Individuals born on this date with an emphasis on American history and culture, including pop culture.
… of David Carradine. Kwai Chang Caine is 69.
… of James MacArthur. Danno can book 68 years worth.
… of Jerry Butler. His precious love is 66.
… of Kim Basinger. Might take her more than 9½ weeks now that she’s 52.
… of Teri Hatcher. She’s desperate at 41.
… of Sinead O’Connor. Nothing compares to her at 39.
Sammy Davis Jr. was born 80 years ago today.
It’s the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873)…. Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and she fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky.”
She went off to college, got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure’s magazine. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913), about Alexandra Bergson, the oldest daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, who struggles to work the family farm after her father dies. Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My ??ntonia (1918), The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).
Willa Cather said, “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”
Source: The Writer’s Almanac.
You may hear Garrison Keillor tell the above and more by clicking here [RealAudio].
… of Eli Wallach. Tuco is 90. “Hey Blondie, do you know what you are? You’re a stinking son of a….” [Theme starts.]
… of Ellen Burstyn. Alice is 73. Ms. Burstyn has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress five times, winning for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in 1975. She was also nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Last Picture Show.
… of Johnny Bench. The Hall of Fame catcher is 58.
… of Larry Bird. The Basketball Hall of Famer is 49.
… of T.O., Terrell Owens. He’s 32 going on 12.
… one of America’s great lyricists, was born on this date in 1896.
Summertime
And the livin’ is easy,
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high.
Oh yo’ daddy’s rich
An’ yo’ ma is good lookin’
So hush, little baby,
Don’t you cry.
[with Dubose Heyward]
*****
You’ve made my life so glamorous
You can’t blame me for feeling amorous.
Oh! ‘S wonderful! ‘S marvelous!
That you should care for me!
‘S wonderful! ‘S marvelous!
That you should care for me!
‘S awful nice! ‘S paradise!
‘S what I love to see!
*****
The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem’ry of all that —
No, no! They can’t take that away from me!
The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off key,
The way you haunt my dreams —
No, no! They can’t take that away from me!
… of Steven Wright. He’s 50.
… of Dave Brubeck. Dave’s taken five for 85 years.
… of Tom Hulce. The actor who played Mozart in Amadeus is 52. (The film came out in 1984.)
The Cinderella Man, James J. Braddock, was born 100 years ago today.
… of Richard Wayne Penniman. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Little Richard is 73.
… of Jose Carreras. The tenor is 59.
… of Jim Messina. The one-time member of Buffalo Springfield (with Dewey Martin, Neil Young, Richie Furay and Steven Stills), and Poco, and Loggins & Messina, is 58.
… of Frankie Muniz. Malcolm is 20.
The Writer’s Almanac tells us about Joan Didion, winner of this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction. Or you can listen to Garrison Keillor recite this and more [RealAudio].
It’s the birthday of the essayist and novelist Joan Didion, born in Sacramento, California (1934). She grew up as a nervous, preoccupied child. She said, “I was one of those children who always thought the bridge would fall in if you walked across it… I thought about the atomic bomb a lot… after there was one.”
She began keeping a notebook when she was five years old, and she later wrote, “Keepers of notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with a sense of loss.” At one point in her childhood, she lived near a mental hospital, and she would wander around the hospital grounds with a notebook, writing down all the most interesting snippets of conversation.
Didion became associated with the so-called New Journalism, because she often made herself a character in whatever she was covering, and she went much further than most journalists in revealing her own states of mind. The title essay of her collection The White Album (1979) includes notes from a psychiatrist’s evaluation after she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband’s recent death from a heart attack at the dinner table, came out this year.
Joan Didion said, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. . . . Writers are always selling somebody out.”
… of Jeff Bridges. The four-time Oscar nominee is 56 today (three times for supporting, once for leading (Starman).
… of twice nominated and one-time winner of the best supporting actress Oscar, Marisa Tomei. She’s 41 today.
Daryl Hannah is 45 today.
Brendan Fraser is 37.
If you think you’re going to see any mention of Britney Spears’ 24th birthday on this website you are sorely mistaken.
… was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1935.
