NewMexiKen

Today is the birthday

… of Robert Caro, born on this date in 1936. The Writer’s Almanac (2005) tells us about Caro, including this:

Since 1974, Caro has been working on a four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. He says he picked Johnson to write about because he wanted to write about political power, and he believes Lyndon Johnson was the most masterful getter and user of political power in the 20th century. For his research on Johnson, Caro has gone through 34 million documents at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, and he has conducted more than 1,000 interviews. He lived in Johnson’s hometown for three years so that he could get to know the people there well enough that they would open up to him. He also tracked down every living member of Johnson’s grammar school class.

Caro eventually uncovered the fact that Johnson had committed an unprecedented series of lies, manipulations, and vote tampering on his way to becoming a United States Senator. But what fascinated Caro was the fact that a politician who would commit such crimes in order to get power could still use that power for good. He points out that, when Johnson got into office, he became the greatest advocate for civil rights of any politician since Abraham Lincoln.

Caro’s third volume Master of the Senate won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

… of Rudolfo Anaya, 72.

[B]orn in Pastura, New Mexico, in 1937. He grew up in the village of Santa Rosa, and he grew up speaking only Spanish, listening to folktales while he helped his family harvest. He went to college, then he taught middle school and high school. And in the evenings, he started to write a book, a fictionalized account of life in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. He couldn’t get it published, but finally, in 1972, he found a small press in California, and it became a classic: Bless Me, Última.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2008)

… of Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, 70.

… of songwriter Eddie Holland, 70.

… of Otis Williams of the Temptations, 68 today.

… of Henry Winkler. The Fonz, is 64.

… of Timothy B. Schmit, of the Eagles is 62. Before the Eagles, he was in Poco.

… of Terry “The Toad.” Charles Martin Smith is 56 today.

Ezra Pound was born in Halley, Idaho, on this date in 1885.

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. . . . His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry–stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound’s words, “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome.” His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

Poets.org

José Manuel Gallegos was born in Abiquiú, Nuevo México, on this date in 1815.

His people were Hispanos, descendants of early Spanish settlers, and Gallegos went on to become New Mexico’s first delegate to the U.S. Congress.

Raised during the Mexican revolution, Gallegos was surrounded by republican ideals during his formative years of education with the Franciscan missionaries in Taos and Durango. Ordained a Catholic priest at age 25, Gallegos readily added political tasks to his clerical responsibilities. He became pastor of San Felipe de Neri church in La Villa de Albuquerque, as well as one of the nineteen “electors,” men who chose Nuevo México’s deputy to the Mexican Congress.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded the Southwest, from Texas to California, to the United States. Nuevo México became the U.S. territory of New Mexico, and Gallegos was elected to its first Territorial Council. He won the election for delegate to the U.S. Congress in 1853, the second Hispanic Congressional Representative in U.S. history. Thirty-one years had elapsed since Joseph Marion Hernández, from the territory of Florida, had become the first Hispanic in Congress in 1822.

Suspended from the priesthood for refusing to accept the authority of French religious superior, Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (who became the subject of Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop), Gallegos put increasing energy into his political life. Subsequently, he was elected to the New Mexico Territorial House of Representatives, served as treasurer of the territory, and was superintendent of New Mexico Indian affairs. Gallegos returned to the U.S. House of Representatives for a second term in 1871.

— Library of Congress

Today is the birthday

… of football hall-of-fame quarterback Yelberton Abraham “Y.A.” Tittle, 83.

Career record: 2,427 completions, 33,070 yards, 242 TDs, 13 games over 300 yards passing…Paced 1961, 1962, 1963 Giants to division titles…Threw 33 TD passes in 1962, 36 in 1963…NFL’s Most Valuable Player, 1961, 1963.

… of Bill Wyman. The Rolling Stones’ bassist (1962-1992) is 73.

… of F. Murray Abraham. The Oscar-winning best actor (Amadeus) is 70 today.

… of Kevin Kline. The Oscar-winning best supporting actor (A Fish Called Wanda) is 62 today.

Bob Kane, the cartoonist who created “Batman” was born on October 24, 1915. From his Times obituary in 1998:

In 1938 he started drawing adventure strips, ”Rusty and His Pals” and ”Clip Carson,” for National Comics. That same year, a comic-book hero called Superman appeared. Vincent Sullivan, the editor of National Comics, who also owned Superman, asked Mr. Kane and Mr. Finger to come up with a Supercompetitor. They developed Batman on a single weekend. Mr. Kane was 18 [23].

The first Batman strip came out in May 1939 in Detective Comics, one year after the debut of Superman. Batman’s first adventure was called ”The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.” And he was another kind of superhero entirely. Batman wasn’t as strong as Superman, but he was much more agile, a better dresser and had better contraptions and a cooler place to live.

He lived in the Batcave, drove the Batmobile, which had a crime lab and a closed-circuit television in the back, and owned a Batplane. He also kept a lot of tools in his utility belt, including knockout gas, a smoke screen and a radio.

”Since he had no superpowers, he had to rely only on his physical and his mental skills,” said Allan Asherman, the librarian of DC Comics.

