NewMexiKen

… because it’s the birthday of the Constitution and Hank Williams. And also these folks.

Football hall-of-fame inductee George Blanda is 81 today. I’m surprised he doesn’t suit up. Blanda played his last game on January 4, 1976, the 1975 AFC Championship. He was 48.

Supreme Court Justice David Souter is 69.

Coach Phil Jackson is 63. Lots of good people born in 1945 (and we are not Baby Boomers, we are War Babies).

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is 57. That’s Cassandra Peterson.

Rita Rudner is 52.

Ken Kesey was born on September 17, 1935. The Writer’s Almanac had a great little essay last year that you should just go read. It begins:

Ken Kesey … was born on this day in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He was a champion wrestler in high school and voted most likely to succeed. He married his high school sweetheart and almost went to Hollywood to be an actor and then accepted a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford, where, as part of a VA experiment, for $75 a day, which was good money, he became one of the first Americans to be exposed to a new drug called LSD.

Maureen Connolly was born on this date in 1934. Connolly was the first woman to win the tennis grand slam (1953). She died of cancer at age 34.

The 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, was born 101 years ago today.

William Carlos Williams was born on this date in 1883. Williams was a physician and poet.

He thought that poetry shouldn’t be full of fancy allusions and abstract ideas, and that there should be “no ideas but in things.” His poems were inspired by the townspeople of Rutherford, especially his patients. A lot of his patients didn’t even know that their hardworking doctor — who delivered more than 2,000 babies — spent his nights and weekends writing poems. Those poems were published in books that include Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and the epic five-volume poem Paterson (1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958) about Paterson, New Jersey, the nearest city to his hometown of Rutherford.

The Writer’s Almanac

David Dunbar Buick was born on September 17th in 1854. Didn’t know Buick was someone’s name, did you?

B.B. King is 83 today. Many more B.B. Many more.

King doesn’t play chords or slide; instead, he bends individual strings till the notes seem to cry. His style reflects his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta and coming of age in Memphis. Seminal early influences included such bluesmen as T-Bone Walker (whose “Stormy Monday,” King has said, is “what really started me to play the blues”), Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bukka White. A cousin of King’s, White schooled the fledgling guitarist in the idiom when he moved to Memphis. King also admired jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. Horns have played a big part in King’s music, and he’s successfully combined jazz and blues in a big-band context.

“I’ve always felt that there’s nothing wrong with listening to and trying to learn more,” King has said. “You just can’t stay in the same groove all the time.” This willingness to explore and grow explains King’s popularity across five decades in a wide variety of venues, from funky juke joints to posh Las Vegas lounges.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Elsewhere, Betty Joan Perske is 84. As Lauren Bacall she was nominated for best actress in a supporting role for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces. Bacall was 20 when she married Humphrey Bogart (he was 45) and just 32 when he died. She was married to Jason Robards from 1961-1969.

Columbo, Peter Falk, is 81.

George Chakiris is 76. You know, Bernardo.

Elgin Baylor is 74.

Had Elgin Baylor been born 25 years later, his acrobatic moves would have been captured on video, his name emblazoned on sneakers, and his face plastered on cereal boxes. But he played before the days of widespread television exposure, so among the only records of his prowess that remain are the words of those who saw one of the greatest ever to play.

NBA.com

Robin Yount is 53.

Robin Yount was a productive hitter who excelled in the field at two of baseball’s most challenging positions – shortstop and center field. Playing his entire 20-year career with the Milwaukee Brewers, he collected more hits in the 1980s than any other player and finished with an impressive career total of 3,142. An every day major leaguer at age 18, Yount earned MVP awards at two positions and his 1982 MVP campaign carried the Brewers to the World Series.

National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Mickey Rourke is 52.

Jennifer Tilly is 50. Tilly received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for Bullets Over Broadway. Better yet she was the voice of Celia, Mike’s love interest, in Monsters, Inc.

Marc Anthony is 40.

Amy Poehler is 37.

… of Jackie Cooper; he’s 86. Cooper’s first appearance in film was in 1929; his last 60 years later. He played Perry White in the Superman films but his real fame was as a child actor, most notably Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1934). He was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Skippy in 1931. This is the role where the director got him to cry on camera by telling Jackie (falsely) that his dog had just been run over by a car.

… of baseball hall-of-famer Gaylord Perry, 70.

