Thomas Andrews (1873 - 1912)

Thomas Andrews was born at Ardara House, Comber, County Down, in Northern Ireland, to The Rt. Hon. Thomas Andrews, a member of the Privy Council of Ireland, and Eliza Pirrie. His siblings included John Miller Andrews, the future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and Sir James Andrews, the future Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. […]

Horace Lawson Hunley (1823 - 1863)

Horace Lawson Hunley (June 20, 1823, Sumner County, Tennessee – October 15, 1863, Charleston, South Carolina), was a Confederate marine engineer during the American Civil War. He developed early hand-powered submarines, the most famous of which was posthumously named for him, H. L. Hunley.  Though he was born in Tennessee, Hunley’s parents (Louisa Harden Lawson […]

Francis Edgar Stanley (1849 - 1918)

He and his twin brother, Freelan Oscar Stanley (otherwise known as Freel, or more often F. O.) learned to carve violins as taught by their grandfather, Liberty Stanley, at the age of ten. He attended Western State Normal School, now known as the University of Maine at Farmington. While F. O. initially became a teacher, […]

Sylvester H. Roper (1823 - 1896)

Sylvester H. Roper’s father, Merrick, was a cabinetmaker, born 1792 in Sterling, Massachusetts. Merrick came to Francestown, New Hampshire in 1807 and married Sylvester’s mother Susan Fairbanks in 1817. Sylvester had an older brother who was a housepainter, two younger sisters, and a younger brother who became a machinist at the Singer Sewing Machine Manufactory […]

Fred Duesenberg (1876 - 1932)

Fred Duesenberg was born in Lippe, Germany and emigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight years old. They settled in Rockford, Iowa. He was actually born Friedrich Simon Düsenberg, and not with the middle name of Samuel as most sources say. Samuel was the middle name of his brother, August […]

John Donne (1572 - 1631)

Donne was born in London, into a recusant Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. Donne’s father was a respected Roman […]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Rabindranath Tagore (Listeni/rəˈbindrəˈnɑːt ˈtɑːɡɔr/; Bengali pronunciation: [robind̪ro nat̪ʰ ʈʰakur]), also written Rabīndranātha Thākura, (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941),γ[›] sobriquet Gurudev,δ[›] was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, […]

Dick Wilson (1970 - 1970)

Dick Wilson Dick Wilson, a British-born character actor who won American television fame as Mr. Whipple, the comically fussy star of two decades of Charmin toilet paper commercials, died on Monday at the Motion Picture & Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 91 and had lived at the organization’s residence in Woodland […]

Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)

Teasdale was born on August 8, 1884. She had such poor health for so much of her childhood, home schooled until age 9, that it was only at age 10 that she was well enough to begin school. She started at Mary Institute in 1898, but switched to Hosmer Hall in 1899, graduating in 1903. […]

Phillis Wheatley (1753 - 1784)

Although the date and place of her birth are not documented, scholars believe that Phillis Wheatley was born in 1753 in West Africa, most likely in present-day Gambia or Senegal. Wheatley was brought to British-ruled Boston, Massachusetts on July 11, 1761, on a slave ship called The Phillis. It was owned by Timothy Fitch and […]

William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850)

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, […]

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and […]

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany. Plath’s father was an entomologist and was a professor of biology at Boston University; he […]

William Blake (1757 - 1827)

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English painter, poet and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form “what is in proportion to its […]

Andrae Crouch (1942 - 2015)

Andrae Crouch Andraé Crouch, a gospel musician who bridged the worlds of church and mainstream music for more than 50 years, died Thursday afternoon. The 72-year-old singer, songwriter and choir director had been hospitalized since Saturday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center in the Los Angeles area after suffering a heart attack. Crouch, sometimes called “the […]

Anita Ekberg (1931 - 2015)

