Ann Harding (1902 - 1981)

Ann Harding Ann Harding, who was known for her stage and screen portrayals of beautiful, aristocratic women in the 1920’s and 30’s, died Tuesday at her home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., after a long illness. She was 79 years old. Miss Harding made her Broadway debut in 1921 in ”Like a King.” In his review […]

Freddie Prinze (1954 - 1977)

Freddie Prinze Freddie Prinze was born Frederick Karl Pruetzel in New York City, New York, to a Puerto Rican mother, Aurea Elena Ruiz, and a German immigrant father, Edward Karl Pruetzel. Freddie grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York City. As a chubby child, he was often bullied, but was quite creative […]

Ritchie Valens (1941 - 1959)

Ritchie Valens Born Richard Steven Valenzuela in a largely Hispanic community north of Los Angeles known as the San Fernando Valley, his father was a devotee of flamenco music and blues and instilled his love of music to Ritchie. At the age of eleven he started playing guitar and took it with him everywhere. During […]

Otis Redding (1941 - 1967)

Otis Redding One of the most popular and critically acclaimed soul vocalist, songwriter and musician representatives of the R&B style known as Southern soul. He is generally regarded as the single most influential male soul artist of the 1960s. He was one of the first artists to broaden his appeal to white audiences with a […]

Sam Cooke (1931 - 1964)

Sam Cooke Singer, Gospel, Blues, Soul and Pop, Songwriter. Sam Cooke is considered the father of soul music and was immensely popular in both the black and white communities. This intelligent performer was not only the overseer and manager of the business side of his own career but founded his own record label and publishing […]

Philip Carey (1925 - 2009)

Carey was born in Hackensack, New Jersey. Carey served in the United States Marine Corps and was wounded as part of the ship’s detachment of the USS Franklin during World War II and served again in the Korean War.  One of his earliest roles was at Lt. (jg) Bob Perry in John Wayne’s Operation Pacific. […]

Macdonald Carey (1913 - 1994)

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Carey graduated from the University of Iowa in Iowa City with a bachelor’s degree in 1935, after attending the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a year where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He first made his career starring in various B-movies of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He […]

Frances Reid (1914 - 2010)

Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, to banker Charles William and Anna May (Priest) Reid,[6] Reid grew up in Berkeley, California. Her acting career started in 1938 with a bit part in the movie Man-Proof.  Reid’s Broadway debut was as Juliette Lecourtois in Where There’s a Will There’s a Way at the John Golden Theatre in […]

William Bast (1931 - 2015)

Bast was born in Wauwatosa, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, the son of Gilbert Bast and Bernice Fleischmann. He began his early education in Milwaukee, transferring to Kenosha when his family moved there. Moving back to Milwaukee, he subsequently graduated from Wauwatosa High school, then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When his family moved to Los […]

Ryan White (1971 - 1990)

Ryan White was born at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Kokomo, Indiana, to Jeanne Elaine Hale and Hubert Wayne White. He was circumcised and the bleeding would not stop. When he was three days old, doctors diagnosed him with severe hemophilia A, a hereditary blood coagulation disorder associated with the X chromosome, which causes even […]

Malcolm Forbes (1919 - 1990)

Forbes was born on August 19, 1919 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Adelaide (Stevenson) and Scottish-born financial journalist and author B. C. Forbes. He graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1937 and Princeton University. Forbes enlisted in the Army in 1942 and served as a machine gun sergeant in Europe. Forbes received a […]

Robert Schuller (1926 - 2015)

Robert Harold Schuller was born on September 16, 1926, near Alton, Iowa, the son of Jennie (née Beltman) and Anthony Schuller. He was the youngest of four children. All of his grandparents were Dutch immigrants, and he was raised on his parents’ farm nearby in a small-knit community of Dutch-Americans, without running water. As a […]

Oral Roberts (1918 - 2009)

Roberts was born in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, the fifth and youngest child of the Reverend Ellis Melvin Roberts and Claudius Priscilla Roberts (née Irwin) (d. 1974). According to an interview on Larry King Live, Irwin was of Cherokee descent. Roberts was a card-carrying member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.  Roberts began life in poverty […]

John Joseph O’Connor (1920 - 2000)

O’Connor was born in Philadelphia, the fourth of five children of Thomas J. and Dorothy Magdalene (née Gomple) O’Connor (1886–1971), daughter of Gustave Gumpel, a kosher butcher and Jewish rabbi. In 2014, his sister Mary O’Connor Ward discovered through genealogical research that their mother was born Jewish and was baptized as a Roman Catholic at […]

Sun Myung Moon (1920 - 2012)

Sun Myung Moon was born Mun Yong-myeong on 25 February 1920, in modern-day North P’yŏng’an Province, North Korea, at a time when Korea was under Japanese rule. He was the younger of two sons in a farming family of eight children. Moon’s family rejected the Shinto faith pushed by the country’s Japanese rulers and followed […]