That makes Woody Allen 70 today.
Richard Pryor is 65.
Bette Midler is 60.
… of America’s oldest teenager. Dick Clark is 76.
… of movie director Ridley Scott. He’s 68.
… of Ben Stiller. He’s 40.
… of Sandra Oh. The actress (Sideways, Arli$$, Grey’s Anatomy) is 35.
Winston Churchill was born on this date in 1874; he died in 1965.
Churchillian quotes:
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”
… of Barry Gordy. The founder of Motown is 76.
… of Randy Newman. The 16-time Oscar nominee (one win) is 62.
… of Paul Shaffer. The Letterman Show band-leader is 56.
… of S. Epatha Merkerson. Lt. Van Buren is 53.
… of Jon Stewart. The Daily Show star is 43.
… of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg. She’s 48 today.
Johnny Allen Hendrix was born in Seattle on this date in 1942. His name was changed to James Marshall Hendrix at age four. We know him as Jimi. He acquired his first guitar at age 16.
Jimi Hendrix expanded the range and vocabulary of the electric guitar into areas no musician had ever ventured before. Many would claim him to be the greatest guitarist ever to pick up the instrument. At the very least his creative drive, technical ability and painterly application of such effects as wah-wah and distortion forever transformed the sound of rock and roll. Hendrix helped usher in the age of psychedelia with his 1967 debut, Are You Experienced?, and the impact of his brief but meteoric career on popular music continues to be felt.
Excerpt from Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum: Inductee Detail
… was born on this date in 1893. He graduated from the University of Tennessee and received an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia. He became an author and lecturer and was drama critic for The Nation during the years 1924-1952. He wrote two criticially acclaimed biographies, Samuel Johnson (1944) and Henry David Thoreau (1948).
Krutch moved to Tucson in 1952 and turned his focus primarily to nature writing. Among his notable works were The Desert Year, The Voice of the Desert and The Great Chain of Life.
From The Voice of the Desert:
Here in the West, as in the country at large, a war more or less concealed under the guise of a “conflict of interests” rages between the “practical” conservationist and the defenders of the national parks and other public lands; between cattlemen and lumberers on the one hand, and the “sentimentalists” on the other. The pressure to allow the hunter, the rancher, or the woodcutter to invade the public domain is constant and the plea is always that we should “use” what is assumed to be useless unless it is adding to material welfare. But unless somebody teaches love, there can be no ultimate protection to what is lusted after. Without some “love of nature” for itself there is no possibility of solving “the problem of conservation.”
… of three generations of sports hall-of-famers. Stan Musial is 85, Earl Monroe is 61, and Troy Aikman is 39.
Also, Kate Hudson’s mother is 60 today. (That’s Goldie Hawn.) “That Girl,” Marlo Thomas is 68.
Update: Aikman is not yet in the Hall-of-Fame. He’s on this year’s list.
… was born on this date in 1904. Listen to his seminal recording of Body and Soul [RealPlayer].
As writer Len Weinstock noted,
Hawkins himself didn’t think there was anything outstanding about his Body and Soul saying “it was nothing special, just an encore I use in the clubs to get off the stand. I thought nothing of it and didn’t even bother to listen to it afterwards”. But the solo, two choruses of beautifully conceived and perfecly balanced improvisation, caused an immediate sensation with musicians and the public. It is still the standard to which tenorists aspire. A parallel can be drawn between Hawkins’ Body and Soul and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address . Both were brief, lucid, eloquent and timeless masterpieces, yet tossed off by their authors as mere ephemera.
Lincoln well knew what he had done at Gettysburg, but it’s a nice analogy even so.
Hawkins died in 1969.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble was born on this date in 1889.
During the past 100 years, astronomers have discovered quasars, pulsars, black holes and planets orbiting distant suns. But all these pale next to the discoveries Edwin Hubble made in a few remarkable years in the 1920s. At the time, most of his colleagues believed the Milky Way galaxy, a swirling collection of stars a few hundred thousand light-years across, made up the entire cosmos. But peering deep into space from the chilly summit of Mount Wilson, in Southern California, Hubble realized that the Milky Way is just one of millions of galaxies that dot an incomparably larger setting.
