Birthdays Today

Today is the birthday of Burt Lancaster, born in 1913, a great actor who now is perhaps best known for his supporting role as Dr. Moonlight Graham in the baseball movie, Field of Dreams.   Lancaster won the Academy Award for Elmer Gantry in 1960, but to me his best role was also his most sinister, as the evil gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success (1957).  Here's a classic scene in which Hunsecker dresses down a U.S. Senator:

Today is also the birthday of the great historian, Paul Johnson, born in 1928.  His book Modern Times is the best single-volume history of the 20th Century.   I have also read and liked several of his other books, particularly Intellectuals, which exposes the supposed great "liberal" political theorists of the past (Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy, Sartre) as, for the most part, creeps in their personal lives.   Coincidence?  
































Finally, today is the birthday of the great St. Louis Cardinal centerfielder, Willie McGee, one of the most beloved of all Cardinals, born in 1958.   It never occurred to me that he could be 52; I'd bet he could still shag down just about anything that anyone could hit.