Alex Rodriguez is 33. (Madonna will be 50 next month.)

Baseball manager Leo Durocher was born 103 years ago today. His Hall-of-Fame bio reads:

Leo Durocher was a good-field, no-hit shortstop for 17 years, but gained his greatest notoriety for accomplishments after his playing days. His combative and swashbuckling style, brilliant baseball mind, uncanny memory and fiery disposition became “The Lip’s” trademarks as a colorful and controversial manager for 24 seasons with the Dodgers, Giants, Cubs and Astros. He compiled 2,009 wins in 3,740 games, captured three pennants and won the World Series in 1954. He was named Manager of the Year three times by the “Sporting News.”

The truce ending the Korean War was signed on this date in 1953. Read the report from The New York Times.

The first U.S. government agency, the Department of Foreign Affairs (which became the Department of State), was established on this date in 1789.

… of Bob Lilly. He’s 69. My god the years do go by.

… of Mick Jagger. He’s still can’t get no satisfaction, even at 65. And, as I read somewhere, time isn’t really on his side so much any more, is it?

… of Oscar-winner Helen Mirren, 63.

… of Dorothy Hamill, 52. Another that makes one wonder where the years have gone. Her gold medal was at the 1976 Winter Olympics.

… of two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey. He’s 49. Spacey won for best supporting actor for The Usual Suspects and leading actor for American Beauty.

… of Sandra Bullock. From Arlington, Virginia, she’s 44. Ms. Bullock has been an Academy Award presenter.

Two great comediennes were born on this date — Gracie Allen in 1895, 1897 or 1902 (her birth certificate was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake) and Vivian Vance in 1909.

Because George Burns lived to be 100 and managed to stay in show business nearly until then (playing God in one film, no less), Gracie, who died in 1964 has been largely forgotten. She was the true comedic talent of the two, however. On their radio and television programs George was the straight man, Gracie had the good lines.

At the end of their show, George Burns would say, “Say goodnight, Gracie.” Urban myth has it that she said, “Good night Gracie,” but, in fact, she always just said “Goodnight.”

“Were you the oldest one in the family?” “No, no, my mother and father were much older.” — Gracie Allen

“They laughed at Joan of Arc, but she went right ahead and built it.” — Gracie Allen

“When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.” — Gracie Allen

Vivian Vance was two years older than her long-time co-star Lucille Ball, though many thought Vance to be much older because her I Love Lucy character Ethel Mertz was married to Fred, played by actor William Frawley, who was 18 years older. Miss Vance died of cancer in 1979.

Actor Jason Robards was born on this date in 1922. Robards won two best supporting actor Oscars and was nominated a third time. NewMexiKen liked Robards in A Thousand Clowns, but Martin Balsam got the acting Oscar for that fine film.

Humorist Jean Shepherd was born on this date in 1925. As they so often do, The Writer’s Almanac had a nice, succinct essay (from 2004):

It’s the birthday of humorist Jean Shepherd, born in Chicago, Illinois (1925). He’s remembered for the autobiographical stories he told on the radio about a boy named Ralph Parker growing up in Hohman, Indiana. One of his stories was made into the movie A Christmas Story (1983), which he narrated. It’s about a boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas, even though every adult in his life says that he’ll shoot his eye out. The stories Shepherd told on-air were always improvised, but he later wrote them down and published them in collections like In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash (1967) and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters (1972).

Shepherd said, “Some men are Baptists, others Catholics. My father was an Oldsmobile man.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856), Carl Jung (1875) and Aldous Huxley (1894) were born on July 26th.

Estelle Getty would have been 85 today (she died Tuesday). Ms. Getty won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for her portrayal as Bea Arthur’s mother on The Golden Girls. (Bea Arthur was 86 in May. She is ten months older than Estelle Getty.)

Today is the birthday

… of Academy Award nominee Barbara Harris. The actress is 73. Ms. Harris was nominated for best supporting actress for Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

… of basketball hall-of-famer Nate Thurmond, 67 today.

… of Joey. Matt LeBlanc is 41.

Louise Brown, the first baby conceived by in vitro fertilization is 30 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a brief report.

