Category: Birthdays

is 92 today. NewMexiKen worked at the LBJ Library in the mid-1970s and met and occasionally chatted with Mrs. Johnson. She was a warm, impressive and attractive woman.

… of Paul Winchell. The voice of Jerry Mahoney is 82.

… of Joe Paterno. The coach who should retire from Penn State is 78.

… of Phil Donahue. The liberal talk show host is 69.

… of Jane Fonda. Barbarella is 67.

… of Carla Thomas. Gee Whiz, she’s 62.

… of Chris Evert. The tennis hall-of-famer is 50.

… of Jane Kaczmarek. Malcolm’s mom is 49.

… of Ray Romano. Raymond is 47.

… of Al Kaline. The hall of fame right fielder is 70.

… of Kevin McHale. The basketball hall-of-fame member is 47.

… of Mike Lookinland. Bobby Brady is 44.

… of Roger Smith. One of the James Bonds is 72. Jeffrey Spencer of 77 Sunset Strip is 72.

… of Keith Richards. The Rolling Stone is 61.

… of Steven Spielberg. The director is 58.

… of Brad Pitt. He’s still pretty at 41.

… of Christina Aguilera. She’s 24.

… of Jane Austen (1775-1817). Best known for her novels about young women yearning to get married, she was never married.

… George Santayana (1863-1952). “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

… of Margaret Mead (1901-1978). “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

… and of Arthur C. Clarke (1917). Clarke’s laws:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

… of Don Hewitt. The producer of 60 Minutes is 82.

… of Patty Duke. The Oscar-winning actress is 58.

… of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel Prize winner (for Literature in 1970) is 86.

… of Rita Moreno. Anita is 73.

… of Tom Hayden. Jane’s one-time husband and co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society is 65.

… of John Kerry. The man who received the second most votes for president ever cast in one election is 61.

… of Brenda Lee. Little Miss Dynamite is (gasp!) 60.

… of Eli Wallach. Tuco is 89. “Hey Blondie, do you know what you are? You’re a stinking son of a….” [Theme starts.]

… of Ellen Burstyn. Alice is 72. 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 57.

… of Larry Bird. The Basketball Hall of Famer is 48.

… of Richard Wayne Penniman. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Little Richard is 72.

… of Jose Carreras. The tenor is 58.

… of Jim Messina. The one-time member of Buffalo Springfield (with Dewey Martin, Neil Young, Richie Furay and Steven Stills) is 57.

… of Frankie Muniz. Malcolm is 19.

… of Dick Clark. America’s oldest teenager is 75.

… of David Mamet. The playwright is 57.

And it was on this date in 1835 that Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born.

He’s best known to us today for his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but in his own lifetime his best-selling books were his travel books such as Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Life on the Mississippi (1883).

The Writer’s Almanac has much more.

… of Barry Gordy. The founder of Motown is 75.

… of S. Epatha Merkerson. Lt. Van Buren is 52.

… of Jon Stewart. The Daily Show star is 42.

Born on this date in 1922. He died in February 2000, the night before his last Sunday strip appeared.

… of Nadia Comaneci. The perfect 10 is 43.

… of Brian Hyland. The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini singer is 61.

… of Booker T. Jones. The organist is 60. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Between 1963 and 1968, Booker T. and the MGs appeared on more than 600 Stax/Volt recordings, including classics by such artists as Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and William Bell. As a result of Stax’s affiliation with Atlantic Records, the group also worked with Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Albert King. Moreover, Booker T. and the MGs were a successful recording group in their own right, cutting ten albums and fourteen instrumental hits, including “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High,” “Time Is Tight” and “Soul-Limbo.”

