Category: Birthdays

is 39 today.

was born on this date in 1901.

Iwerks was Disney’s right hand man in the creation of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Disney would come up with the ideas, stories, and motivations, then Iwerks would bring it to life. Bringing Mickey Mouse to life, however, was no easy task and it required Iwerks to spit out 600 drawings every single day. Iwerks dedication, however, would soon payoff for him and Disney. The third Mickey Mouse cartoon that Disney directed and Iwerks animated, “Steamboat Willie,” would be the one that would catapult Mickey and Disney into stardom and household names.

Though Iwerks and Disney were colleagues since age 18, they spliit in 1930 after Iwerks signed a deal with a distributor that had failed to pay Disney. Walt and Roy Disney bought out Iwerks’ 20% ownership in Disney Brothers Productions. After attempting to establish his own studio, Iwerks returned to Disney in 1940. He is credited with combining live action with animation.

Source: An online essay, Ub Iwerks – The Early Disney Years.

was born in Eisenach, Germany, on this date in 1685.

Music…should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul; where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamor and ranting.

was born in Conyers, Georgia, on this date in 1958.

Miss Hunter has been nominated for an Academy Award four times, twice for best actress and twice for supporting actress. She won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role for The Piano in 1993. She has also won Emmys for Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and Roe vs. Wade.

NewMexiKen is wearing the green today in honor of his Irish children and grandchildren.

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields,
And until we meet again,
May God hold you
In the palm of his hand.

is 71 today.

was born in Ulm, Germany, on this date in 1879.

Michael Caine is 71.

Billy Crystal is 57.

James Taylor, sweet sounding as ever, is 56 today.

was born on this date in 1952.

Adams died of a heart attack in 2001. His obituary from BBC included this background:

Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952 and educated in Essex before returning to Cambridge to study at St John’s College.

His career included work as a radio and television writer and producer before his life was changed by the publication of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in 1979.

The satirical tale chronicled the journey of alien Ford Prefect and his human companion Arthur Dent throughout the Universe after the destruction of Earth.

It centred around the search for an answer to life, the universe, and everything – which turned out to be 42.

The novel went on to sell more than 14 million copies worldwide and was followed by the sequels The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long and Thanks For All the Fish.

The Writer’s Almanac has this:

…The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a series of satiric science-fiction novels that begins when the main character, Arthur Dent, is yanked from Earth just before the planet is demolished to make space for an interstellar highway. The book begins: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has–or rather had–a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time . . . lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.”

Great stuff — at least it was 25 years ago.

was born on this date in 1841. Three times wounded in the Civil War, Holmes survived to become a prominent legal scholar, Chief Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932. He is considered one of the greatest of the Supreme Court justices.

But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States, Baer v. United States, 249 U.S. 52 (1919).

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting, Abrams et al. v. United States, 250 U.S. 630 (1919).

was born on this date in 1931. The Writer’s Almanac has this about McPhee:

It’s the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931). He’s the author of over twenty books, and he’s been a staff writer for many years for The New Yorker magazine. In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange growing business, he wrote: “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”

John McPhee won the Pulitizer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1999 with his Annals of the Former World.

McPhee has long been one of NewMexiKen’s favorites.

was born on this date in 1806.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

to Ed McMahon, he’s 81.

And Rob Reiner (“Meathead”), he’s 57.

was born 100 years ago today. Visit the Seussentennial.

When Theodor Seuss Geisel was awarded an honorary degree at Princeton in 1985, the entire graduating class stood and recited Green Eggs and Ham.

Green Eggs and Ham is the third largest selling book in the English language — ever.

circumnavigator of the globe and Pacific Crest Trail thru-hiker, was born in Flint, Michigan, on this date in 1957.

are 50 today; that is, actor and Oscar-winning director Ron Howard is 50 today.

was born on this date in 1807.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

is 70 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice profile.

It’s the birthday of Kiowa poet, novelist and memoirist N(avarro) Scott Momaday, born in Lawton, Oklahoma (1934). One of the first books Momaday published was a collection of traditional Kiowa narratives about the sacred Sun Dance doll of the Kiowa tribe. While working on the project, Momaday had a chance to view the doll, which is kept in a rawhide bundle and has not been displayed since the Sun Dance of 1888. Seeing it made him feel for the first time that he had a connection to his heritage. He said, “I became more keenly aware of myself as someone who had walked through time and in whose blood there is something inestimably old and undying. It was as if I had remembered something that had happened two hundred years ago.”

He tried to write a book of poems based on the experience, but Wallace Stegner helped him turn the poems into fiction, and the book became House Made of Dawn (1969), about an Indian veteran of World War II named Abel who doesn’t fit in with mainstream America or the Indian reservation where he lives. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and it helped spark an American Indian literary renaissance. Momaday has gone on to write many more books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His most recent book is In the Bear’s House (1999).

Momaday was instrumental in the production of the PBS series The West, whose website includes this biographical background.

Momaday has always understood who he is. “I am an Indian and I believe I’m fortunate to have the heritage I have, ” he says, speaking as a Kiowa Indian who defines himself as a Western Man. But that sense of identity didn’t evolve without difficulty. “I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now,” Momaday says. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life. I’ve been able to deal with it reasonably well, I think, and I value it.”

Momaday was born in 1934 and spent his childhood on the Navajo, Apache and Pueblo reservations of the Southwest. “I had a Pan-Indian experience as a child, even before I knew what that term meant,” he recalls. Eventually, after enduring the job-scarce rigors of the Depression, the family settled in New Mexico, where Momaday’s parents, both teachers, taught for 25 years in a two-teacher Indian day school. Momaday’s father was also a painter and his mother a writer. “I grew up in a creative household and followed in my mother’s footsteps, to begin with,” says Momaday, who later became a painter, as well, and has extensively exhibited his work here and abroad. “I was interested in reading and writing early on.”

Those literary interests led to a lifelong love affair with American and English literature. After getting his BA at the University of New Mexico, Momaday earned an MA and Ph. D. at Stanford University. During the 35-plus years of his academic career, Momaday’s reputation as a scholar who specializes in the work of Emily Dickinson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, as well as in Indian oral tradition and concepts of the sacred, has resulted in his receiving numerous awards. These include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Premio Letterario Internationale Mondello, Italy’s highest literary award.

Momaday has also had tenured appointments at the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses of the University of California, Stanford University and the University of Arizona. He developed his first course in Indian oral tradition in 1969 while he was at Berkeley and “I’ve been teaching it every year since.” In addition, Momaday has been a visiting professor at Columbia and Princeton; was the first professor to teach American literature at the University of Moscow in Russia; and holds 12 honorary degrees from various American universities, including Yale.

Momaday is the author of 13 books, including novels, poetry collections, literary criticism, and works on Native American culture. His first novel, House Made of Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize, but his favorites are The Ancient Child, his most recent novel, because “it is a greater act of the imagination,” and The Way to Rainy Mountain, because “it presents a good, accurate picture of Kiowa culture in its heyday.”

Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward is 74 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times. Woodward and Paul Newman have been married 46 years.

Two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor is 72 today. She won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Miss Taylor is probably best known, however, for being the voice of Maggie on The Simpsons.

was born in Detroit on this date in 1952. She is co-author with her husband of children’s books including Lizards on the Wall and It Rained on the Desert Today.

was born on this date in 1888. Dulles was Secretary of State under Eisenhower from 1953 until April 1959. He is the person for whom Washington Dulles International Airport is named.