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Rapid Robert is 90 today.

Combining an overpowering fastball with a devastating curve, both of which appeared out of a deceptively high leg kick, Bob Feller dominated the American League in the 1940s. Rapid Robert led the league in wins six times and in strikeouts seven over his 18-year career. He pitched three no-hitters and still holds the major league record, along with Nolan Ryan, of 12 one-hitters.

The winningest pitcher in Cleveland Indians history, his career totals — a 266-162 record and 2,581 strikeouts — would have been considerably higher but for the almost four seasons he spent in the Navy during World War II.

As a teenager appearing in his first exhibition game against major leaguers he was so impressive that Dizzy Dean, when asked to take a photograph with the youngster, responded. “Why ask me? Ask that kid if he’ll pose with me.”

Feller’s fastball was so potent and his curve so unbalancing that he became the featured player in 1940s newsreels demonstrating that a thrown baseball could travel faster than a motorcycle and could be made to curve

ESPN Classic

Michael Dukakis is 75.

Remember the movie “To Sir, With Love”? Lulu, the red-headed singer is 60 today.

Roseanne Barr is 56 today.

Her family was Jewish, but her parents supported the family by selling crucifixes door to door. When she was three, she hit her head on the dining room table, and her face became paralyzed. Her mom called a rabbi, but Roseanne wasn’t healed. So her mom called the Mormon missionaries, and Roseanne got better. Her Jewish mom took it as a sign that Roseanne should be raised Mormon. Her dad was an atheist, and he was fine with that. Her dad loved comedy shows on television. Whenever a comedian appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, her dad would jump up and yell, “Comedian!” and everyone in the family would rush to the TV. When she was 15, Roseanne ran out into the street and purposefully let herself get hit by a car. She was knocked unconscious, and when she came to, she was placed in a psychiatric ward. She spent eight months there, and she said that it was a very good and valuable experience.

She met a man who drove a garbage truck, and they got married and moved into a trailer. She raised three kids, and on the side she wrote comedy routines. After auditioning for six minutes, she got hired at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Her jokes were about being a mom and a housewife and about the incompetence of the male species. About husbands who couldn’t find their own socks, she said, “They think the uterus is a tracking device.”

And, “As a housewife, I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I’ve done my job.”

And, “The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his chest.”

And, “Women complain about PMS, but I think of it as the only time of the month when I can be myself.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Kate Capshaw is 55. So is Dennis Miller, who will probably change back to liberal after tomorrow.

Photographer Walker Evans was born on November 3rd in 1903.

[B]orn in St. Louis, Missouri (1903), [Evans] wanted to be a writer but suffered from terrible writer’s block. He said, “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word.” He felt like a failure until one day he picked up a camera and realized that with a camera he didn’t have to create things, he could just capture them. The popular photography of the day was highly stylized, so Evans decided to go in the opposite direction, to take pictures of ordinary, unpretentious things. He said, “If the thing is there, why there it is.”

Evans photographed storefronts and signs with marquee lights, blurred views from speeding trains, old office furniture, and common tools. He took pictures of people in the New York City subways with a camera hidden in his winter coat. He especially loved photographing bedrooms: farmers’ bedrooms, bohemian bedrooms, middle-class bedrooms. He’d photograph what people had on their dressers and in their dresser drawers. In 1933, Evans was given the first one-man photographic exhibition by the new Museum of Modern Art.

In the summer of 1936, he collaborated with the journalist James Agee on a book about tenant farmers Greensboro, Alabama, called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which included Evans’s photographs of the Burroughs family, the Fields family, and the Tingle family at work on their farms and in their homes. Those photos are among the most famous images of the Great Depression.

Walker Evans said, “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

Sputnik 2 was launched 51 years ago today. On board was the first animal in space, the dog Laika.

And 62 years ago today Franklin Roosevelt beat Alfred Landon. Landon carried two states, Maine and Vermont.

It’s Halloween and the birthday

… of Astronaut Michael Collins. Collins was the guy on board the Apollo while Armstrong and Aldrin played on the moon.

… of Dan Rather. His frequency is 77.

… of David Ogden Stiers. Major Winchester is 66.

… of Jane Pauley. She’s 58.

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.

The great jazz and blues singer and film actress Ethel Waters was born on this date in 1896.

Later, in the 1930s, Waters found the mainstream of popular music, including jazz and congenial, and brought to it a combination of tragedy (in Harold Arlen’s Stormy Weather, 1933) and comedy (in H. I. Marshall’s You Can’t Stop Me From Loving You, 1931) which, in its range, was unsurpassed by any other popular singer. …

Waters was the first black entertainer to move successfully from the vaudeville and nightclub circuits to what blacks called “the white time” (the West Indian Bert Williams had done this earlier in the Ziegfield Follies — but in blackface). Her vocal resources were adequate though unexceptional, but this shortcoming was mitigated by an innate theatrical flair that enabled her to project the character and situation of every song she performed. (PBS – JAZZ A Film By Ken Burns)

Ms. Waters was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar in 1949 for her part in “Pinky.” Such was the segregation in film and television at that time that Waters next played the title role in “Beulah” an early fifties situation comedy. Beulah was a domestic for a white family. Waters was succeeded in the role by Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel, then Louise Beavers, and finally Amanda Randolph.

Ethel Waters died in 1977.

Ehrich Weiss, better known to us as Harry Houdini, died on this date — Halloween — in 1926.

But during a stay in Montreal in October, Houdini was assaulted by a young man in his dressing room. The stomach blows — which he had invited as a test of his legendary strength — aggravated a case of appendicitis, and he soon became seriously ill. In a final display of stamina and willpower, Houdini performed the next day and again in Detroit. His appendix was removed on October 25th, but the delay had allowed an infection to set in, and he died in Detroit on Halloween.

Source: The American Experience, which has a brief biography.

Nevada became the 36th state on this date in 1864, just in time to cast two electoral votes for Abraham Lincoln.

Nevada was admitted to the Union as the 36th state on this date in 1864.

In Spanish “nevada” means snow-capped.
The Nevada state bird: Mountain Bluebird
State animal: Desert Bighorn Sheep
State reptile: Desert Tortoise
Nevada is the seventh largest state: 110,540 square miles. It has 17 counties.