It’s the birthday of writer Anne Fadiman, born in New York City (1953). Her father was an editor, her mother was a journalist, and her whole family loved books: she called them "Bibliolatrous" in her book of essays Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.
It’s the birthday of reed player (Rahsaan) Roland Kirk, born in Columbus, Ohio (1936). Blinded soon after birth, he took up tenor saxophone and flute. He took the name ‘Rahsaan,’ and toured with bassist Charlie Mingus, before forming his own group. Kirk could play 3 different saxes at the same time, producing 3-part harmony, and was especially known for his improvisations.
On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that the government could neither ban nor confiscate copies of the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce. The court pointed out that if that book could be banned for its erotic passages, so could Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and parts of the Odyssey.
It’s the birthday of filmmaker Nicholas Ray (Raymond Nicholas Kienzle), born in Galesville, Wisconsin (1911). He grew up in La Crosse, studied theater at the University of Chicago, studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at the architect’s Taliesin art colony in Wisconsin, then moved to Hollywood to become a director. He made a number of pictures in the 40s and 50s focusing on disaffected loners in such films as Knock on Any Door (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He made his last picture, 55 Days at Peking, in 1963; after that, project after project fail to materialize. Ray’s personal motto, “I’m a stranger here myself,” was used as the title for a documentary on his life, made in 1974. Ray said, “There is no formula for success. But there is a formula for failure, and that is to try to please everybody.”
It’s the birthday of paleontologist L(ouis) S(eymour) B(azett) Leakey, born in a village 8 miles from Nairobi, Kenya (1903). The son of British missionaries to the Kikuyu tribe, he grew up with Kikuyu children, and at 13½ was initiated into manhood by tribal rite and was given the name Son of the Sparrow Hawk. He went to England for college, but returned to Africa with his wife, Mary, to do archeological work. They concentrated on the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, and on July 17, 1959, made a remarkable discovery: they found 400 bits of the skull of a man almost 1.75 million years old. Leakey estimated that the family of man was more than 19 million years old, much older than had been previously thought, and that; and he placed the origins of man in Africa, rather than Asia.
Broadcast date: TUESDAY, 8 August 2000 Poem: “I Remember,” by Anne Sexton, from All My Pretty Ones (Houghton Mifflin).It's the birthday in St. Louis, 1884, of poet Sara Teasdale. She received the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry when the awards started up in 1918. Her "Heart's House" was written ten years earlier:
My heart is but a little house
With room for only three or four,
And it was filled before you knocked
Upon the door. I longed to bid you come within,
I knew that I should love you well,
But if you came the rest must go
Elsewhere to dwell. And so, farewell, O friend, my friend!
Nay, I could weep a little too,
But I shall only smile and say
Farewell to you.
It's the birthday in Washington D.C., in 1896, of writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. She went to school in Wisconsin, was a journalist in Louisville and Rochester, New York, and finally settled in Cross Creek, Florida in 1928. She said, "I felt I had come home when I came here. The people so charmed me I determined to write about them and, if I failed, not to write anymore." It was in Cross Creek that she wrote The Yearling, the story of young Jody Baxter's coming of age in the big scrub country which is now the Ocala National Forest in Florida. The book came out in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Besides The Yearling, Rawlings wrote another popular novel about the area called Cross Creek.
The German Luftwaffe began its attack of the British Isles on this day in 1940. The Battle of Britain was intended to wipe out the Royal Air Force before Germany invaded England. Twenty-two hundred German fighters and bombers made daily runs over southern England for weeks on end. The R.A.F. was outnumbered four-to-one, but they had the new invention of radar which allowed them to concentrate their defenses. The R.A.F. knocked down three times as many German aircraft as it lost, and Hitler called off the invasion. It was Germany's first major defeat.
It's the birthday in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1952, of writer Valerie Sayers whose comic novels Due East, Who Do You Love? and How I Got Him Back, are all set in the fictional coastal town of Due East, South Carolina.
It's the birthday in Washington, D.C., 1954, of short-story writer and novelist, Elizabeth Ann Tallent. She began writing stories, selling her first one, "Ice," to The New Yorker when she was twenty-six years old, then following that up with "Why I Love Country Music."
Richard Nixon, facing the prospect of impeachment over Watergate, resigned from the presidency twenty-six years ago today.
