Individuals born on this date with an emphasis on American history and culture, including pop culture.
Bob McGrath — that’s Bob from Sesame Street — is 76.
Siegfried Fischbacher is 69.. That’s Siegfried of Siegfried and Roy.
John-Boy Walton is 57. That’s actor Richard Thomas.
The voice of Buzz Lightyear is 55. That’s Tim Allen.
Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy is 46.
And the Olsen twins are 44.
President George H.W. Bush is 84 today.
Well, gawwwleee and shazzayam, Jim Nabors is 78.
Marv Philip Aufrichtig was born 67 years ago today. We know him as Marv Albert.
Armando Anthony Corea is also 67. We know him as Chick.
Anne Frank should have been 79 years old today. The Writer’s Almanac has a brief essay about Frank. Beginning with: “It was on this day in 1942 that she received a red and white plaid journal, from her father, for her 13th birthday, and she started to write her diary, a diary that she called by the name of ‘Kitty.'”
Fourteen years ago today someone killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
Two-time Oscar nominee Gene Wilder is 75 today. Wilder was nominated for supporting actor for The Producers and as a co-writer with Mel Brooks for Young Frankenstein.
Chad Everett is 71.
Adrienne Barbeau is 63. And now it’s her age, too.
Frank Beard is 59 today. That’s him with Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Frank Beard is the one without a beard.
Joe Montana is 52.
Shia LaBeouf is 22.
William Styron was born on June 11th in 1925. This from American Masters:
After leaving the service, [Styron] moved to New York, where he supported his fledgling writing career working at McGraw-Hill Publishing. He also began taking classes with Hiram Haydn at the New School for Social Research. With guidance and encouragement from Haydn, Styron made his stunning debut at the age of twenty-six with LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS (1951). This novel launched his career and earned him the American Academy’s Prix de Rome. Told under the shadow of the Hiroshima bombing, LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS charts the tragic descent into suicide of a young woman raised in a troubled Virginia family.
He followed LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS with THE LONG MARCH (1957), SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE (1960), and one of his most famous novels, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER (1967). Published at the height of the civil rights movement, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER is told from the point of view of the historical figure who led a disastrous and bloody slave insurrection which set the stage for the Civil War. Winning a Pulitzer Prize, THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER was both praised as a brave look into a rarely represented life, and maligned for what many saw as a clichéd conception of a black man.
Styron’s next novel did not appear for more than ten years. The tragedy of SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1979) is played out between a young Virginia writer and a Polish Holocaust survivor in an urban Jewish enclave of Brooklyn. It takes place during the aftermath of World War II, an era Styron describes as “a nightmarish Sargasso Sea of guilt and apprehensions.” In SOPHIE’S CHOICE, Styron weaves a fictional tale, profound in its engagement, with major recent historical events. Made into a popular movie starring Meryl Streep, SOPHIE’S CHOICE returned Styron to the popular eye as both a controversial personality and a major writer.
Styron’s compelling Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) describes his crippling, nearly suicidal depression at age 60. Styron died in November 2006.
Vince Lombardi was born on June 11 in 1913. Lombardi is the legendary football coach. You know — the one the Super Bowl trophy is named for.
Some Lombardisms:
Vince Lombardi died in 1970 at age 57.
Jeanette Rankin…was born on this date in 1880 on a ranch near Missoula, Montana. In 1916, Rankin was elected the first woman member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was not re-elected in 1918, after voting against entry in the First World War, but was returned to Congress for one term in 1940. In 1941, she cast the sole vote in Congress against the U.S. declaration of war on Japan. Jeanette Rankin was a social worker and a lobbyist for peace and women’s rights. She died just before her 93rd birthday in 1973. She is one of the two Montanans honored in The National Statuary Hall Collection of the U.S. Capitol. Read Rankin’s obituary from The New York Times.
And NewMexiKen’s very own sister Martha is celebrating her birthday today, too.
Oh, and today is a state holiday in Hawai’i. It’s Kamehameha Day. “On June 11th, 2008, thousands of people will gather on the northern tip of the Big Island of Hawai‘i to honor King Kamehameha I, the chief who united the Hawaiian Islands in 1795.”
Prince Philip is 87 today.
Maurice Sendak is 80. He illustrated and wrote Where the Wild Things Are in 1963.
Football hall-of-famer Dan Fouts is 57.
John Edwards is 55.
Gina Gershon is 46.
Jeanne Tripplehorn is 45. Her father played with Gary Lewis and the Playboys.
