Saturday

May 23, 1998

The Short Man

by Robert Lax

SATURDAY 5/23

Today's Reading: ""The Short Man" by Robert Lax from LOVE HAD A COMPASS, published by Grove Press (1996).

The poet JANE KENYON was born on this day in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1947. She began writing poems when she was in junior high. She went to university right there in Ann Arbor, starting out as a French major, switching to English. Her poetry teacher was Donald Hall. Two years after meeting him they married and later moved out to an old family homestead named Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire. There she wrote the collections, The Boat of Quiet Hours (1987), and Let Evening Come (1991), poems about home and rural life, and poems about her struggle with depression. She died of leukemia in 1995.

Electrical engineer Robert A. Moog, creator of the Moog synthesizer, was born on this day in Flushing, New York, 1934.

Outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were gunned down on this day in 1934 by a group of Texas Rangers in Plain Dealing, Louisiana.

It's the birthday of singer Rosemary Clooney ("Come on-a My House"), born on this day in Maysville, Kentucky, 1928.

Big band vocalist Helen O'Connell was born in 1920 on this day in Lima, Ohio.

It's the birthday of bandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw, born in New York City in 1910.

It's the birthday of physicist John Bardeen, who, with William Shockley and Walter Brattain, invented the transistor, coining the term by putting together transfer and resistor. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1908.

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY was founded on this day in 1895. Governor Samuel Tilden brought together two private libraries &emdash; the Astor and Lenox libraries &emdash; with the 15,000 books of the Tilden Trust, plus a $2 million endowment to get the new city library started.

It's the birthday of Swedish writer Par Lagerkvist (THE DWARF; BARABBAS), born in Vaxjo, Sweden, in 1891.

Botanist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the first systematic method of classifying and naming plants, was born on this day in Rashult, Sweden, in 1707.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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