DJ AM (1973 - 2009)

Goldstein was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family. As a child, he was verbally abused by his father, whom Goldstein called “unbelievably cruel.” His father abused drugs and alcohol and was sent to jail for committing bank fraud and later died due to complications from AIDS. Goldstein attended the elite Quaker school Friends’ […]

Sahara Davenport (1984 - 2012)

Sahara Davenport A native of Dallas, Sahara Davenport began his drag career while attending Southern Methodist University. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance, he relocated to New York City, where he began performing regularly at many gay bars and nightclubs throughout the city. Sahara Davenport has been seen on television on A&E […]

Michael Johns (1978 - 2014)

John Lee was born in Perth, Western Australia on 20 October 1978. As a teenager, he appeared as The Coachman in Pinocchio at the Regal Theatre and was a choir singer in Anything Goes at His Majesty’s Theatre. He attended Newman College in Perth. In 1997, John Lee moved to the United States on a […]

Mirjana Puhar (1995 - 2015)

Mirjana Puhar Puhar was born in Sremska Mitrovica – a city of less than 40,000 people in the Vojvodina province of Serbia – and she spent the first few years of her life with parents who lived in constant fear, as the Kosovo War raged around them. After the conflict ended, her family fled Serbia […]

Betsy Palmer (1926 - 2015)

Palmer was born Patricia Betsy Hrunek in East Chicago, Indiana, the daughter of Marie (née Love), who launched the Chicago Business College, and Rudolph Vincent Hrunek, an industrial chemist who was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia. She graduated from DePaul University, where she studied theater. Palmer married Dr. Vincent J. Merendino on May 8, 1954; the […]

Shelby Foote (1916 - 2005)

Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of Shelby Dade Foote and his wife Lillian (née Rosenstock). Foote’s paternal grandfather, Huger Lee Foote (1854-1915), a planter, had gambled away most of his fortune and assets. His paternal great-grandfather, Hezekiah William Foote (1813-1899), was an American Confederate veteran, attorney, planter and state politician from Mississippi. […]

Macon McCalman (1932 - 2005)

Nicknamed “Sonny, McCalman helped form the Front Street Theatre in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. During the Korean War, he served in the U.S. Army.[citation needed] Over the course of his acting career McCalman appeared in various film and TV guest roles, usually in supporting parts, both dramatic and comedic often as heavies and authoritarian […]

Duncan Hines (1880 - 1959)

Hines was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the son of a Confederate soldier. His mother died when he was four and he was raised by his grandmother. Hines attended Bowling Green Business University, which later merged with what is now Western Kentucky University and worked in the American West for Wells Fargo and other companies […]

Ray Kroc (1902 - 1984)

Kroc was born on October 5, 1902 in Oak Park, near Chicago, to parents of Czech origin, Rose Mary (Hrach) and Louis Kroc. His father was from the village Břasy near Plzeň, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). He grew up and spent most of his life in Oak Park, Illinois. During the First World War […]

Wilbur Hardee (1918 - 2008)

Wilbur Hardee Wilber Hardee, a farm boy turned grill cook who went on to open the first Hardee’s hamburger stand in 1960, starting a chain that now has nearly 2,000 restaurants in the United States and overseas, died Friday at his home in Greenville, N.C. He was 89.   Born in Martin County, N.C., on […]

William J. Hardee (1815 - 1873)

Hardee was born to Sarah Ellis and Major John Hardee at the “Rural Felicity” plantation in Camden County, Georgia. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1838 (26th in a class of 45) and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Dragoons. During the Seminole Wars (1835–42), he […]

Colonel Sanders (1890 - 1980)

Sanders was born on September 9, 1890 in a four-room house located 3 miles (5 km) east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children born to Wilbur David and Margaret Ann (née Dunlevy) Sanders. The family attended the Advent Christian Church. The family were of mostly Irish and English ancestry.  His father […]

Dick Tiger (1929 - 1971)

Dick Tiger Nigerian professional boxer, world middleweight (160 pounds) and light heavyweight (175 pounds) champion during the 1960s. Tiger learned to box from British military officers stationed in Nigeria. He began his professional boxing career in his homeland in 1952, and he went on to win the Nigerian championship in the middleweight division before moving […]

Gene Fullmer (1931 - 2015)

Gene Fullmer Gene Fullmer was the World Middleweight Champion (1957). Widely believed, he was named after former boxer Gene Tunner, he was born into a Mormon family and endured a strict upbringing. He was introduced to the sport, when his father brought him and his two younger brothers to a local gym to watch the […]

Kid Gavilán (1926 - 2003)

Kid Gavilán Cuban professional boxer and world welterweight champion who was known for his “bolo punch,” a combination of a hook and an uppercut. Gavilan said that cutting sugarcane during his youth in Cuba helped him to perfect his punching technique. He was a flashy fighter and a skillful boxer who began his professional career […]

Nicolino Locche (1939 - 2005)