Elizabeth Hurley is 43.
Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana, is 37 today. If he runs with McCain, their average age election day would be nearly 55.
Frances Ethel Gumm was born 86 years ago today. We know her as Judy Garland. She was just under 5-feet tall and the need for weight-control lead her to drugs, which controlled much of her adult life. She died of a barbiturate overdose at age 47. Ms. Garland was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for A Star is Born (1955) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Judgment at Nuremberg (1962). She won a special “Juvenile Oscar” for The Wizard of Oz (1940).
The author Saul Bellow was born on June 10th in 1915 in Quebec. He grew up in Chicago. The Writer’s Almanac had a brief bio last year that included this:
His father wasn’t happy that Bellow wanted to be a writer. He said, “You write and then you erase. You call that a profession?” His brothers went into more conventional careers and Bellow once said, “All I started out to do was to show up my brothers.”
Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10th in 1895. She won a supporting actress Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind, the first African-American to be nominated. Ms. McDaniel has nearly 100 credits listed at IMDB.
Donald Duck, Cole Porter and Les Paul!
Lester William Polfus is 93 today. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as Les Paul.
The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric guitar. As a player, inventor and recording artist, Paul has been an innovator from the early years of his life. Born Lester William Polfus in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul built his first crystal radio at age nine – which was about the time he first picked up a guitar. By age 13 he was performing semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist and working diligently on sound-related inventions. In 1941, Paul built his first solid-body electric guitar, and he continued to make refinements to his prototype throughout the decade. He also worked on refining the technology of sound, developing revolutionary engineering techniques such as close miking, echo delay and multitracking. All the while he busied himself as a bandleader who could play both jazz and country music.
…In 1952, Les Paul introduced the first eight-track tape recorder (designed by Paul and marketed by Ampex) and, more significantly for the future of rock and roll, launched the solid-body electric guitar that bears his name. Built and marketed by Gibson, with continuous advances and refinements from Paul in such areas as low-impedance pickup technology, the Les Paul guitar became a staple instrument among discerning rock guitarists.
Robert S. McNamara is 92.
Dick Vitale is 69 today, baby! Not exactly a diaper dandy.
Michael J. Fox is 47.
Two-time nominee for the Best Actor Oscar, Johnny Depp is 45.
Tedy Bruschi is 35.
Natalie Portman is 27.
Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, on June 9th in 1891.
Mr. Porter wrote the lyrics and music for his songs, and to both he brought such an individuality of style that a genre known as “the Cole Porter song” became recognized.
The hallmarks of a typical Porter song were lyrics that were urbane or witty and a melody with a sinuous, brooding quality. Some of his best-known songs in this vein were “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “Night and Day,” “Love for Sale” and “Begin the Beguine.”
But an equally typical and equally recognizable Porter song would have a simple, bouncy melody and a lyric based on a long and entertaining list of similarities, opposite or contrasts. “Let’s Do It” ticked off the amiable amatory habits of birds, flowers, crustacea, fish, insects, animals and various types of humans, while “You’re the Top” was an exercise in the creation of superlatives that included such items as “the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire,” “Garbo’s salary” and “Mickey Mouse.”
Still a third type of Porter song was exclamatory in both lyrics and melody. “Just One of Those Things,” “From This Moment On” and “It’s All Right With Me” were instances.
Night and Day was one of the NPR 100, their list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century. The first note is repeated 35 times.
Donald Duck is 74 today. He debuted in the Disney Silly Symphony cartoon “The Wise Little Hen” on this date in 1934. (Donald Duck is one of three Disney characters with an “official” birthday. The others are Mickey and Minnie, who debuted on November 18, 1928.)
Donald Duck actually appeared in more theatrical cartoons than Mickey Mouse — 128. Donald’s middle name is Fauntleroy.
Levi Stubbs is 72. Stubbs was and is the lead vocalist of The Four Tops. It’s Stubbs who sings:
Now if you feel that you can’t go on
Because all of your hope is gone
And your life is filled with much confusion
Until happiness is just an illusion
And your world around is tumbling down
Darling reach out
C’mon girl
Reach on out for me
Reach out for me
Tennis Hall of Famer Bjorn Borg is 52.
Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti is 41. He was nominated for his supporting role in Cinderella Man. Giamatti’s father was professor of Renaissance literature at Yale, president of Yale, and Commissioner of Baseball.