Rex Humbard (1919 - 2007)

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Pentecostal evangelists, Rex Humbard was the first evangelist to have a weekly nationwide television program in the United States, running from 1952 to 1983, although his first television broadcast was in 1949. Humbard’s $4 million Cathedral of Tomorrow church in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a suburb of nearby Akron, was […]

Gordon Hinckley (1910 - 2008)

A muiti-generational Latter-day Saint, Hinckley was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to prominent LDS writer and educator Bryant S. Hinckley and Ada Bitner Hinckley. He graduated from LDS High School in 1928. He grew up on a residential farm in East Millcreek. His home library contained approximately a thousand volumes of literary, philosophical and […]

Jerry Falwell (1933 - 2007)

Jerry Falwell Falwell and twin brother Gene were born in the Fairview Heights region of Lynchburg, Virginia, the sons of Helen Virginia (Beasley) and Carey Hezekiah Falwell. His father was an entrepreneur and one-time bootlegger who was agnostic. His grandfather was a staunch atheist. Jerry Falwell married the former Macel Pate on April 12, 1958. […]

Ezra Taft Benson (1899 - 1994)

Born on a farm in Whitney, Idaho, Benson was the oldest of eleven children. He was the great-grandson of Ezra T. Benson, who was appointed by Brigham Young a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1846. Benson began his academic career at Utah State Agricultural College (USAC), where he first met his […]

Gloria Stuart (1910 - 2010)

Gloria Stuart Gloria Stuart had an interesting, and long spanning acting career which ran nearly 80 years. She would accumulate an Oscar nomination, Golden Globe nomination, a Saturn award, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild. Stuart received her big break when she was able to sign with Universal Studios. She […]

Teena Marie (1956 - 2010)

Teena Marie Teena Marie was an American singer-songwriter nicknamed Lady Tee, considered an R&B legend who proclaimed herself as the “Ivory Queen of Soul” because she was one of the first successful white performers of that genre of music. She had many classic hits including a duet with her mentor Rick James called “Fire and […]

Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - 2011)

Elizabeth Taylor Elizabeth Taylor was an acting legend from the golden age of Hollywood. AFI listed her as seventh on the “Female Legends List”. Her acting career lasted over sixty years, starting at the age of ten and ending at the age of 71. Elizabeth Taylor was born in London, England. The daughter of Americans […]

Dieter Grau (1913 - 2014)

Dieter Grau (April 24, 1913 – December 17, 2014) was a rocket scientist and member of the “von Braun rocket group”, at Peenemünde (1939–1945) working on the V-2 rockets in World War II. He was among the scientists who surrendered to the United States and traveled there, providing rocketry expertise via Operation Paperclip, which took […]

Fitzhugh Fulton (1925 - 2015)

Born in Blakely, Georgia, Fulton attended Auburn University, the University of Oklahoma, and is a graduate of Golden Gate University.  Fulton flew 225 trips to Berlin in C-54’s during the Berlin Airlift. He also flew 55 combat mission in the Douglas B-26 Invader over North Korea. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross and five Air […]

Ernest Sternglass (1923 - 2015)

Both of his parents were physicians. When Ernest was fourteen, the Sternglass family left Germany in 1938 to avoid the fascist regime. He completed high school at the age of sixteen, then entered Cornell, registering for an engineering program.  Financial difficulties encountered by his family forced him to leave school for a year. By the […]

Clarice Taylor (1917 - 2011)

Clarice Taylor Actress. Fondly remembered for her role as Bill Cosby’s mother Anna Huxtable in the popular TV series “The Cosby Show” (1985 to 1992), for which she received an Emmy Award nomination in 1986. Born in Buckingham, Virginia, the daughter of a post office worker, she herself worked for the post office after attending […]

Bruce Edwards Ivins (1946 - 2008)

Bruce Edwards Ivins (April 22, 1946 – July 29, 2008) was an American microbiologist, vaccinologist, senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.  On Tuesday, July 29, 2008, he died of an overdose of Tylenol with […]

Malcolm Casadaban (1949 - 2009)

Malcolm Casadaban (12 August 1949 – 13 September 2009) was Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology and of Microbiology at the University of Chicago. Casadaban died following an accidental laboratory exposure to an attenuated strain of Yersinia pestis, a bacterium that causes the plague.  According to a CDC report on the incident, the […]

Shirley Temple (1928 - 2014)

Shirley Temple Actress, United States Diplomat. She is considered an icon of American cinema, she is arguably the most successful child film star in motion picture history. She started taking dancing lessons at the age of three, and had her first experience in motion pictures when she was chosen to appear in a series of […]

George Carlin (1937 - 2008)

George Carlin Comedian. A provocative and influential standup performer, he is best known for his “Seven Dirty Words” routine which led to the 1978 United States Supreme Court case “F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation” that established the American government’s right to regulate profanity on the public airwaves. The decision also propelled his career forward. In general, […]