Category: Birthdays

Individuals born on this date with an emphasis on American history and culture, including pop culture.

The first man on the moon

Neil Armstrong is 74 today.

All you current and former civil servants out there should find Armstrong to be your particular hero. The first man on the moon was a federal employee, a GS-14.

Satchmo

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans on this date in 1901.

Armstrong would be near the top of NewMexiKen’s list of most significant Americans ever. His impact is immeasurable. Or, as claimed by Playboy, “What was the greatest band of the 20th century? Forget the Beatles — it was Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and its subsequent incarnation, the Hot Seven … these bands altered the course of popular music.”

The Red Hot Jazz Archives has numerous Armstrong recordings you can hear. Start with West End Blues or—better—St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith [both Real Audio].

Munch…

is 60 today. That’s actor Richard Belzer of Homicide and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Munch would have been a good replacement for Briscoe it seems to me. He’s got the wise crack down.

Happy Birthday!

Tony Bennett is 78.

Martin Sheen is 64.

Martha Stewart is 63.

Jay North (TV’s Dennis the Menace) is 53.

Super Bowl quarterback Tom Brady is 27.

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 twice before posted this quote from Pyle, but decided to do so again on his birthday, and because for me, returning late last night, be it ever so humble, 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

Jean Shepherd…

was born on this date in 1925. As they so often do, The Writer’s Almanac has a nice, succinct essay:

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.”

Happy Birthday

Cosmo Kramer is 55 today (Michael Richards).

Wonder Woman is 53 (Lynda Carter).

Mrs. Marc Anthony is 34 (J Lo).

Anna Paquin (Oscar winner at age 11) is 22.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie…

was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on this date in 1912. We, of course, know him as Woody Guthrie.

This from David Hajdu in a review in The New Yorker earlier this year of a new biography of Guthrie:

…”This Land Is Your Land,” a song that most people likely think they know in full. The lyrics had been written in anger, as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which Woody Guthrie deplored as treacle. In addition to the familiar stanzas (“As I went walking that ribbon of highway,” and so on), Guthrie had composed a couple of others, including this:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people—
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God Blessed America for me.

Woody Guthrie died in 1967.

Gerald R. Ford …

is 91 today. He was born as Leslie L. King, Jr., on this date in 1913. He took the name Gerald Rudolf Ford, Jr., when adopted by his stepfather.

Ford is the second oldest former president ever, after Ronald Reagan. John Adams and Herbert Hoover both lived to be 90.

NewMexiKen had several meetings with President Ford in the years after he left office (1977). In fact it can be said that on one two-day occasion I helped him clean his garage. The most astonishing incident however, was in 1981.

The Gerald R. Ford Museum was about to be dedicated in Grand Rapids. As the representative of the National Archives nearest Ford’s retirement office in Rancho Mirage, California, I was called with an urgent request. It seemed flags had not been ordered for the replica Oval Office in the Museum. President Ford would lend them his. I was asked to go to his office, pick them up and ship them to Michigan.

The next morning I was ushered into the former President’s office. He was standing at his desk browsing through some papers. After the routine “Hello, Ken” and “Hello, Mr. President” exchange, I went about my business with the flags. He continued his business with the papers.

The U.S. flag was on a brass stand with two wooden staff pieces screwed together at the middle and a brass eagle, wings outstretched, at the top, about seven feet from the floor. I unscrewed the two pieces of the staff, a task made difficult by the weight of the flag and the eagle above.

As I began to lower the top half at an angle, the eagle took flight. It was just set on the top of the staff, not screwed on as it should have been.

Stop and picture this. The former President of the United States is a few feet away. His gorgeous White House presidential desk is even closer. And we have a brass eagle weighing several pounds in free fall. I’m holding the flag and can’t do anything but watch.

Poor President Ford I thought, he is about to be in the news for being clunked (or worse!) by a flagpole eagle in his own office — and this after years of being portrayed by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a clumsy, stumble-prone klutz. (In reality Gerald Ford was an All-American football player at Michigan in the thirties and still looked exceptionally fit in his sixties.)

It wasn’t my fault the eagle hadn’t been attached but I was about to be a footnote to history.

Amazingly, the eagle missed Mr. Ford. Even more miraculously, it missed the historic desk and fell harmlessly to the carpet with a thud.

The former President had to have noticed. He never said a word. For that alone he has my enduring admiration.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.