Today CXXXII - Happy Birthday, Alberto

Today is Alberto's birthday - cumpleaños felices, amigo!


Birthdays:

• Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, novelist, the author of Frankenstein, married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, 30 August 30, 1797 – February 1, 1851


• Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, physical and organic chemist, winner of the inaugural Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901; helped to found the discipline of physical chemistry as we know it today, August 30, 1852 - March 1, 1911


• Carle David Tolmé Runge Ph.D., mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist; Runge crater on the Moon is named after him, August 30, 1856 – January 3, 1927


• Isaac Ilyich Levitan, landscape art painter who advanced the genre of the mood landscape, August 30, 1860 - August 4, 1900


• Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, PC, FRS, nuclear physicist, known as the "father" of nuclear physics, pioneered the orbital theory of the atom; awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, August 30, 1871 – October 19, 1937


• Theodor Svedberg, chemist, whose work with colloids supported the theories of Brownian motion put forward by Einstein and Smoluchowski; developed the technique of analytical ultracentrifugation, and demonstrated its utility in distinguishing pure proteins one from another; awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, August 30, 1884 – February 25, 1971


• Raymond Hart Massey, actor, famous for his quintessential American roles, especially that of Abraham Lincoln, August 30, 1896 – July 29, 1983


• Marjory Ford, aka Shirley Booth, stage, film, and television actress, received her first Tony Award, for Best Supporting or Featured Actress in 1948 as Grace Woods in Goodbye, My Fancy; her second Tony was for Best Actress in a Play, in 1950 as Lola Delaney in Come Back, Little Sheba; in 1953, she received the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role as Lola Delaney in the movie version of Come Back, Little Sheba, the first actress ever to win both a Tony and an Oscar for the same role; her third Tony was for Best Actress in a Play for her performance in The Time of the Cuckoo; in 1957, she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work on the stage in Chicago; in 1961, she began starring as housemaid, Hazel Burke in the TV sitcom Hazel, for which won two Emmys, in 1962 and 1963, August 30, 1898 – October 16, 1992


• Roy Wilkins, civil rights activist, active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), assistant NAACP secretary between 1931 and 1934; became editor of Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, in 1934, August 30, 1901 – September 8, 1981


• Rose JOAN Blondell, actress, appeared in more than 100 movies and television productions, August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979


• Fred MacMurray, actor, appeared in over one hundred movies; his most famous role was that Steve Douglas on My Three Sons, which ran from 1960 until 1972, August 30, 1908 – November 5, 1991


• Edward Mills Purcell, physicist, shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids, with Felix Bloch, August 30, 1912 - March 7, 1997


• Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone, economist, received the 1984 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities on a national and, later, an international scale, August 30, 1913 – December 6, 1991


• Theodore Samuel TED Williams, nicknamed the "Splendid Splinter", MLB left fielder, played 19 seasons with the Boston Red Sox; partial list of baseball accomplishments: 1946 and 1949 AL MVP, led the league in batting six times, and won the 1942 and 1947 Triple Crown, career batting average of .344, with 521 home runs, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1966, the last player in MLB history to bat over .400 in a single season, August 30, 1918 – July 5, 2002


• William Russell BILLY Johnson, MLB third baseman, 1947 All-Star, August 30, 1918-June 20, 2006


• Muriel Deason, aka Kitty Wells, country musician and singer, 1919


• Warren Edward Buffett, stock investor, businessman and philanthropist; in June, 2006, made the commitment to give away 85% of his $42 billion fortune, most of it to the Gates Foundation, 1930


• John Edmund Andrew Phillips, singer, guitarist, and songwriter, leader of The Mamas & the Papas, August 30, 1935 – March 18, 2001


• Robert Dennis Crumb, artist and illustrator, known for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream, a founder of the underground comics movement and its most prominent figure, 1943


• Peggy Lipton, actress and philanthropist, best known as detective Julie Barnes in The Mod Squad and waitress Norma Jennings on Twin Peaks, 1947


• Timothy Bottoms, actor, 1951


• Marlon Jerrard Byrd, MLB centre fielder for the Washington Nationals, 1977

RIP:

• Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien, physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to compose Wien's displacement law, which relates the maximum emission of a blackbody to its temperature; awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physics; a crater on Mars is named in his honor, January 13, 1864 – August 30, 1928


• Sir Joseph John [J. J.] Thomson, OM, FRS, physicist, the discoverer of the electron, warded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics, December 18, 1856 – 30 August 30, 1940


• Peder Oluf Pedersen, engineer and physicist, notable for his work on electrotechnology, June 19, 1874 – August 30, 1941


• Charles Douville Coburn, film and theater actor, June 19, 1877 – August 30, 1961


• Vera-Ellen Westmeier Rohe, aka Vera-Ellen, actress and stage and film dancer, known for her filmed dance partnerships with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor; excelled in tap, ballet, acrobatic, and modern dance, February 16, 1921 - August 30, 1981


• Janet Miriam Holland TAYLOR Caldwell, novelist, author of popular fiction, including Dynasty of Death, This Very Earth, and The Eagles Gather, among many others, September 7, 1900–August 30, 1985


• Lindsay Gordon Anderson, film and documentary director whose early short film, Thursday's Child, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954; best remembered for his trilogy of feature films, starring Malcolm McDowell: If..., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, April 17, 1923 - August 30, 1994


• Holmes STERLING Morrison, Jr., one of the founding members of The Velvet Underground, playing lead, rhythm, and bass guitar, and singing backing vocals, August 28, 1942 – August 30, 1995


• Raymond Poïvet, cartoonist and comics artist, 1910 - August 30, 1999


• Charles Dennis Buchinsky, aka Charles Bronson, actor, starred in the TV detective series Man With A Camera from 1958 to 1960; most famous films include The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven, and Once Upon a Time in the West; also starred in Death Wish and its sequels, November 3, 1921 – August 30, 2003