Nathan Hale was born on June 6th in 1755. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” he said when hanged by the British in 1776 as an American spy. Hale had volunteered to report on British positions in New York. He was caught when Karl Rove’s ancestor revealed Hale’s covert identity to Robert Novak.
Bill Moyers is 74 today.
Author Ken Follett is 59.
Suze Orman is 57.
Kenneth Gorelick is 52. You know, Kenny G.
Peter Gibbons is 41, and no longer turning out TPS reports and going to Chotchkie’s. That’s actor Ron Livingston.
Supporting Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg is 37.
Richard Scarry was born on June 5, 1919. Scarry has written more than 300 books for children and, according to The Writer’s Almanac, “said that what made him happiest as an author was receiving letters from people telling him that their copies of his books were all worn out, or were held together with Scotch tape.” Scarry died in 1994.
Doroteo Arango was born on June 5, 1878. We know him as Pancho Villa.
Adam Smith was baptized on June 5, 1723. His An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.
Another immortal economist, John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883.
He’s best known for his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published during the Great Depression in 1935. He argued that governments can correct severe depressions by spending lots of money, even if it means running a deficit, to put people back to work. Keynes’s ideas greatly influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal polices, and his ideas have been used to justify budget deficits ever since.
William Boyd, better known as Hopalong Cassidy, was born on this date in 1895. After success as a leading man in silent film, Boyd’s career was going nowhere in 1935 when he was cast to play the cowboy, Hopalong Cassidy. He made 54 films in the role for producer Harry Sherman, then 12 more on his own. In 1948, in one of the great prescient moves ever made in Hollywood, Boyd bought the rights to all the films, selling his ranch to raise the money. Television needed Saturday morning fare and Boyd had it.
One medium fed on the other, and by 1950 [William] Boyd was at the center of a national phenomenon. For two years he was as big a media hero as the nation had seen. In personal appearances he was mobbed: 85,000 people came through a Brooklyn department store during his appearance there. His endorsement for any product meant instant sales in the millions. It meant overnight shortages, frantic shopping sprees, and millions of dollars for Boyd. There were Hopalong Cassidy bicycles, rollerskates (complete with spurs), Hoppy pajamas, Hopalong beds. The demand for Hoppy shirts and pants was so great that a shortage of black dye resulted. His investment in Hopalong Cassidy paid off to an estimated $70 million.
Why a man of 52 years appealed to so many children remains a mystery. Possibly some of it had to do with the novelty of television: just as Amos ‘n’ Andy had capitalized on the newness of radio a generation earlier, a TV sensation was bound to occur. And the hero had a no-nonsense demeanor: he was steely-eyed and quick on the draw, and he meted out justice without the endless warbling and sugar-coated romance that came with the others. As for Boyd, he became Cassidy in a real sense. His personal habits changed; he gave up drinking and carousing and lived with his fifth wife until his death in 1972.
John Dunning, On the Air
Hopalong Cassidy was NewMexiKen’s first hero. None has been as good since.
Angelina Jolie is 33 today.
Michelle Phillips, one of the mamas of The Mamas and the Papas, is 64.
Noah Wyle, Dr. Carter, is 37.
Robert Fulghum is 71.
When he was a Unitarian minister in Washington state in the 1960s, Fulghum began jotting down personal insights to use in sermons and his weekly church newsletter. He worked them up into a statement of personal belief: “Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess…” — which eventually found its way to a Connecticut literary agent when her daughter came home with it tucked in her school bookbag, photocopied by her teacher. The agent asked Fulghum to write more, and the book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and its follow-up, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It (1989), ran for a time in first and second positions on bestseller lists.
Larry McMurtry is 72 today. Three years ago, The Writer’s Almanac had a good essay about McMurtry, in NewMexiKen’s opinion the best to write both fiction and nonfiction about the American west since his mentor Wallace Stegner. Two years ago NewMexiKen and Dad visited McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, Texas. Here’s my report.
Tony Curtis is 83. Curtis received a leading actor Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones.
Anderson Cooper is 41.
Allen Ginsberg was born on this date in 1926.
His father was a schoolteacher and occasional poet. His mother was a Russian immigrant and devoted Marxist. She was in and out of psychiatric institutions all through out his childhood and had to undergo electric shock treatments and a lobotomy. Ginsberg went to Columbia University on a small scholarship and there he began consorting with Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs. After college, he got a job in marketing research, wore a business suit everyday, and had on office on the 52nd floor of the Empire State Building. He says he started writing there, and that there he learned about careful manipulation of words.
He moved to San Francisco and became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Ginsburg’s [sic] first major work, Howl.