… of Neil Young. He’s 59. Again, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Neil Young is one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters and performers. In a career that extends back to his mid-Sixties roots as a coffeehouse folkie in his native Canada, this principled and unpredictable maverick has pursued an often winding course across the rock and roll landscape. He’s been a cult hero, a chart-topping rock star, and all things in-between, remaining true to his restless muse all the while. At various times, Young has delved into folk, country, garage-rock and grunge. His biggest album, Harvest (1972) , apotheosized the laid-back singer/songwriter genre he helped invent. By contrast, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Young’s second-best seller, was a loud, brawling masterpiece whose title track, an homage to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, contained the oft-quoted line “Better to burn out than it is to rust.”

… of Calista Flockhart. Ally McBeal is 40.

… of Demi Moore. She’s 42.

… of Jonathan Winters. He’s 79. “If God had really intended man to fly, He’d make it easier to get to the airport.”

… of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He’s 82. The Writer’s Almanac has several paragraphs on Vonnegut, including this:

Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and the book made Vonnegut a hero among the war protesters. Vonnegut said it was an anti-war book. But he also said, “Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers.”

… of Bonnie Raitt. She turns 55 in the Nick of Time.

… of Patti Page. A good gift for Patti as she turns 77 might be A Doggy in The Window. Depends on how much, I suppose.

It’s also the birthday of Margaret Mitchell, born on this date in 1900. As you all must know (but just in case), Mitchell’s original name for Scarlett O’Hara was Pansy O’Hara. Just wouldn’t have been the same.

The Writer’s Almanac has quite a bit on Mitchell.

… of Billy Graham. He’s 86 today.

… of Mary Travers. Mary of Peter, Paul & Mary is (big sigh) 67.

… of Roberta Joan Anderson. Joni Mitchell is 61.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ike Turner is 73 today.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Art Garfunkel is 63.

Sam Shepard is 61. An inductee as a playwright into the Theatre Hall of Fame, Shepard was also nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

Peter Noone (Herman of Herman’s Hermits) is 57. No, Peter isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Bill Walton is 52. He’s in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Tatum O’Neal is 41. Miss O’Neal won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar at age 10 for Paper Moon. Her new tell-all book is called A Paper Life.

Vivien Leigh (who died at age 53) was born on this date in 1913. Miss Leigh was selected as Best Actress twice — for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (opposite Clark Gable) and for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (opposite Marlon Brando).

And Leonard Franklin Slye was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1911. As Roy Rogers he’s an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the only person to be elected twice — as the King of the Cowboys and as a founder of the Sons of the Pioneers (“Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water”). Rogers died in 1998.

is 88 today.

… of Dan Rather. His frequency is 73.

… of Jane Pauley. She’s 54.

… of David Ogden Stiers. Major Winchester is 62.

It’s also the birthday of Michael (Bonanza/Little House on the Prairie) Landon, who was born in 1936 and died in 1991, and John Candy, born in 1950. Candy died in 1994.

… of Grace Slick. The Jefferson Airplane singer is 65.

… of Henry Winkler. The Fonz is 59.

… of Charles Martin Smith. Terry “The Toad” (American Graffiti) is 51.

… of Bill Gates. The former resident of Albuquerque is 49 today.

… of Julia Roberts. The Oscar-winning (Erin Brockovich) actress is 37. Ms. Roberts was also nominated for Best Actress for Pretty Woman and Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias.

It’s also the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. He was born in 1914 and died in 1995. The following is from The Writer’s Almanac:

In the 1950s, Salk turned his attention to the polio virus. The disease affected children and many of those infected became paralyzed or died. There had been larger and larger outbreaks of polio in the United States since the late 19th century. By 1952, more than 58,000 cases were reported and more than 3,000 children had died of the disease.

It was the height of the baby boom, there were more children in the United States than ever before, and parents were terrified. The outbreaks occurred in the summer, and parents kept their children home from swimming pools out of fear they would be infected.

Salk’s groundbreaking discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus. Scientists were skeptical at the time, but Salk believed so strongly that it would work that he first tested the vaccine on himself, his family and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe.

When the vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, polio infection rates were reduced to less than 100 cases a year, and Salk was declared a national hero.