Broadcast date: WEDNESDAY, 9 August 2000 Poem: “Four Poems in One,” from An Altogether Different Language: Poems 1934-1994 (Zoland Books).It's the birthday in Washington, D.C., 1950, of Jeanne Larsen, author of the novels Silk Road (1989) set in 8th-century China, and Bronze Mirror (1991), in 12th-century China.
It's the birthday of the creator of the Dr. Alex Delaware Mysteries, Jonathan Kellerman, born in New York City, 1949. He, like his main character, is a child psychologist.
The second atomic bomb was dropped by the U.S. on this day in 1945, on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The intended target was the city of Kokura, but poor visibility there forced the B-29 bomber on to Nagasaki. The bomb detonated at 11:02 a.m., local time, and destroyed about half the city, killing 70,000 people.
It's the birthday of Philip Larkin, the poet and novelist, born 1922 in Coventry. He worked as a librarian for most of his life, and mostly in the town of Hull. Two of his novels came out after World War II, Jill and A Girl in Winter, but he is best known for his stoic and melancholy poetry.
It is the birthday of Leonide Massine, born in Moscow, 1896. He was the principal dancer who replaced Nijinsky in Diaghilevs's Ballets Russes. A choreographer, he created the dances for such important works as La Boutique Fantasque and Parade. At age fifty-two he danced in the film The Red Shoes.
Broadcast date: THURSDAY, 10 August 2000 Poem: “It is no gift I tender,” by A.E. Housman.It’s the birthday of novelist Beverly Lowry, born in Memphis, Tennessee (1938). She grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, a town that closely resembles her fictional town of Eunola. Her first three novels--Come Back, Lolly Ray (1977), Emma Blue (1978), and Daddy’s Girl (1981)--were impudent, frolicsome accounts of young women coming of age. Then in 1984, a terrible year in Lowry’s life, her diabetic father had to have both legs amputated, and then her 18-year-old son was killed in a hit-and-run accident. The novels she wrote following that terrible year--The Perfect Sonya (1987), and Breaking Gentle (1988)--were ominous tales of disruption and disaster. After the memoir Crossed Over (1992), she wrote another novel, The Track of Real Desire (1994).
It’s the birthday of novelist Jorge Amado, born near Ilhéus, Brazil (1912). He was elected to the national assembly in 1946, running as a Communist. He's the author of a number of novels including Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966 film, starring Sonia Braga, in 1978), and Gabriela, Cinnamon and Clove (1958), about a woman whose skin smells of those spices.
On this day in 1912, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf at London’s St. Pancras Registry Office. They had met her a year earlier at the home of Virginia's sister and brother-in-law, Vanessa and Clive Bell, in the Bloomsbury section of London. They became members of the “Bloomsbury Group,” brilliant and talented artists, writers, critics and thinkers who came to live in or near that district just before World War One.
It’s the birthday of guitar-maker Leo Fender, born in Anaheim, California (1909)who created the Fender Telecaster, and later the Fender Stratocaster.
It’s the birthday of horror screenwriter Curt Siodmak, born in Dresden, Germany (1902). He emigrating to Hollywood, where, in the 1940s, he wrote scripts that terrorized the adolescent imaginations of 5 generations. Films he wrote include The Wolf Man (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Beast With Five Fingers (1947). Siodmak established several film traditions in The Wolf Man, such as the pentagram as the sign of the werewolf, and the silver-tipped cane to destroy the werewolf. The Wolf Man, which spawned 3 quick sequels, tells the story of Lawrence Talbot (played by Lon Chaney, Jr.), who is bitten by a werewolf, becomes a wolf man, and isn’t believed when he desperately tries to get people to believe he is, truly, a wolf man.
On this day in 1787, Mozart completed Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”). Composed in 4 movements, it is the Serenade # 13 in G Major, scored for 2 violins, viola and bass.
