NewMexiKen

Today is the birthday of Billy Graham. He’s 89.

Opera star Joan Sutherland is 81.

Johnny Rivers is 65.

Roberta Joan Anderson is 64. We know her as Joni Mitchell.

A consummate artist, Joni Mitchell is an accomplished musician, songwriter, poet and painter. Hailing from Canada, where she performed as a folksinger as far back as 1962, she found her niche on the same Southern California singer/songwriter scene of the late Sixties and early Seventies that germinated such kindred spirits as Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Mitchell’s artistry goes well beyond folksinging to incorporate elements of jazz and classical music. In her own words, “I looked like a folksinger, even though the moment I began to write, my music was not folk music. It was something else that had elements of romantic classicism to it.” Impossible to categorize, Mitchell has doggedly pursued avenues of self-expression, heedless of commercial outcomes. Nonetheless, she managed to connect with a mass audience in the mid-Seventies when a series of albums—Court and Spark (1974, #2), Miles of Aisles (1974, #2), The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975, #4) and Hejira (1976, #13)-established her as one of that decade’s pre-eminent artists.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Christopher Knight is 50. We know him as Peter Brady.

Herman Mankiewicz was born 110 years ago today. Mankiewicz shared the best writing Oscar for Citizen Kane with Orson Welles.

The screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz—who helped establish rapid-fire dialogue as a hallmark of Hollywood’s early talking pictures—is remembered first for co-authoring the script for Citizen Kane. Although he and director Orson Welles shared writing credit (and with it Kane’s only Academy Award), many film historians today not only give Mankiewicz more credit for the script than Welles did, they give him more credit than they give Welles himself.

Columbia University

Mike Nichols is 76 today. Nichols has been nominated for four best director Oscars, winning for “The Graduate.”

Sally Field is 61. Field has won two best actress Oscars (because the Academy really likes her); one for “Norma Rae” and the other for “Places in the Heart.”

Glenn Frey of The Eagles is 59.

California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, is 52.

Ethan Hawke is 37. Hawke has been nominated for two Oscars, one for supporting actor, “Training Day,” and one for co-writing, “Before Sunset.”

New Yorker founder Harold Ross was born on November 6, 1892.

It’s the birthday of Harold Ross, born in Aspen, Colorado (1892), who founded The New Yorker magazine. He was gap-toothed, his hair was always a mess, and he spoke with a Western twang. He had never finished high school, and people sometimes joked that he’d only read one book in his life. But he had actually started out as a migratory newspaperman, traveling the country and filing hundreds of stories from California and Brooklyn and New Orleans and Panama. He later said of that period in his life, “If I stayed anywhere more than two weeks, I thought I was in a rut.”

He settled in New York after serving in World War I, at a time when the city was suddenly filling up with smart, interesting people in their late twenties, and it occurred to him that there was no national magazine being written for this new generation. All the popular magazines at the time were either too intellectual or too middlebrow. Ross wanted to create a magazine that was funny and entertaining and unpretentious, and the result was The New Yorker, which came out February 21, 1925.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Walter “Big Train” Johnson was born 120 years ago today. Johnson was one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame — along with Cobb, Ruth, Mathewson and Wagner.

There were no sophisticated measuring devices in the early 1900s, but Walter Johnson’s fastball was considered to be in a class by itself. Using a sweeping sidearm delivery, the Big Train fanned 3,508 over a brilliant 21-year career with the Washington Senators, and his 110 shutouts are more than any pitcher. Despite hurling for losing teams most of his career, he won 417 games – second only to Cy Young on the all-time list – and enjoyed 10 successive seasons of 20 or more victories.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

James Naismith was born on this date in 1861. He’s the guy that created basketball and for whom the basketball hall-of-fame is named — and basketball’s most prestigious trophies. Dr. James Naismith’s 13 Original Rules of Basketball.

John Philip Sousa was born on November 6, 1854.

Sousa said a march ‘should make a man with a wooden leg step out’, and his surely did. However, he was no mere maker of marches, but an exceptionally inventive composer of over two hundred works, including symphonic poems, suites, songs and operettas created for both orchestra and for band. John Philip Sousa personified the innocent energy of turn-of-the-century America and he represented America across the globe. His American tours first brought classical music to hundreds of towns.