By his 30s, he was prematurely bald with a ring of hair on the fringe of his head and thick long black beard streaked with gray. He wore black rimmed classes and his Buddha belly was one of his most distinguishing features.
Ginsburg’s [sic] reading of Howl was reputed to have “turned the 1950s into the 1960s overnight.” It began:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
Ginsberg died in 1997.
Dr. Zaius was born on June 3rd in 1901. That’s Maurice Evans, famed stage actor, two-time Tony winner, who is perhaps most remembered for playing the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith in Planet of the Apes.
Jefferson Davis was born on June 3rd in 1808.
Jerry West is 70 today.
Jerry West was on the fast track to stardom from the day he touched a basketball. Throughout the NBA’s history, it would be hard to find a better pure shooter. At West Virginia University, West led the Mountaineers to the NCAA Finals and captured the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award in 1959. In a superlative senior season, West was a consensus All-America and led West Virginia to its third consecutive conference championship. In Los Angeles, West played virtually his entire career with Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor, and five years with Wilt Chamberlain. When the game was on the line, West’s Los Angeles Laker teammates always found a way to get the ball to “Mr. Clutch.” His cool, calm, and collected personality and his leadership on the court was a coach’s dream. When he retired, West’s name was on nearly every page of the record books. He scored 25,192 points (third), averaged 27.0 ppg (fourth), made 7,160 free throws (second), dished out 6,238 assists (fifth). West was equally adept on the defensive end, named to the NBA All-Defensive First-Team four times.
Official Website of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
Rudolph Giuliani is 64 today. This alone disqualifies May 28th from any consideration as a holiday.
Gladys Knight is 64. The Pips are various ages.
Gladys Knight and the Pips – brother Merald “Bubba” Knight and cousins Edward Patten and William Guest – are one of the most respected and longest-lived soul groups, with hits spanning four decades. Knight was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where she began singing at age four with her brother and cousins at Baptist church functions. The group first recorded for the Brunswick label in 1958 and dented the charts with “Every Beat of My Heart” (1961) and “Letter Full of Tears” (1962), both on Fury Records. After a few more singles and personnel changes, which cemented Gladys Knight and the Pips in their most enduring and best-known lineup, the group signed with Motown’s Soul label in 1966. Motown founder Berry Gordy, who saw them perform at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1966, made note of Knight’s “class, artistry and stage presence….She could talk to an audience and articulate what she wanted to say with just the right words.”
At Motown, Gladys Knight and the Pips quickly rose to prominence with their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (#1 R&B, #2 pop), which boasted more of an uptempo, gospel-style arrangement than Gaye’s own recording of it.
John Fogerty is 63 today. Fogerty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 with Creedence Clearwater Revival.
John Fogerty now firmly at the helm as guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer, Creedence took off with their neo-psychedelic reworking of Dale Hawkins’ rockabilly classic “Suzie Q.” From then on, the hits kept coming as the band churned out six albums of powerful, roots-oriented rock and roll between 1968 and 1970: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country, Green River, Willie and the Poorboys, Cosmo’s Factory and Pendulum. Ten of Creedence’s singles cracked the Top Ten during the period 1968-71. Although the group was not overtly political, several of their songs – particularly “Fortunate Son” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain” – eloquently expressed the counterculture’s resistance to the Vietnam War and sympathy for those who were fighting in what now stand as anthems of those troubled times.
Oh, put me in, coach – I’m ready to play today;
Put me in, coach – I’m ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be centerfield.
Sondra Locke is 61 today. Though never married, she and Clint Eastwood were a couple from 1975-1990.
The Dionne Quintuplets were born in Corbeil, Ontario, Canada, 74 years ago today.
Annette Lillianne Marie Dionne
Cécile Marie Emilda Dionne
Emilie Marie Jeanne Dionne (died 1954)
Marie Reina Alma Dionne (died 1970)
Yvonne Edouilda Marie Dionne (died 2001)
Together, the five girls, at least two months premature, weighed about 14 pounds. They were put by an open stove to keep warm, and mothers from surrounding villages brought breast milk for them. Against all expectations, they survived their first weeks. Watch video.
According to the CBC Archives:
When the quints are still babies, the Ontario government takes the sisters from their parents, apparently to protect their fragile health, and makes the girls wards of the state. For the first nine years of their lives, they live at a hospital in their hometown that becomes a tourist mecca called “Quintland.” The Ministry of Public Welfare sets up a trust fund in their behalf with assurances that the financial well-being of the entire Dionne family would be taken care of “for all their normal needs for the rest of their lives.”