Hubble went on to trump even that achievement by showing that this galaxy-studded cosmos is expanding — inflating majestically like an unimaginably gigantic balloon — a finding that prompted Albert Einstein to acknowledge and retract what he called “the greatest blunder of my life.” Hubble did nothing less, in short, than invent the idea of the universe and then provide the first evidence for the Big Bang theory, which describes the birth and evolution of the universe. He discovered the cosmos, and in doing so founded the science of cosmology.
Source: TIME 100: Edwin Hubble
… to comedian Dick Smothers. The straight man of the duo is 67.
… to Veronica Hamel of Hill Street Blues. She’s 62.
… to Joe Walsh of The Eagles. He’s 58. Life’s been good to him so far.
I have a mansion forget the price
Ain’t never been there they tell me it’s nice
I live in hotels tear out the walls
I have accountants pay for it all
They say I’m crazy but I have a good time
I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime
Life’s been good to me so far
My Maserati does 185
I lost my license now I don’t drive
I have a limo ride in the back
I lock the doors in case I’m attacked
… to Bo Derek. She’s nearly five 10s now. She’s 49.
Robert F. Kennedy should have been 80 today. He was assassinated at age 42.
… of Larry King. He’s 72.
… of Dick Cavett. He’s 69.
… of Ted Turner. He’s 67.
… of Calvin Klein. He’s 63.
… of Ann Curry. She’s 49.
… of Allison Janney. She’s 45.
… of Meg Ryan. She’s 44.
… of Jodie Foster. She’s 43.
… to Gordon Lightfoot. The singer is 67.
… to Martin Scorsese. The director is 63
… to Danny DeVito. The actor/director/producer is 61.
… to Lorne Michaels. The producer of Saturday Night Live is 61.
… to Tom Seaver. Tom Terrific, the baseball hall-of-famer is 61.
… to Elvin Hayes. The basketball hall-of-famer is 60.
… to Howard Dean. The politician is 57.
… to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The actress is 47.
… to Daisy Fuentes. The hottie is 39.
Rock Hudson was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1985.
Soichiro Honda was born on this date in 1906; he died in 1991. Honda started as an auto mechanic at age 15.
… of jazz singer Dianna Krall. She’s 41 today. Great music to blog by.
… of actor Burgess Meredith, like Oklahoma and Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, born on this date in 1907. Meredith was twice nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar — at the age of 68 and 69 — The Day of the Locust and Rocky.
W.C. Handy was born on this date in 1873. Handy was the first to write sheet music for the blues and for that reason is known as the Father of the Blues. Though associated with Memphis and Beale Street, Handy’s most famous song is St. Louis Blues (1914).
Click to hear Bessie Smith sing St. Louis Blues accompanied by Louis Armstrong — possibly the most influential recording in American music history (1925). [RealPlayer file]
NPR told the Handy and St. Louis Blues stories as part of the NPR 100. Click to hear the NPR report, which includes Handy’s own reminiscences and the complete Smith-Armstrong recording. [RealPlayer file]
W.C. Handy died in 1958.
Our guv, Bill Richardson, is 58 today.
Judge Wapner is 86. Raymond Babbitt sends his greetings.
Ed Asner, who will always be Lou Grant to me, is 76.
Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), artist Georgia O’Keefe (1887-1986), Field Marshal Edwin Rommel (1891-1944), Governor (of New York) Averell Harriman (1891-1986) and U.S. Air Force General (and George Wallace running-mate) Curtis LeMay (1906-1990) were all born on this date.
I was going to refer to this as the Ides of November, but learned the 15th was the Ides only in March, May, July, and October. In the other Roman months, including this, the ninth month, the Ides was the 13th. By the way, NewMexiKen has been watching the HBO series Rome and I’m pretty sure something bad is going to happen to Julius Caesar just as it did to Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood. History has a way of eliminating the most interesting character.
… in 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Franklin died in 1790.
… in 1940, the Disney film Fantasia premiered.
… in 1977, the comic strip “Li’l Abner” ended.
… in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was dedicated.
Whoopi Goldberg is 50 today; Chris Noth 49.