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Today is the birthday

… of Margaret Thatcher, 85.

… of Melinda Dillon. That’s the mom in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She’s 71. Dillon was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar for that role and for her part in Absence of Malice. But best of all, she was the mom in The Christmas Story.

Mr. Parker: Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian.
Mrs. Parker: Uh, I think that says FRAGILE, dear.
Mr. Parker: Oh, yeah.

… of Paul Simon. He’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” at 69.

Paul Simon is among the most erudite and daring songsmiths in popular music. After the breakup of Simon and Garfunkel in 1970, Simon embarked on a fruitful solo career that’s been notable for lyrical acuity, impeccable musicianship and stylistic daring. While Simon and Garfunkel worked largely (but not exclusively) in the folk idiom, Simon the solo artist has roamed wherever his muse has taken him – and that has literally meant around the world. His is not so much a conventional career in music as an odyssey of discovery using “intuitive flashes, synaptic leaps and shorthand logic” (in Simon’s own words) to help him on his way.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Demond Wilson. Sanford’s son is 64.

… of Sammy Hagar, 63.

However, Van Halen bounced back strong following Roth’s departure. The group recruited Sammy Hagar, who sang and played guitar. Hagar had started out with the hard-rock group Montrose and had a highly successful solo career. He fit well with Van Halen, with whom he was more personally compatible than his predecessor. In fact, the newly harmonious group scored its first Number One album with 5150, on which Hagar handles lead vocals.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Marie Osmond. She’s 51.

… of Jerry Rice. He’s 48.

… of Kate Walsh, 43. “The real question is, when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?”

… of skater Nancy Kerrigan. She’s 41.

… of Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen is 39.

The woman known as Molly Pitcher was born on October 13, 1754.

An Artillery wife, Mary Hays McCauly (better known as Molly Pitcher) shared the rigors of Valley Forge with her husband, William Hays. Her actions during the battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778 became legendary. That day at Monmouth was as hot as Valley Forge was cold. Someone had to cool the hot guns and bathe parched throats with water.

Across that bullet-swept ground, a striped skirt fluttered. Mary Hays McCauly was earning her nickname “Molly Pitcher” by bringing pitcher after pitcher of cool spring water to the exhausted and thirsty men. She also tended to the wounded and once, heaving a crippled Continental soldier up on her strong young back, carried him out of reach of hard-charging Britishers. On her next trip with water, she found her artilleryman husband back with the guns again, replacing a casualty. While she watched, Hays fell wounded. The piece, its crew too depleted to serve it, was about to be withdrawn. Without hesitation, Molly stepped forward and took the rammer staff from her fallen husband’s hands. For the second time on an American battlefield, a woman manned a gun. (The first was Margaret Corbin during the defense of Fort Washington in 1776.) Resolutely, she stayed at her post in the face of heavy enemy fire, ably acting as a matross (gunner).

For her heroic role, General Washington himself issued her a warrant as a noncommissioned officer. Thereafter, she was widely hailed as “Sergeant Molly.” A flagstaff and cannon stand at her gravesite at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A sculpture on the battle monument commemorates her courageous deed.

Fort Sill History

Burr Tillstrom was born on October 13, 1917. He was a puppeteer, creator of Kukla, Ollie and a passel of other characters who interacted with actress Fran Allison in the early days of television. Kukla, Fran and Ollie began in Chicago and then was on NBC each evening Monday through Friday, shortened to 15 minutes, then made weekly, but lasting until 1957. Early on the show won a Peabody Award for, “whimsy and gentle satire of the James Barrie-Lewis Carroll sort.” Time said KFO, “flourished in this desert as an oasis of intelligent fantasy.”

Kukla, Fran and Ollie was the first children’s show to be equally popular with children and adults. The show’s immense popularity stemmed from its simplicity, gentle fun and frolic and adult wit. Burr Tillstrom’s Kuklapolitan Players differed from typical puppets in that the humor derived from satire and sophisticated wit rather than slapstick comedy. At the height of the show’s popularity, the cast received 15,000 letters a day, and its ratings were comparable to shows featuring Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan.