Between 1934 and 1943, about 3 million people visit Quintland. The government and nearby businesses make an estimated half-billion dollars off the tourists, much of which the Dionne family never sees. The sisters are the nation’s biggest tourist attraction — bigger than Niagara Falls.
After nine years and a bitter custody fight, the girls rejoined their family.
There is still a mystery surrounding what happened to the money the Ontario government placed in a trust fund for the quints, though it’s believed that most of the funds went to pay for the many employees of “Quintland.”
In 1998 the surviving quints were awarded $4 million by Ontario.
NewMexiKen has a vague memory of seeing the Dionne quints on display (so to speak) at the Michigan State Fair when I was a little kid. Perhaps only four were there, depending on when it was.
And the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century was born near Prague, Oklahoma, on this date in 1888. His Sac and Fox given name was Wa-Tho-Huk (Bright Path). We know him as Jim Thorpe.
Thorpe was named by ESPN as the 7th greatest athlete of the 20th century (after Jordan, Ruth, Ali, Brown, Gretsky and Owens). Read the biographical essay, Thorpe preceded Deion, Bo. A couple of items from the biography:
“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”
Rachel Carson, born on May 27, 1907
Hubert Humphrey was born in Wallace, South Dakota, on this date in 1911. Humphrey was first elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 and U.S. Senator in 1948. Senator Humphrey introduced his first bill in 1949; it became law in 1965 and we know it as Medicare.
Humphrey became Vice President with the election of President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. After Johnson withdrew from the 1968 campaign, and after Robert Kennedy was killed, Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President. He lost to Richard Nixon in one of the closest elections in history. Some commented that with the vote trending as it did, had the election been one or two days later Humphrey would have won.
But then we wouldn’t have had Watergate and Nixon to kick around.
Best-selling mystery author Tony Hillerman was born on this date in 1925. The Shape Shifter is the 18th book in the series centered on Navajo Tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Hillerman had an interesting website with excerpts from all the books, but it has disappeared. There he told us that:
Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green ‘crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers–my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.
. . .Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense–and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever’s “Days of Old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.
Mystery writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on this date in 1894. Hammett departed from the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels (Sherlock Holmes for example) and transformed the genre with his less-than-glamorous realism. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Hammett actually was a detective with Pinkerton for a few years just before World War I. Contracting TB during military service, he realized his health would keep him from resuming as a detective. He turned to writing. He published his first story in 1922, and then about 80 more, many in the popular pulp crime magazine Black Mask. Hammett’s first novel was Red Harvest, published in 1929. His most famous character, Sam Spade, made his appearance in Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930). (It was the third—and only successful—attempt to turn that novel into a film when Humphrey Bogart played the role in 1941.) The Thin Man (1934) was the last of Hammett’s novels.
By the early-thirties, Hammett was established and famous. He began a relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman that lasted for 30 years despite his drinking and womanizing. Though both eventually divorced their spouses, they never married. Hammett served in the Army in World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48. His involvement in left-wing politics and unwillingness to testify about it before Congress however, and the continued drinking, diminished his stature. Hammett died in 1961.
John Cheever was born on this date in 1912.
He wrote for more than 50 years and published more than 200 short stories. He’s known for writing about the world of American suburbia. Even though he was one of the most popular short-story writers of the 20th century, he once said that he only earned “enough money to feed the family and buy a new suit every other year.”
In 1935 he was published in The New Yorker for the first time, and he would continue to write for the magazine for the rest of his life. His stories were collected in books including The Way Some People Live (1943) and The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the few collections of short stories ever to make the New York Times best-seller list.
Cheever died in 1982.
James Arness — Marshall Dillon — is 85.
Brent Musburger is 69. ABC must have some sort of mandatory retirement age.
Levon Helm of The Band is 68.
The Band, more than any other group, put rock and roll back in touch with its roots. With their ageless songs and solid grasp of musical idioms, the Band reached across the decades, making connections for a generation that was, as an era of violent cultural schisms wound down, in desperate search of them. They projected a sense of community in the turbulent late Sixties and early Seventies – a time when the fabric of community in the United States was fraying. Guitarist Robbie Robertson drew from history in his evocative, cinematic story-songs, and the vocal triumvirate of bassist Rick Danko, drummer Levon Helm and keyboardist Richard Manuel joined in rustic harmony and traded lines in rich, conversational exchanges. Multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson provided musical coloration in period styles that evoked everything from rural carnivals of the early 20th century to rock and roll revues of the Fifties.