Gaylord Perry achieved two of pitching’s most magical milestones with 314 wins and 3,534 strikeouts. Distracting and frustrating hitters through an array of rituals on the mound, he was a 20-game winner five times and posted a 3.10 lifetime ERA. With the Giants in 1968, Perry no-hit the Cardinals and starter Bob Gibson. An outstanding competitor, he won Cy Young awards in 1972 with Cleveland and with San Diego in ‘78, becoming the first pitcher to win the award in both leagues.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

… of Jessye Norman, 63 today. From a biographical essay by the Kennedy Center:

Jessye Norman is one of the most celebrated artists of our century. She is also among the most distinguished in a long line of American sopranos who refused to believe in limits, a shining member of an artistic pantheon that has included Rosa Ponselle, Maria Callas, Leontyne Price and now this daughter of Augusta, Georgia. “Pigeonholing,” said Norman, “is only interesting to pigeons.” Norman’s dreams are limitless, and she has turned many of them into realities in a dazzling career that has been one of the most satisfying musical spectacles of our time.

… of Tommy Lee Jones. He’s 62. Jones has been nominated for the Best Supporting Actor twice, winning for The Fugitive, but not for JFK. And he was nominated for best actor for In the Valley of Elah, a fine, fine performance. NewMexiKen like Jones also in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Jones and Harvard roommate Al Gore were the inspiration for Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal’s best-seller Love Story.

… of Oliver Stone, also 62. Stone has been nominated for ten Oscars and won three — he won for writing for Midnight Express and for best director for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.

Football hall-of-famers Merlin Olsen, 68, and Dan Marino, 47, share this birthday.

County music immortal Roy Acuff was born on this date in 1903.

Roy Claxton Acuff emerged as a star during the early 1940s. He helped intensify the star system at the Grand Ole Opry and remained its leading personality until his death. In so doing, he formed the bridge between country’s rural stringband era and the modern era of star singers backed by fully amplified bands. In addition, he co-founded Acuff-Rose Publications with songwriter Fred Rose, thus laying an important cornerstone of the Nashville music industry. For these and other accomplishments he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1962 as its first living member.

Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum

Humorist Robert Benchley was born on this date in 1889. In 2005 The Writer’s Almanac said:

He started writing humor as a kid in school. Assigned to write an essay about how to do something practical, he wrote one called “How to Embalm a Corpse.” When he was assigned to write about the dispute over Newfoundland fishing rights from the point of view of the United States and Canada, he instead chose to write from the point of view of the fish.

He’s the grandfather of Peter Benchley, author of Jaws.

Agatha Christie was born on this date in 1890. Two years ago The Writer’s Almanac has this (and more):

During World War I, she was working as a Red Cross nurse, and she started reading detective novels because, she said, “I found they were excellent to take one’s mind off one’s worries.” She grew frustrated with how easy it was to guess the murderer in most mysteries, and she decided to try to write her own. That book was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) about a series of murders at a Red Cross hospital.

Christie’s first few books were moderately successful, and then her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came out in 1926. That same year, Christie fled her own home after a fight with her husband, and she went missing for 10 days. There was a nationwide search, and the press covered the disappearance as though it were a mystery novel come to life, inventing scenarios and speculating on the possible murder suspects, until finally Christie turned up in a hotel, suffering from amnesia. During the period of her disappearance, the reprints of her earlier books sold out of stock and two newspapers began serializing her stories. She became a household name and a best-selling author for the rest of her life.

William Howard Taft, both president and later chief justice of the United States, was born on September 15, 1857:

In 1900, President William McKinely appointed Taft chair of a commission to organize a civilian government in the Philippines which had been ceded to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War. From 1901 to 1904 Taft served successfully as the first civilian governor of the Philippines. In 1904 Theodore Roosevelt named Taft secretary of war.

After serving nearly two full terms, popular Teddy Roosevelt refused to run in 1908. Instead, he promoted Taft as the next Republican president. With Roosevelt’s help, Taft handily defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Throughout his presidency, Taft contended with dissent from more liberal members of the Republican party, many of whom continued to follow the lead of former President Roosevelt.

Progressive Republicans openly challenged Taft in the Congressional elections of 1910 and in the Republican presidential primaries of 1912. When Taft won the Republican nomination, the Progressives organized a rival party and selected Theodore Roosevelt to run against Taft in the general election. Roosevelt’s Bull Moose candidacy split the Republican vote and helped elect Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

From 1921 until 1930, Taft served his country as chief justice of the Supreme Court. In an effort to make the Court work more efficiently, he advocated passage of the 1925 Judges Act enabling the Supreme Court to give precedence to cases of national importance.

Library of Congress