Broadcast date: FRIDAY, 11 August 2000 Poem: “Poets,” by James Laughlin, from The Bird of Endless Time (Copper Canyon Press).It's the birthday in Lake Charles, Louisiana, 1936, of Andre Dubus, the short-story writer and author of collections like Dancing After Hours, and The Times Are Never So Bad. Dubus was a great baseball fan, particularly of the Red Sox, and shortly before he died wrote: "I rarely concentrate on a moment of anything but writing and receiving Communion. Yet watching a game I do. A batter steps out of the box, looks to his left at the third-base coach; the coach moves his hands, touches his arm, his chest, his face, his cap; the batter steps to the plate; the catcher's right fingers signal to the pitcher; the pitcher nods, brings up his hands, kicks, throws. The ball is moving 93 miles per hour, but there is time for me to focus on it, maybe hold my breath. The reality I am watching is moments of grace and skill, gifts received by men who do not turn away from them, but work with them for the few years they are granted. One spring the batter will not be able to hit a fast ball, the pitcher will not be able to throw one; the gifts are gone, as if they existed independent of men, staying with one for a time, then moving on to another, a boy in the womb, and when he is in elementary school you can already see that he has it."
It is the birthday of Alex Haley, born in Ithaca, New York, 1921. He was the collaborator and editor of The Autobiography of Malcom X, and the author of Roots: the Saga of an American Family. The book, which was based on his African-American roots, came out in 1976, and in 1977 it was made into a very successful television mini-series.
It is the birthday of Mary Roberts Rinehart, born in Pittsburgh in 1876. A novelist and playwright, she is best known for her mystery stories; the first of these stories was "The Circular Staircase," which came out in 1908.
It's the birthday in 1897, Livermore Falls, Maine, of poet Louise Bogan.
It's the birthday of Hugh MacDiarmid, the Scottish poet, born Christopher Murray Grieve, in Langholm. He was the leader of the Scottish literary renaissance when he came out with his book written in Scotts dialect, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in 1926. McDiarmid was also one of the founding members of the Scottish National Party.
Broadcast date: SATURDAY, 12 August 2000 Poem: “A Lecture on Aphids,” by Charles Goodrich, from Insects of South Corvalis (Knothouse).It's the birthday of poet J.D. McClatchy, born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1945. He is the author of the essay collection, Twenty Questions, and a book of poems called Ten Commandments.
It's the birthday in New York City, 1940 of writer Gail Parent, the author of comic novels like The Best Laid Plans (1980), and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1972). Besides her novels, Parent was a comedy writer for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and the mother of two sons. She says: "Having children kept me normal, because I was never able to go off and celebrate joyously over something for a week or do what I feel like, nor did I allow myself to dwell on unhappiness when something went wrong. You can't do that when you have children, and I attribute my sanity to having them."
The Wizard of Oz was premiered on this day in 1939 at a theater in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. Virtually nobody in the national press noticed, so the so-called official premiere was held three days later at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
It's the birthday in Chicago, 1931, of novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and All the President's Men.
It's the birthday of novelist Wallace Markfield, in Brooklyn,1926. He's best remembered for his 1970 comic novel, Teitlebaum's Window.
It's the birthday in Hillisburg, Indiana, of Zerna Sharp, born in 1889. She was the originator of the Dick and Jane readers for children, which introduced only one new word on each page.
It was on August 12, 1877, that Thomas Alva Edison, working in his Menlo Park, New Jersey lab, completed the model for the first phonograph, a device that recorded sound onto tinfoil cylinders.
Broadcast date: SUNDAY, 13 August 2000 Poem: “Summer Storm,” by Dana Gioia (by permission of the poet).Construction of the Berlin Wall began in the early hours of August 13, 1961. The communist East German government built it to stem the flood of people moving to the West -- about 2 million since W.W.II ended. By the time it fell in 1989, it was a fifteen-foot-high wall running 28 miles through the middle of Berlin, topped with barbed wire and guarded with watchtowers and mines. Another set of walls ran 75 miles around West Berlin, separating it from the rest of East Germany.
On August 13, 1942, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin wrote to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, begging them to reverse their decision and to invade western Europe. Stalin's beleaguered Russian army had been contending with a German invasion for over a year. It wasn't until two years later, on D-Day, that a million Allied soldiers flooded into France.
It's the birthday in London, 1899, of director Alfred Hitchcock. He went to school to become an engineer, but got a job in 1920 with a London film company writing out titles. He got his first shot at directing in 1925 and later moved to Hollywood. Within a year his film Rebecca had won an Oscar for best picture.
It's the birthday in 1818, West Brookfield, Massachusetts, of the abolitionist and women's suffrage pioneer Lucy Stone. She paid her own way through Oberlin College, and then went on the lecture circuit arguing against slavery and for women's rights. In December, 1858, in Orange, New Jersey, she refused to pay her taxes because women didn't have the right to vote.