Stevie Nicks is 60 today. A moment of silence please.
Finally, the platinum edition of Fleetwood Mac came together in 1975 with the recruitment of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. The San Francisco duo had previously cut an album together as Buckingham-Nicks. Drummer Fleetwood heard a tape of theirs at a studio he was auditioning, and the pair were drafted into the group without so much as a formal audition. This lineup proved far and away to be Fleetwood Mac’s most durable and successful. In addition to the most solid rhythm section in rock, this classic lineup contained strong vocalists and songwriters in Buckingham, Nicks and Christine McVie. Male and female points of view were offered with unusual candor on the watershed albums Fleetwood Mac (1975) and Rumours (1977).
Sally K. Ride is 57. Ride Sally Ride.
Lenny Kravitz is 44.
Shakespeare is 38. That’s actor Joseph Fiennes.
Bob Dylan’s influence on popular music is incalculable. As a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-conscious narratives. As a vocalist, he broke down the notions that in order to perform, a singer had to have a conventionally good voice, thereby redefining the role of vocalist in popular music. As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music, including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that just touches on the tip of his achievements. Dylan’s force was evident during his height of popularity in the ’60s — the Beatles’ shift toward introspective songwriting in the mid-’60s never would have happened without him — but his influence echoed throughout several subsequent generations. Many of his songs became popular standards, and his best albums were undisputed classics of the rock & roll canon. Dylan’s influence throughout folk music was equally powerful, and he marks a pivotal turning point in its 20th century evolution, signifying when the genre moved away from traditional songs and toward personal songwriting. Even when his sales declined in the ’80s and ’90s, Dylan’s presence was calculable.
The beginning of Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s profile at allmusic.
Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24th 67 years ago. That’s Bob Dylan, of course.
From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:
Bob Dylan is the pre-eminent poet/lyricist and songwriter of his time. He re-energized the folk-music genre, brought a new lyrical depth to rock and roll when he went electric, and bridged the worlds of rock and country by recording in Nashville. As much as he’s played the role of renegade throughout his career, Dylan has also kept the rock and roll community mindful of its roots by returning often to them. With his songs, Dylan has provided a running commentary on a restless age. His biting, imagistic and often cryptic lyrics served to capture and define the mood of a generation. For this, he’s been elevated to the role of spokesmen – and yet the elusive and reclusive Dylan won’t even admit to being a poet. “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word,” he has said.
Here’s a video of Tangled Up In Blue.
Tommy Chong, he’s Chong of Cheech and Chong, is 70.
Walter “Radar” O’Reilly, that is Gary Burghoff, is 68.
Patti LaBelle is 64 today.
Priscilla Presley is 63.
Alfred Molina is 55.
Rosanne Cash is 53. She was born a month before her father released his first record, “Cry, Cry, Cry.”
Kristin Scott Thomas is 48.
Michael Chabon is 45 today.
After Wonder Boys, Chabon stumbled on a box of comic books he’d kept since childhood. He hadn’t looked at them in 15 years. He said, “When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there.” It gave him the idea to write a novel about the golden days of the comic book trade called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It came out in 2000, and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the story of a Jewish kid who flees the Nazis just before World War II — has to leave his family behind and come to America. Along with his cousin, he creates a comic book super hero called “The Escapist.”
John C. Reilly is 43. “Shake ‘n Bake.”
Victoria was born on May 24, 1819. She was the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. None of her uncles had legitimate children who survived, so when her uncle William IV died in 1837, she became queen at age 18. Her reign lasted until 1901; the longest of any British monarch. She had nine children and is Elizabeth II’s great great grandmother.
Victoria Day has been celebrated in Canada since 1845. The holiday is now the Monday before May 24th, unless Monday is May 24th.
The first passenger railroad in the U.S. began service between Baltimore and Ellicott’s Mills, Maryland, on May 24th in 1830. That’s 13 miles.
The first telegraph message was transmitted by Samuel F. B. Morse on May 24th in 1844. Sent from Washington to Baltimore it said, “What hath God wrought!”
The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24th in 1883. Click here for every fact you ever needed to know about this landmark.
The first Major League Baseball night game was played in Cincinnati on May 24, 1935. The Reds beat the Phillies 2-1. The Reds played seven night games that year (one against each National League opponent).
Jewel is 34 today. Joan Collins is 75. Drew Carey is 50.
Jewel’s last name is Kilcher.