Playwright and director Moss Hart was born on October 24th in 1904.

A distinguished librettist, director, and playwright who was particularly renowned for his work with George S. Kaufman. Hart is reported to have written the book for the short-lived “Jonica” in 1930, but his first real Broadway musical credit came three years later when he contributed the sketches to the Irving Berlin revue “As Thousands Cheer.” Subsequent revues for which he co-wrote sketches included “The Show Is On,” “Seven Lively Arts,” and “Inside USA.” During the remainder of the ’30s Hart wrote the librettos for “The Great Waltz” (adapted from the operetta “Waltzes of Vienna”), “Jubilee,” “I’d Rather Be Right” (with Kaufman), and “Sing Out the News” (which he also co-produced with Kaufman and Max Gordon). In 1941 he wrote one of his wittiest and most inventive books for “Lady in Dark,” which starred Gertrude Lawrence, and gave Danny Kaye his first chance on Broadway.

Thereafter, as far as the musical theater was concerned, apart from the occasional revue, Hart concentrated mostly on directing, and sometimes producing, shows such as Irving Berlin’s “Miss Liberty,” and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s smash hits “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.” He won a Tony Award for his work on “My Fair Lady.” His considerable output for the straight theater included “Light up the Sky,” “The Climate of Eden,” “Winged Victory,” and (with Kaufman) “Once in a Lifetime,” “You Can’t Take It With You” (for which they both won the Pulitzer Prize), and “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” Hart also wrote the screenplays for two film musicals, HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (1952) and the 1954 remake of A STAR IS BORN, starring Judy Garland. His absorbing autobiography, ACT ONE, was filmed in 1963 with George Hamilton as Hart and Jason Robards as Kaufman.

Broadway: The American Musical . Stars Over Broadway | PBS

Coast-to-coast telegraph service was completed on this date in 1861.

Thursday, October 24th, 1929 — Black Thursday — was the first of the three most significant days of the stock market crash (the others were Monday the 28th and Tuesday the 29th).

Whitey Ford is 81.

Edward Whitey Ford was the big-game pitcher on the great Yankees teams of the 1950s and early ’60s, earning him the moniker Chairman of the Board. The wily southpaw’s lifetime record of 236-106 gives him the best winning percentage (.690) of any 20th century pitcher. He paced the American League in victories three times, and in ERA and shutouts twice. The 1961 Cy Young Award winner still holds many World Series records, including 10 wins and 94 strikeouts, once pitching 33 consecutive scoreless innings in the Fall Classic.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Steve Cropper is 68. According to the All Music Guide:

Probably the best-known soul guitarist in the world, Cropper came to prominence in the early ’60s, first with the Mar-Keys (“Last Night”), then as a founding member of Booker T. & the MG’s. A major figure in the Southern soul movement of the ’60s, Cropper made his mark not only as a player and arranger (most notably on classic sides by Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, and Wilson Pickett) but as a songwriter as well, co-writing the classic “In the Midnight Hour.”

And Green Onions is the single greatest rock instrumental ever, period (Booker T. Jones, organ; Steve Cropper, guitar; Lewis Steinberg, bass; Al Jackson, drums).

M.G.’s stands for the British motor car and not for Memphis Group. Chips Moman of Stax founded the band and named it for his car. Moman had played with Jones in an earlier band, the Triumphs. Stax changed the origin of the M.G.’s story when Moman left the label. Steve Cropper confirmed Moman’s version on Fresh Air in 2007.

Judy Sheindlin (“Judge Judy”) is 67.

The daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher is 53. That’s Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia.

Ken Watanabe is 50.

Dizzy Gillespie was born on October 21, 1917.

Dizzy Gillespie was one of the principal developers of bop in the early 1940s, and his styles of improvising and trumpet playing were imitated widely in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, he is one of the most influential players in the history of jazz.
. . .

Early in 1953, someone accidentally fell on Gillespie’s trumpet, which was sitting upright on a trumpet stand, and bent the bell back. Gillespie played it, discovered that he liked the sound, and from that point on had trumpets built for him with the bell pointing upwards at a 45 degree angle. The design is his visual trademark — for more than three decades he was virtually the only major trumpeter in jazz playing such an instrument.

PBS – JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns

Alfred Nobel was born on this date in 1833. He was the owner of a weapons manufacturer and inventor of dynamite.

Nobel’s enormous legacy — the impetus to leave the prize money now awarded to Nobel laureates — actually stemmed from an event that left him with feelings of great indignation. After his older brother Ludvig died, a French newspaper printed a scathing obituary of Alfred Nobel, who was in fact alive and well. The writer was allegedly confused about who had died, and he used the obituary to write a condemnation of Alfred’s life and work. “Le marchand de la mort est mort (‘The merchant of death is dead’),” the newspaper proclaimed — and also, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.”
Alfred Nobel read the obituary about himself and was so upset that this was to be his legacy that he rewrote his will to establish a set of prizes celebrating humankind’s greatest achievements.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

NewMexiKen’s parents eloped 67 years ago today. She was a high school senior just turned 17. He was a 19-year-old sailor. My grandmother told her new son-in-law she didn’t know whether to kiss him or kick him.