The basic format of the show was simple: Fran Allison stood in front of a small stage and interacted with the characters. The format was derived from the puppet act Tillstrom performed for the RCA Victor exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications

That’s Tillstrom with his stars.

Art Tatum was born on October 13th in 1909.

It’s hard to summon enough superlatives for Tatum’s piano playing: his harmonic invention, his technical virtuosity, his rhythmic daring. The great stride pianist Fats Waller famously announced one night when Tatum walked into the club where Waller was playing, “I only play the piano, but tonight God is in the house.”

NPR : Art Tatum

Leonard Alfred Schneider was born on this date in 1925. We know him as Lenny Bruce.

On April 1, 1964, four New York City vice squad officers attended Bruce’s performance at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. The officers arrested Bruce and owner Howard Solomon following Bruce’s 10:00 P.M. show. Assistant District Attorney Richard Kuh presented a grand jury with a typed partial script of Bruce’s performance including references to Jackie Kennedy trying to “save her ass” after her husband’s assassination, Eleanor Roosevelt’s “nice tits,” sexual intimacy with a chicken, “pissing in the sink,” the Lone Ranger sodomizing Tonto, and St. Paul giving up “fucking” for Lent. The jury indicted Bruce on the obscenity charge. The trial before a three-judge court in New York City that followed stands as a remarkable moment in the history of free speech. Both the prosecution and defense presented parades of well-known witnesses to either denounce Bruce’s performance as the worst sort of gutter humor or celebrate it as a powerful and insightful social commentary. Among the witnesses testifying in support of Bruce were What’s My Line? panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, sociologist Herbert Gans, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer. In the end, the censors won. Voting 2 to 1, the court found Bruce guilty of violating New York’s obscenity laws and sentenced him to “four months in the workhouse.”

Famous Trials: The Lenny Bruce Trial

Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966.

Today is the birthday

… of Elmore Leonard. He’s 85. Leonard on his Rules of Writing — “These rules I picked up along the way to help me remain invisible while I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.” (Quotation from If You Can’t Do It Well, Don’t Do It.)

Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle (Leonard’s Rules of Writing).

Elmore Leonard’s western stories are as good if not better than his detective novels.

… of Joan Cusack. The actress is 48. She’s been nominated for the best actress in a supporting role Oscar twice, Working Girl and In & Out.

And, if they rated first ladies like they rate the presidents, the one who would surely be at the top, Eleanor Roosevelt, was born on this date in 1884. (She died in 1962.) The following is excerpted from the White House Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt:

A shy, awkward child, starved for recognition and love, Eleanor Roosevelt grew into a woman with great sensitivity to the underprivileged of all creeds, races, and nations. Her constant work to improve their lot made her one of the most loved–and for some years one of the most revered–women of her generation.

She was born in New York City on October 11, 1884, daughter of lovely Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt, younger brother of Theodore. …

In her circle of friends was a distant cousin, handsome young Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They became engaged in 1903 and were married in 1905, with her uncle the President giving the bride away. Within eleven years Eleanor bore six children; one son died in infancy. …

From [Franklin’s] successful campaign for governor in 1928 to the day of his death, she dedicated her life to his purposes. She became eyes and ears for him, a trusted and tireless reporter.

When Mrs. Roosevelt came to the White House in 1933, she understood social conditions better than any of her predecessors and she transformed the role of First Lady accordingly. She never shirked official entertaining; she greeted thousands with charming friendliness. She also broke precedent to hold press conferences, travel to all parts of the country, give lectures and radio broadcasts, and express her opinions candidly in a daily syndicated newspaper column, “My Day.”

October 10th is the 283rd day of 2010.

Thelonious Monk was born on this date in 1917.

Thelonious Monk, who was criticized by observers who failed to listen to his music on its own terms, suffered through a decade of neglect before he was suddenly acclaimed as a genius; his music had not changed one bit in the interim. In fact, one of the more remarkable aspects of Monk’s music was that it was fully formed by 1947 and he saw no need to alter his playing or compositional style in the slightest during the next 25 years.