Nicolino Locche Born September 2, 1939 in Tunuyan, Mendoza, Argentina. Nicolino Locche renowned for his uncanny defensive tactics, Locche’s extraordinary reflexes and ability to feint earned him the nickname “El Intocable” (The Untouchable).   Following a tremendous amateur career, in which he lost only 5 of 122 bouts, Locche turned pro in 1958. In 1961 […]

Terry McGovern (1880 - 1918)

Terry McGovern A feared puncher called “Terrible Terry, the Brooklyn Terror”, he held the world bantemweight and featherweight crowns at the dawn of the 20th. century. Born Joseph Terrence McGovern, he was raised in Brooklyn and received no formal education. Just when he took-up boxing is unclear but his first recorded professional fight was a […]

Jack Cassidy (1927 - 1976)

He was born in Richmond Hill, New York, the son of Charlotte (née Koehler) and William Cassidy. His father, who was engineer at the Long Island Rail Road, was of Irish descent and his mother was of German ancestry.  Cassidy achieved his greatest success as a musical performer on Broadway, appearing in Alive and Kicking, […]

Ted Lewis (1893 - 1970)

Ted Lewis World Welterweight Champion in 1915 and 1916 and from 1917 to 1919, Ted “Kid” Lewis was nicknamed the “Aldgate Sphinx.” He fought in six different divisions, at weights from 116 to 166 pounds, during his 20-year career. Ted Lewis became England’s youngest boxing champion in October 1913, when he won the British Featherweight […]

Butterfly McQueen (1911 - 1995)

Born Thelma McQueen in Tampa, Florida on January 7, 1911, she planned to become a nurse until a high school teacher suggested that she try acting. McQueen initially studied with Janet Collins and went on to dance with the Venezuela Jones Negro Youth Group. Around this time she acquired the nickname “Butterfly” – a tribute […]

Linda Darnell (1923 - 1965)

Monetta Eloyse Darnall was born in Dallas, Texas, as one of four children (excluding her mother’s two children from an earlier marriage), to postal clerk Calvin Roy Darnall and the former Pearl Brown. She was the younger sister of Undeen (born March 1918) and the older sister of Monte Maloya (born 1929) and Calvin Roy, […]

Max Baer (1909 - 1959)

Max Baer The Heavyweight Champion of the World from 1934 to 1935, he was born in Omaha, Nebraska and dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work with his father on a cattle ranch and developed great strength. He turned pro in 1929 and progressed steadily through the ranks beating the likes of […]

Gloria Dickson (1917 - 1945)

Born in Pocatello, Idaho as Thais Alalia Dickerson, Dickson began acting during high school in amateur theatre productions. Encouraged by her acting coaches, she moonlighted doing dramatic readings at social clubs and on KFOX radio station in Long Beach, California. In April 1936, she was spotted by Warner Brothers talent scout Max Arnow who signed […]

Harry Wills (1889 - 1958)

Harry Wills Between 1915 and 1927, Harry Wills was one of the best fighters, if not the best, in the heavyweight division. Yet, he never got his chance to fight for the heavyweight championship. Like other black fighters in the early part of the past century, Harry Wills was nothing but a footnote in boxing […]

Jim Jeffries (1875 - 1953)

Jim Jeffries James J. Jeffries was the heavyweight champion of the world from 1899 to 1905 but he is best known to history for coming out of retirement to take on Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion in history, in what was called “The Fight of the Century”. That fight ensured Jeffries’ place […]

Tony Zale (1913 - 1997)

Tony Zale His three-fight series with Rocky Graziano between 1946 and 1948 are treated with reverence and awe by those who simply read about them as well as the relative few who witessed them in person. Only the third, in which Zale proved his superiority with a third-round knockout, was filmed. The grainy footage provides […]

Tony Canzoneri (1908 - 1959)

Tony Canzoneri American professional boxer who held world championships in the featherweight, lightweight, and junior-welterweight divisions. Canzoneri weighed only 95 pounds (43 kg) when he began his amateur boxing career. After turning pro in 1925, he won the National Boxing Association’s version of the bantamweight title. Canzoneri’s first world-title match was as a featherweight on […]

Jersey Joe Walcott (1914 - 1994)

Jersey Joe Walcott Jersey Joe Walcott, the son of poor immigrants from Barbados who was to slug his way out of poverty and into the record books as the oldest fighter to win the heavyweight championship of the world, died Friday at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, N.J., where he lived. He […]

Bob Fitzsimmons (1863 - 1917)

Bob Fitzsimmons Bob Fitzsimmons was born in England and as a youth he worked as a blacksmith and developed great strength. He then moved to New Zealand and then Australia and started boxing. He then moved to the United States and progressed through the Middleweight ranks defeating the likes of Dick Ellis, Dave Conway and […]

Carmen Basilio (1927 - 2012)

Carmen Basilio A crafty prize fighter with an impressive amount of skill and stamina, he was the former World Welterweight Champion (1955 to 1957) and World Middleweight Champion (1957 to 1958). The son of an Italian immigrant onion farmer, he began his professional boxing career in the Lightweight Division during 1948 following service with the […]