Anita Ekberg Born Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg, she will be best remembered for her performance in the film “La Dolce Vita” (1960) by Federico Fellini. During her career she starred in over 70 films including “Abbott and Costello Go to Mars” by Charles Lamont (1953), “Blood Alley” by William A. Wellman, “Artists and Models” co-starring […]

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as […]

Delmira Agustini (1886 - 1914)

Born in Montevideo, the daughter of Italian immigrants, Agustini was a precocious child. In addition to beginning to write poetry when she was 10 years old, she studied French, music and painting.  She wrote for the magazine La Alborada (The Dawn). She formed part of the Generation of 1900, along with Julio Herrera y Reissig, […]

Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973)

Pablo Neruda (/nəˈruːdə/; Spanish: [ˈpaβ̞lo̞ ne̞ˈɾuð̞a]) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973). He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.  Neruda became known as […]

Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

Walter “Walt” Whitman (/ˈhwɪtmən/; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. […]

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Robert Frost Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost, Jr., and Isabelle Moodie. His mother was of Scottish descent, and his father descended from Nicholas Frost of Tiverton, Devon, England, who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634 on the Wolfrana.  Frost’s father was a teacher and later an […]

Harry Reasoner (1923 - 1991)

Reasoner was born at First Street North in Dakota City, Iowa on April 17, 1923; He and his older sister Esther were children of Eunice (Nicholl) and Harry Ray Reasoner, who married in 1911. Reasoner was taught to read by his parents before entering school, gaining a strong vocabulary from his mother.  Reasoner attended West […]

Chet Huntley (1911 - 1974)

Huntley was born in Cardwell, Montana, the only son and oldest of four children born to Percy Adams Huntley and Blanche Wadine (née Tatham) Huntley. His father was a telegraph operator for the Northern Pacific Railway, and young Chet was born in Cardwell depot’s living quarters. Owing to the railroad’s seniority system, wherein employees with […]

Roger Grimsby (1928 - 1995)

Roger Grimsby was an orphan who was born in Butte, Montana and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, by a Lutheran minister. After graduating from Denfeld High School in 1946, he attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, before studying history at Columbia University in New York. Grimsby was a U.S. Army veteran who was stationed in […]

Julie London (1926 - 2000)

Julie London Popular Actress and Singer. She had roles in movies including “Jungle Woman” (1944), “The Red House” (1947), with Edward G. Robinson, Task Force” (1949) with Gary Cooper, “The Fat Man” (1950) and “A Question of Adultery’ (1958). London was married to Jack Webb from “Dragnet” for 5 years. She was then married to […]

Dave Garroway (1913 - 1982)

Born in Schenectady, New York, Garroway was 14 and had moved with his family thirteen times before settling in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended University City High School and Washington University in St. Louis, from which he earned a degree in abnormal psychology. Before going into broadcasting, Garroway worked as a Harvard University lab […]

Hal Fishman (1931 - 2007)

A Brooklyn, New York native, Fishman received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University where he worked at the campus radio station. He also received a master’s degree in political science from UCLA in 1956. Planning for a career in academia, he worked as an assistant political science professor at California State University, Los Angeles for […]

Carole Lombard (1908 - 1942)

Carole Lombard was an American film actress. She was particularly noted for her highly neurotic, energetic and often off-beat roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. She was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s. Lombard was born into a wealthy family in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on October 6, 1908. She attended […]

Douglas Edwards (1917 - 1990)

A native of Oklahoma, Edwards grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Edwards joined CBS Radio in 1942, eventually becoming anchor for the regular evening newscast The World Today as well as World News Today on Sunday afternoons. Edwards came to CBS after stints as a newscaster and announcer at WSB in Atlanta, Georgia and WXYZ in […]

Audry Lindley (1918 - 1997)

Audry Lindley She is best remembered for her role as the landlady ‘Helen Roper’ on the ABC television sitcom “Three’s Company,” which aired from March 1977 to September 1984, and it’s spinoff, “The Ropers,” which ran for only one year. Born Audra Marie Lindley, her father was actor Bert Lindley who appeared in films from […]