All Music

A must-have jazz album is Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. All Music has a review and the background — the tape had been lost for decades.

Monk died in 1982.

October 10th is the birthday

… of Peter Coyote, the actor. He’s 69. Coyote does a lot of voice-over and narration. He’s the one that sounds a lot like Henry Fonda. He’s appeared in more than 100 films and television shows (including recently in “Commander in Chief”), though he began acting only at age 39. He tested for the part of Indiana Jones.

… of actor Ben Vereen, 64.

… of singer John Prine, 64.

… of David Lee Roth, 56.

… of Tanya Tucker, 52.

… of Bradley Whitford. He’s 51.

… of Brett Favre. He’s 41 and done.

… of Dale Earnhardt Jr. He’s 36.

Novelist and screenwriter James Clavell was born in Sydney, Australia, on this date in 1924; he died in 1994. Among Clavell’s films, The Great Escape and To Sir, with Love. His most famous novels are King Rat and Shōgun.

Helen Hayes was born on October 10th in 1900. Hayes won two acting Oscars — leading in 1932 and supporting 39 years later in 1971.

Long regarded as “the First Lady of American Theater,” Helen Hayes earned international esteem and affection during a career that spanned more than eighty years on stage and in films, radio, and television. As a screen actor she won two Oscars, as a stage actor she won a prestigious Drama League of New York award, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan presented her with the National Medal of Arts. Deeply in love with her profession, Hayes enjoyed playing a variety of roles, from Amanda Wingfield in Tennesse Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” (1948) to a little old lady stowaway in AIRPORT (1970). Both the charm of her comic roles and the depth of her tragic ones made Hayes one of the most respected and beloved American actors.

American Masters

Robert Gould Shaw, the Union officer commanding the 54th Regiment, portrayed in the movie Glory by Matthew Broderick, was born on October 10th in 1837. He died leading an attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1863.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has an interesting few paragraphs today on St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Time marches on.

Today Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan, is 71; Jesse Jackson 69; Chevy Chase 67; Stephanie Zimbalist 54. Even Matt Damon is 40.

Susan Alexandra Weaver is 61. She is one of 11 actors to be nominated for both leading and supporting Oscars in the same year — Gorillas in the Mist and Working Girl. She was also nominated for leading actress for Aliens. She’s 5-foot-11 and took the name Sigourney after reading The Great Gatsby.

Author R.L. Stine is 67.

When someone asked him how he first knew that Goosebumps was going to be a big success, he said: “I was in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, driving to a bookstore for a book signing. I remember I was stuck in a huge traffic jam and I was really worried I would be late and was growing more and more annoyed at all the traffic. When we finally approached the bookstore, I realized that the traffic jam was caused by all the people who were coming to see me.” For several years in a row in the 1990s, he was voted not just the best-selling children’s author in the country, but the best-selling author. He has written more than 100 books and sold more than 400 million copies.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2009)

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, was born on this date in 1920. He died in 1986.

Eddie Rickenbacker was born on this date in 1890.

Edward Vernon Rickenbacker was a man whose delight in turning the tables on seemingly hopeless odds took him to the top in three distinct fields.

In the daredevil pre-World War I days of automobile racing he became one of this country’s leading drivers, although he had a profound dislike for taking unnecessary risks. He had entered the auto industry as a trainee mechanic and made his first mark servicing the cranky machines of that day.

In World War I he became the nation’s “Ace of Aces” as a military aviator despite the fact that he had joined the Army as a sergeant-driver on Gen. John J. Pershing’s staff.

He was named by Gen. William Mitchell to be chief engineering officer of the fledgling Army Air Corps. His transfer to actual combat flying–in which he shot down 22 German planes and four observation balloons–was complicated not only by his being two years over the pilot age limit of 25, but also because he was neither a college man nor a “gentleman” such as then made up the aristocratic fighter squadrons of the air service.

In the highly competitive airline business, Mr. Rickenbacker was the first man to prove that airlines could be made profitable, and then the first to prove that they could be run without a Government subsidy and kept profitable.

New York Times (1973)

Seems like he might have been the last man to prove that airlines could be made profitable too.