And …

Henry Knox was born on July 25th in 1750. He is one of the most enjoyable of the Founding Fathers. The following is taken from a longer profile at The General Henry Knox Museum:

Henry Knox was an ordinary man who rose to face extraordinary circumstances. He was born into poverty in Boston in 1750. He left Boston Latin Grammar School at a young age to apprentice to a bookbinder, helping to support his widowed mother and younger brother. He eventually worked his way to opening his own bookshop in Boston at the age of 21, little suspecting the important role that he would play in the birth of our nation. His keen interest in military strategy led him to do a lot of reading on the subject, and when he joined the local militia, his talent was noticed.

In 1775, as the situation between Great Britain and the American colonies was heating up, General George Washington inspected a rampart at Roxbury designed by Knox and was instantly taken with the young man’s abilities. Knox soon became Washington’s Chief of Artillery, and earned a place in history in the winter of 1776 by carting sixty tons of captured cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York to Dorchester Heights, driving the British from Boston Harbor. Throughout most of the war he was by Washington’s side, and eventually rose to Major-General. Following the war he was Washington’s choice for the first Secretary at War. They remained life-long friends.

It’s the birthdate of painter and photographer Thomas Eakins, born on this date in 1844. “Esteemed for his powers of characterization and mastery of technique, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is recognized as one of America’s foremost painters, a master draftsman and watercolorist, and an especially gifted photographer.” The Metropolitan Musuem of Art (source of the preceding quote) had an exhibition of Eakins’s work in 2002, which fortunately remains on line. Click the painting to see the exhibition.

The longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer was born on this date in 1902. The Writer’s Almanac had this in 2006.

It’s the birthday of writer and philosopher Eric Hoffer…, born in New York City (1902). He spent most of his life working on the docks as a longshoreman, and he wrote philosophy in his spare time, including The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). Eric Hoffer said, “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”

The alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges was born on this date in 1907.

One of the most distinctive solo voices in jazz, Hodges was inextricably bound up with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which he first joined in [M]ay 1928, remaining for most of the rest of his life, apart from a brief venture into bandleading from 1951-5. His plaintive blues playing was as memorable as his haunting ballad playing, and although he was capable of producing a tone of incredible beauty and intensity, he could also add a jazzy edge to his sound, and play in a jumping swing style. (BBC – Radio 3 Jazz Profiles)

Here’s a too brief but lovely sample of Hodges from iTunes. And another.

Sweetness, the great Walter Payton, was born on July 25th in 1954. He died at age 45 of a liver disease.

It’s also the birthday of NewMexiKen’s dad, born on this date in 1923. Miss you every day, Dad.

Today it’s the birthday

… of cartoonist Pat Oliphant, 73.

… of Ruth Buzzi, 72.

… of Cosmo Kramer. Michael Richards is 59 today. Older, and let’s hope wiser.

… of Wonder Woman. Lynda Carter is 57.

… of Pam Tillis, 51.

… of Barry Bonds. He’s 44.

… of Kristin Chenoweth. The Tony award-winner from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, is 40, all 4-foot-11 of her. Chenoweth is one-quarter Cherokee.

… of J Lo. Jennifer Lopez is 39.

… of Anna Paquin. An Oscar winner at age 11, she’s now 26.

Amelia Earhart was born on July 24th in 1897. She disappeared at age 40.

It was on this date in 1847 that Brigham Young gazed at Utah’s Valley of the Great Salt Lake and made his famous declaration: “This is the place.”

Emily and Rob celebrate their 9th anniversary today. Congratulations!

Daniel Radcliffe is 19 today. That’s Harry Potter to you.

At the other end of the acting spectrum, Gloria DeHaven is 83.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is 72. Kennedy, a Reagan appointment, is the swing vote on the Court.

Actor Ronny Cox is 70. Cox, a Cloudcroft, New Mexico native, is perhaps most famous as Lt. Andrew Bogomil of the Beverly Hills Police Department, but he has more than 120 credits listed at IMDB.

Don Imus is 68 today.

Woody Harrelson is 47. Harrelson was nominated for best actor for The People vs. Larry Flynt and won one Emmy for playing Woody on Cheers.

Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman is 41.

Alison Krauss is 37.