Christina Onassis (1950 - 1988)

Christina Onassis, the only daughter of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and his first wife, Athina Livanos, was born in New York City at LeRoy Sanitarium. Her maternal grandfather was Stavros G. Livanos, founder of the Livanos shipping empire. Onassis had an older brother, Alexander. She and Alexander were raised and educated in France, […]

Irving Berlin (1888 - 1989)

Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Baline, May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989) was a Russian-born Jewish-American composer and lyricist. Widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history, his music forms a great part of the Great American Songbook. He published his first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy”, in 1907, receiving 37 cents […]

Diana Vreeland (1903 - 1989)

She was born as Diana Dalziel in Paris, France, at 5, avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne (Avenue Foch since World War I). Vreeland was the eldest daughter of American socialite mother Emily Key Hoffman (1876–1928) and British father Frederick Young Dalziel (1868–1960). Hoffman was a descendant of George Washington’s brother as well as a cousin of Francis […]

William Schuman (1910 - 1992)

Schuman was born into a Jewish family in Manhattan, New York City, son of Samuel and Rachel Schuman. He was named after the 27th U.S. president, William Howard Taft, though his family preferred to call him Bill. Schuman played the violin and banjo as a child, but his overwhelming passion was baseball. He attended Temple […]

George Murphy (1902 - 1992)

He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, of Irish Catholic extraction, the son of Michael Charles “Mike” Murphy, athletic trainer and coach, and the former Nora Long. He was educated at Peddie School, Trinity-Pawling School, and Yale University in his native New Haven. He worked as a tool maker for the Ford Motor Company, as […]

Alex Haley (1921 - 1992)

Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and was the oldest of three brothers and a sister. Haley lived with his family in Henning, Tennessee, before returning to Ithaca with his family when he was five years old. Haley’s father was Simon Haley, a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M […]

Hal Roach (1892 - 1992)

Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York, the grandson of Irish immigrants. A presentation by the great American humorist Mark Twain impressed Roach as a young grade school student.  After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Hal Roach arrived in Hollywood, California in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent […]

Jo Ann Robinson (1912 - 1992)

Born near Culloden, Georgia, she was the youngest of twelve children. She attended Fort Valley State College and then became a public school teacher in Macon, where she was married to Wilbur Robinson for a short time. Five years later, she went to Atlanta, where she earned an M.A. in English at Atlanta University. After […]

Heinrich Eberbach (1895 - 1992)

During late 1914 Eberbach fought in France as a corporal, and by February 1915 he was promoted to Lieutenant. During 1915 he was wounded twice in France, lost his nose due to a French bullet (a rubber replacement was made) and was captured by the French. In December 1916 he was exchanged for a French […]

Bernice Gera (1931 - 1992)

Bernice Shiner Gera (June 15, 1931 – September 23, 1992) was the first female umpire in professional baseball.  Born in Ernest, Pennsylvania, Gera loved baseball as a child, but never considered a career in baseball until she was already in her mid thirties, married, and working as a secretary. According to a Time Magazine article, […]

Nancy Walker (1922 - 1992)

Walker was born in 1922 as Anna Myrtle Swoyer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder of two daughters of vaudevillian Dewey Barto (né Stewart Steven Swoyer; 1896–1973) and Myrtle (née Lawler; died January 2, 1931). Walker and her father both stood 4’11” (1.50 m). Anna’s younger sister, Betty Lou (born August 17, 1930), also had a […]

Bobbi Kristina Brown (1993 - 2015)

Bobbi Kristina Brown Bobbi Kristina Brown, 22, the only daughter of singers Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, died Sunday, nearly six months after she was found unresponsive in a bathtub of her home, her family said. Brown has been unresponsive in hospitals and hospice care since she was found in a bathtub of her Roswell, […]

Red Grange (1903 - 1991)

“Red” Grange was born on June 13, 1903 in Forksville, a village of about 200 people in an area of Pennsylvania lumber camps. His father was the foreman of three lumber camps. For a number of years, the Grange family lived with relatives until they could finally afford a home of their own in Wheaton, […]

Edwin Land (1909 - 1991)

Edwin Land was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Matha (Goldfaden) and Harry Land, owner of a scrap metal yard. Land’s parents were of Eastern European Jewish descent. Land attended the Norwich Free Academy at Norwich, Connecticut, a semi-private high school, and graduated in the class of 1927. The library there was posthumously named for him, […]

Bob Welch (1945 - 2012)

Bob Welch was a key member of the pop group Fleetwood Mac in the early 1970s before scoring several minor hits as a solo performer, died June 7 at his home in Nashville. He was 65. According to police, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He left a suicide note. Mr. Welch was a […]

Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012)

Ray Bradbury was an American science fiction writer whose works were translated in more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies around the world. Although he created a world of new technical and intellectual ideas, he never obtained a driver’s license and had never driven a car. He was born Ray Douglas Bradbury on […]

Robin Gibb (1949 - 2012)

Robin Gibb Robin Gibb, one-third of the Bee Gees, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, his spokesperson has confirmed via a statement. Gibb was 62 years old. “The family of Robin Gibb, of the Bee Gees, announce with great sadness that Robin passed away today following his long battle with cancer and intestinal surgery,” […]

Margaret Suckley (1891 - 1991)

Suckley was born December 20, 1891, at Wilderstein, the family home of Robert Bowne Suckley and Elizabeth Philips Montgomery in the Hudson Valley. She was the fourth of seven children, and a sixth cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Generally called “Daisy” by those close to her, Suckley grew up at Wilderstein, where she was a […]

Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991)

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up there by her divorced mother. She attended the Ohio State University, but left in early 1918.  In 1918 she moved with friends from OSU to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she was ‘adopted’ by the anarchist Hippolyte Havel. She shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with […]

Martha Graham (1894 - 1991)

Graham was born in Allegheny City – later to became part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – in 1894. Her father George Graham practiced as what in the Victorian era was known as an “alienist”, a practitioner of an early form of psychiatry. The Grahams were strict Presbyterians. Dr. Graham was a third-generation American of Irish descent. […]

Lee Remick (1935 - 1991)

Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin “Frank” Remick, who owned a department store. Her maternal great-grandmother, Eliza Duffield, was an English-born preacher and her paternal grandfather was of Irish ancestry. Remick attended the Swaboda School of Dance, The Hewitt School and studied acting […]

Donald Dunn (1941 - 2012)

Donald Dunn As the bass player on dozens of the most soulful hits in the history of pop music, Donald “Duck” Dunn often found himself out on the road playing to fans who had assumed he was black like the stars he supported, notably Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave. When audiences encountered […]

George Lindsey (1928 - 2012)

George Lindsey George Lindsey, the actor who portrayed the country-bumpkin mechanic Goober Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show,” died Sunday after a brief illness, his family said. He was 83. Lindsey’s character Goober Pyle joined the hit sitcom in 1964 as the cousin of Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors. When the show ended four […]

Dick Clark (1929 - 2012)

Dick Clark Host and TV producer Dick Clark has died. He was 82. Spokesman Paul Shefrin said the “American Bandstand” creator had a heart attack Wednesday morning at Saint John’s hospital in Santa Monica, a day after he was admitted for an outpatient procedure. Long dubbed “the world’s oldest teenager” because of his boyish appearance, […]

Jonathan Frid (1924 - 2012)

Jonathan Frid Jonathan Frid, a Shakespearean actor who found unexpected — and by his own account unwanted — celebrity as the vampire Barnabas Collins on the sanguinary soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died last Saturday, April 14, in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87. He died from complications of a fall, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played […]

Halston (1932 - 1990)

Roy Halston Frowick was born on April 23, 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa, the second son of a Norwegian-American accountant James and his seamstress wife Hallie. Halston developed an interest in sewing from his mother, and he began creating hats and altering clothes for his mother and sister as a boy. He graduated Benjamin Bosse […]

Alberto Moravia (1907 - 1990)

Alberto Pincherle (the pen-name “Moravia” was the surname of his paternal grandmother) was born in Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His Jewish Venetian father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His Catholic Anconitan mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, was of Dalmatian origin.  The family he was born in had […]

Reinaldo Arenas (1943 - 1990)

Arenas was born in the countryside, in the northern part of the Province of Oriente, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín. In 1963, he moved to Havana to enroll in the School of Planification and, later, in the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad de La Habana, where he studied philosophy and […]

Alice Marble (1913 - 1990)

Born in the small town of Beckwourth, Plumas County, California, Marble moved with her family at the age of five to San Francisco. A tomboy, she excelled in many sports, including baseball; but her brother persuaded her to try the more ladylike tennis. She quickly mastered the game, playing in Golden Gate Park. She suffered […]

Pearl Bailey (1918 - 1990)

Bailey was born in Southampton County in southeastern Virginia, to Joseph and Ella Mae Ricks Bailey. She was reared in the Bloodfields neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia.  She made her stage-singing debut when she was 15 years old. Her brother Bill Bailey was beginning his own career as a tap dancer, and suggested she enter […]