Naxos.com

Abraham Lincoln was elected president on this date in 1860.

Today is the birthday

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ike Turner, 76 today. [Tina will be 68 later this month.] A Fool in Love / Proud Mary

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Art Garfunkel, 66. Bridge Over Troubled Water

… of Sam Shepard. He’s 64. An inductee as a playwright into the Theatre Hall of Fame, Shepard was also nominated for the best actor Oscar for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff.

… of Peter Noone (Herman of Herman’s Hermits). He’s 60. No, Peter isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter

… of Bill Walton, 55. He’s in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

… of football hall-of-famer Kellen Winslow. He’s 50.

… of Bryan Adams, 48.

… of Tatum O’Neal, 44. Miss O’Neal won the best supporting actress Oscar at age 10 for Paper Moon.

Vivien Leigh (who died at age 53) was born on this date in 1913. Miss Leigh was voted best actress twice — for Katie Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (opposite Clark Gable) and for Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (opposite Marlon Brando).

Leonard Franklin Slye was born in Cincinnati on this date in 1911. As Roy Rogers he’s an inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the only person to be elected twice — as the King of the Cowboys and as a founder of the Sons of the Pioneers (“Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water“). Rogers died in 1998.

The journalist Ida Tarbell was born on this date in 1857.

By the early 1900s, John D. Rockefeller Sr. had finished building his oil empire. For over 30 years, he had applied his uncanny shrewdness, thorough intelligence, and patient vision to the creation of an industrial organization without parallel in the world. The new century found him facing his most formidable rival ever–not another businessman, but a 45-year-old woman determined to prove that Standard Oil had never played fair. The result, Ida Tarbell’s magazine series “The History of the Standard Oil Company,” would not only change the history of journalism, but also the fate of Rockefeller’s empire, shaken by the powerful pen of its most implacable observer.

. . .

“The History of the Standard Oil Company” would be hailed as a landmark in the history of investigative journalism, as well as the most comprehensive study of the building of Rockefeller’s oil empire. In 1999 it was listed number five among the top 100 works of twentieth-century American journalism. …

American Experience

Eugene V. Debs was born on November 5th in 1855.

Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890’s in which he was jailed, and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and social security — all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.

Labor Hall of Fame

Today is the birthday of a bunch of characters. Character-actors, that is.

Doris Roberts is 77. She was Raymond’s mom.

Loretta Swit is 70. She was Major Houlihan.

Art Carney was born on this date in 1918. He’s most famous for playing Ed Norton opposite Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden but he won the Oscar for best actor for Harry and Tonto. Carney died in 2003.

Martin Balsam was born on this date in 1914. Balsam was also a character actor. NewMexiKen’s favorite Balsam roles: Juror #1 in 12 Angry Men, Henry Mendez in Hombre, Mr. Green in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and his Oscar-winning Arnold Burns (best supporting actor) in A Thousand Clowns. Balsam died in 1996.

It’s also the birthday of Delbert McClinton. He’s 67.

The novelist Charles Frazier is 57 today.

Kathy Griffin is 47.

The Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio, is 46.

And Matthew McConaughey is 38.

The First Lady of the United States, Laura Bush, is 61 today.

And Walter Cronkite is 91.

Will Rogers was born in Oologah, Oklahoma, on this date in 1879.

H.L. Mencken called him “the most dangerous writer alive.” Damon Runyan dubbed him “America’s most complete document.” And Franklin D. Roosevelt credited him with bringing his fellow Americans “back to a sense of proportion.” He was a ranch hand, rodeo rider, vaudeville performer, film star, columnist and author, radio personality, pioneer of aviation, tireless master of ceremonies, friend to presidents, and unofficial ambassador of good will under three administrations. He was Will Rogers, and during his lifetime he was the single most popular and beloved man in America.

American Masters

A little of Rogers’ “cowboy philosophy” —

“A fool and his money are soon elected.”

“I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him ‘father.'”

“There is no credit to being a comedian, when you have the whole government working for you. All you have to do is report the facts. I don’t even have to exaggerate.”

“Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.”

“I never met a man I didn’t like.”