Lauren Chapin, who played the youngest daughter, Kathy or Kitten, on “Father Knows Best,” is 63.
Benjamin Sherman Crothers — known to us better as Scatman Crothers — was born May 23rd in 1910. Crothers is best remembered as the permissive orderly in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the concerned chef in The Shining and as Louie the Garbage Man on the TV show Chico and the Man. He was also a successful composer and singer and did a number of cartoon voices. The nickname Scatman came from his scat singing. Crothers died in 1986.
Clyde Champion Barrow and Bonnie Parker were shot to death in an ambush near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana, on May 23rd in 1934. The FBI has a web page with details about Bonnie and Clyde, including a photo of each. Not exactly Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman (who portrayed Clyde’s brother Buck). All three were nominated for an acting Oscar, as were Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons. Parsons, who played Buck’s wife Blanche in the 1967 film, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
William Harvey Carney was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on May 23rd in 1900 — for duty performed nearly 37 years earlier at Fort Wagner, S.C. Sergeant Carney was the first African-American to receive the Medal of Honor. Carney was a member of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the regiment whose story was told in the film Glory (1989) with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick. Carney was not portrayed in the film by name. The citation for Carney’s Medal of Honor reads: “When the color sergeant was shot down, this soldier grasped the flag, led the way to the parapet, and planted the colors thereon. When the troops fell back he brought off the flag, under a fierce fire in which he was twice severely wounded.”
Mary Cassatt was born on May 22nd in 1844.
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was a unique artist because she was a woman who succeeded in what was in the nineteenth century a predominantly male profession, because she was the only American invited to exhibit with a group of independent artists later known as the Impressionists, and because she responded in a very distinctive way to their mandate to portray modern life.
Click images for larger version and to learn more.
Peter Matthiessen is 81 today and Garry Wills is 74. The Writer’s Almanac has background on these two exceptionally insightful and important American writers.
You can hear Garrison Keillor’s audio of same by clicking here (RealAudio).
NewMexiKen has a first edition of Matthiessen’s wonderful and wonderous The Snow Leopard.
NewMexiKen checked and I’ve never posted the birthdays for May 21st. Here’s why:
Al Franken is 57. Mr. T is 56. Judge Reinhold is 51.
TV actress Lisa Edelstein is 40. I didn’t even know what show she’s in.
However, Thomas “Fats” Waller was born on this date in 1904.
Here he is in the 1943, shortly before he died at age 39, singing his most famous composition, “Ain’t Misbehavin'”
And here’s a great version of the same tune with Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli (no video, just the music).
And the Muppets have a nice cover, too.
How about some guitar misbehavin’?
James Stewart was born 100 years ago today. Stewart received five best actor Oscar nominations in his long career, but won only for The Philadelphia Story in 1941.
Joe Cocker is 64. Timothy Olyphant is scowling at being 40.
Cher is 62.
Charles Lindbergh departed Long Island for Paris 81 years ago today.
Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland for Ireland on May 20th in 1932, the first woman to solo the Atlantic.
Malcolm Little was born 83 years ago today in Omaha.
Your assigned reading: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the best book Alex Haley wrote.
Essay question (after reading the autobiography): What would 83-year-old Malcolm say about this year’s presidential election?
Dusty Hill is 59 today. It ought to be an American holiday.
The genius of ZZ Top is that they’re reverential about the blues but loose and funny about the subject matter of their songs. Their songs are laden with pop-culture references, sexual double entendres and the determined pursuit of a good time. They have written about fast cars, fishnet stockings, sharp clothes, TV dinners, cheap sunglasses and “tush.” They visually connected with the MTV generation by virtue of Hill’s and Gibbons’ long beards and fur-lined guitars. For many, ZZ Top have been the premiere party band on the planet. Certainly, they have been Texas’s foremost cultural ambassadors.
Pete Townshend is 63. It ought to be a national holiday in Britain too.
From Mod-era “maximum R&B” to rock operas and quintessential Seventies hard rock, the Who reigned across the decades as one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time. At their best, they distilled the pent-up energy and chaos of rock and roll into its purest form while investing their music with literary wiles and visionary insight. In their prime they were a unit whose individual personalities fused into a larger-than-life whole. Pete Townshend provided the slashing guitar work and much of the material. Vocalist Roger Daltrey injected the songs with expressive muscularity and passion. Bassist John Entwistle anchored the band with his stoic demeanor and expert musicianship. Keith Moon, one of the greatest of all rock and roll drummers, embodied their explosive energy and anarchic wit.
And AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd is 54. So it ought to be a national holiday in Australia as well.
For three decades AC/DC has reigned as one of the best-loved and hardest-rocking bands in the world. Featuring guitarist Angus Young as their visual symbol and musical firebrand, they grew from humble origins in Australia to become an arena-filling phenomenon with worldwide popularity. They did so without gimmickry, except for Angus’s schoolboy uniform, which became mandatory stage attire. From the beginning they have been a straight-ahead, no-frills rock and roll band that aimed for the gut. “We’ve never pulled any punches,” vocalist Brian Johnson has said. “We just play music that’s fun and simple–the way our audience likes it.”
Elsewhere, Jim Lehrer is 74, Nora Ephron is 67 and Kevin Garnett is 32.
Ho Chi Minh was born on May 19th in 1890. Pol Pot was born on May 19th in 1925. So probably not a holiday in Cambodia.
Johns Hopkins was born on May 19, 1795, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to a Quaker family. Convinced that slavery was morally wrong, his parents freed their slaves. As a result, Johns had to leave school at age twelve to work in the family tobacco fields. Hopkins regretted that his formal education ended so early. Ambitious and hardworking, he abandoned farming, and, at his mother’s urging, became an apprentice in his uncle’s wholesale grocery business when he was seventeen. Within a decade, he had created his own Baltimore-based mercantile operation. Hopkins single-mindedly pursued his business ventures. He never married, lived frugally, and retired a rich man at age fifty. A series of wise investments over the next two decades—he was the largest individual stockholder in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, for example—further increased his wealth. He used his fortune to found The Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, incorporating them in 1867.
Hopkins died in 1873. His will divided $7 million equally between the hospital and the university. At the time, the gift was the largest philanthropic bequest in U.S. history. Hopkins also endowed an orphanage for African-American children.
Maude’s husband, Walter, is 86. That’s actor Bill Macy. He was recently a character named Whiskey Pete on My Name Is Earl.
The oldest (and sole surviving) Cartwright boy, Adam, is 80. That’s Pernell Roberts.
Dobie Gillis is 74. That’s actor Dwayne Hickman who played the high school chum of Maynard G. Krebs when he was 25 (and Bob Denver was 24).
Brooks Robinson is 71.
Known as The Human Vacuum Cleaner, Brooks Robinson established a standard of excellence for modern-day third basemen. He played 23 seasons for the Orioles, setting major league career records for games, putouts, assists, chances, double plays and fielding percentage. A clutch hitter, Robinson totaled 268 career home runs, at one time an American League record for third basemen. Robinson earned the league’s MVP Award in 1964 and the World Series MVP in 1970, when he hit .429 and made a collection of defensive gems.
Reggie Jackson is 62.
Reggie Jackson earned the nickname Mr. October for his World Series heroics with both the A’s and Yankees. In 27 Fall Classic games, he amassed 10 home runs – including four in consecutive at-bats – 24 RBI and a .357 batting average. As one of the game’s premier power hitters, he blasted 563 career round-trippers. A terrific player in the clutch and an intimidating cleanup hitter, Jackson compiled a lifetime slugging percentage of .490 and earned American League MVP honors in 1973.
George Strait is 56.
George Strait – Amarillo By Morning
Tina Fey is 38.
Frank Capra was born in Bisaquino, Sicily on this date in 1897.
For the next six years, he worked as everything from a prop man to a comedy writer. In 1928, he signed a contract with Columbia. Five years later he made his first big hit, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1933), for which he won the first of three Academy Awards for Best Director. In the next fifteen years he made a string of successful movies, most of them about a naïve and idealistic man from small-town America who goes up against greedy politicians and lawyers and journalists. Capra said the moral of his movies was: “A simple honest man, driven into a corner by predatory sophisticates, can, if he will, reach down into his God-given resources and come up with the necessary handfuls of courage, wit, and love to triumph over his environment.”
His movies were so distinctive and so influential that the word “Capraesque” has made it into the dictionary. The 2000 American Heritage Dictionary defined it as “of or evocative of the movies of Frank Capra, often promoting the positive social effects of individual acts of courage.”
His movies include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), which was also about a small-town hero who battles corruption, but it was darker and more cynical than any of his earlier movies, and it didn’t do very well at the box office. For some reason, Capra didn’t renew its copyright in 1974, and it fell into the public domain. PBS was the first network to play it every year around Christmas. Other stations started picking it up, and now watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV is a holiday tradition for families across the country.