Ray Manzarek (1939 - 2013)

Manzarek was of Polish descent, born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, as were his parents, Helena and Raymond Manzarek, Sr. Growing up, he took private piano lessons from Bruno Michelotti and others. He originally wanted to play basketball, but he only wanted to play power forward or center. When he was […]

Ken Venturi (1931 - 2013)

Born in San Francisco, California, Venturi learned to play golf at an early age, and developed his game at Harding Park Golf Course and other public courses in the Bay Area. In the early 1950s, he was a pupil of Byron Nelson, and was also influenced by playing partner Ben Hogan. Venturi won the California […]

Billie Sol Estes (1925 - 2013)

Billie Sol Estes Estes was born January 10, 1925 to John and Lillian Estes on a farm near Clyde, Texas. He was one of six children. He did not attend college, but served in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II.  In the late 1950s, Estes was heavily involved in the Texas anhydrous ammonia […]

Joyce Brothers (1927 - 2013)

Joyce Diane Bauer was born in 1927 in Brooklyn, New York, to Estelle (née Rapaport) and Morris K. Bauer, attorneys who shared a law practice. Her family was Jewish. She graduated from Far Rockaway High School in January 1944. She entered Cornell University, double majoring in home economics and psychology and was a member of […]

Ottavio Missoni (1921 - 2013)

Ottavio Missoni was born in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast. His mother, Teresa de Vidovich, was Countess of Capocesto and Rogoznica, and his father, Vittorio Missoni, was a Friulian sea captain who had moved to Dalmatia whilst it was under Austrian rule. He was educated in Zara, Trieste, and Milan.  Aged 16, Missoni joined the […]

Ray Harryhausen (1920 - 2013)

Harryhausen was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Martha L. (née Reske) and Frederick W. Harryhausen. Of German descent, the family surname was originally spelled “Herrenhausen”.  After having seen King Kong (1933) for the first of many times on its initial release, Harryhausen spent his early years experimenting in the production of animated […]

Eleanor Adair (1926 - 2013)

Eleanor Adair Eleanor Campbell Reed was born on Nov. 28, 1926, in Arlington, Massachusetts. Her father had a Dodge dealership; prior to marriage her mother had worked as a fashion illustrator. Adair (then Reed) received a degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1948. Her doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1955 is in physics […]

Christian de Duve (1917 - 2013)

de Duve was born of a shopkeeper Alphonse de Duve and wife Madeleine Pungs in the village of Thames Ditton, near London. His parents fled Belgium at the outbreak of the First World War. After the war in 1920, at age three, he and his family returned to Belgium. He was a precocious boy, always […]

Frederic Franklin (1914 - 2013)

Born in Liverpool, England, Frederic Franklin claimed that on seeing Peter Pan, his only thought was to go on the stage. He began his career in 1931 at the Casino de Paris with Josephine Baker, briefly danced with the Vic-Wells (early Royal Ballet) and joined the Markova-Dolin Ballet in 1935. Three years later, Franklin became […]

Jeff Hanneman (1964 - 2013)

Hanneman was born January 31, 1964, in Oakland, California, and grew up in Long Beach in a family containing several war veterans: his father fought in Normandy during World War II and his brothers in Vietnam, making warfare a common conversation topic at the dinner table. War films were popular on TV at the time, […]

Marc Rich (1934 - 2013)

Rich was born in 1934 to a Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium. His parents were working-class Jews who emigrated with their son to the United States in 1941 to escape the Nazis. His father opened a jewelry store in Kansas City, Missouri. The family moved to Queens, New York City in 1950, where Rich’s father […]

Slim Whitman (1923 - 2013)

Slim Whitman Whitman was born Ottis Dewey Whitman Jr, in Tampa, Florida, on January 20, 1923. Growing up, he liked the country music of Jimmie Rodgers and the songs of Gene Autry, but he did not embark on a musical career of his own until the end of World War II, after he had served […]

Robert Fogel (1926 - 2013)

Fogel was born in New York City, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants from Odessa (1922). His brother, six years his senior, was his main intellectual influence in his youth as he listened to him and his college friends intensely discuss social and economic issues of the Great Depression. He graduated from the Stuyvesant High […]

Esther Williams (1921 - 2013)

Esther Williams Born in Inglewood, California, on August 8, 1921, Williams was the fifth and youngest child of Louis Stanton Williams (January 19, 1886 – June 10, 1968) and Bula Myrtle (née Gilpin; October 8, 1885 – December 29, 1971). Louis Williams was a sign painter and Bula Myrtle Williams was a psychologist. The two […]

Frank Lautenberg (1924 - 2013)

Lautenberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, to Mollie (née Bergen) and Sam Lautenberg, impoverished Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, who had arrived in the United States as infants. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Frank Bergen, and close family friend and Paterson community activist, Raleigh Weintrob.  When Lautenberg was 19, his father […]

Deacon Jones (1939 - 2013)

Jones was born in Eatonville, Florida, and lived in a four-bedroom house with his family of ten. Jones attended Hungerford High School, where he played football, baseball, and basketball. During high school, Jones developed a lump in his thigh and learned that it was a tumor; he had surgery to remove it.  When he was […]

William Campbell (1923 - 2011)

Campbell’s film career began in 1950, with a small part in the John Garfield film, The Breaking Point. After several years of similar supporting performances in a number of films, including as a co-pilot in William Wellman’s The High and the Mighty (1954), he won his first starring role in Cell 2455 Death Row (1955), […]

Michael Ansara (1922 - 2013)

Michael Ansara Michael George Ansara was born in a small village in Syria, and his family emigrated to the United States when he was two years old. They resided in Lowell, Massachusetts, for a decade before moving to California. He originally wanted to be a physician, but developed a passion for becoming a performer after […]

William Warren Scranton (1917 - 2013)

William Scranton was born while the Scranton family was on vacation at a cottage in Madison, Connecticut. He was the son of Worthington Scranton, a wealthy Pennsylvania businessman, and Marion Margery Scranton, a member of the Republican National Committee for over two decades. Despite her own involvement in politics, his mother tried to dissuade him […]

George Charles Scott “Boomer” (1944 - 2013)

Scott was born March 23, 1944, in Greenville, Mississippi, as the youngest of three children. His father, a cotton farm laborer, died when George Jr. was two years old, and young George was picking cotton by age nine. “That’s all we knew,” he said. “The reason you did that, all of that money was turned […]

George Scott (Wrestler) (1929 - 2014)

George Scott was the first born son to his parents, Walter and Jeannie. He was born in Dalmeny, Scotland while his parents were visiting relatives and, returning to Canada, was raised in Hamilton, Ontario. He grew up with his siblings Angus (AKA Sandy Scott, 1934-2010), Walter. His sister Jeannie, near the age of 12, suffered […]

Lindy Boggs (1916 - 2013)

Boggs was born on the Brunswick Plantation near New Roads in Pointe Coupee Parish in South Louisiana. She attended Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans. She was a second cousin of deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison, Sr., the former mayor of New Orleans, Ambassador to the Organization of American States, and three-time candidate for […]

George P. Mitchell (1919 - 2013)

George P. Mitchell Mitchell was born to Greek immigrant parents in the port city of Galveston, Texas in 1919. Mitchell’s roots reached back to Greece, where his father Savvas Paraskevopoulos from the village of Nestani in Arcadia, tended goats before immigrating to the United States in 1901, arriving at Ellis Island at the age of […]

Walter De Maria (1935 - 2013)

De Maria was born in 1935 in Albany, California. His parents were the proprietors of a local restaurant in Albany. Walter De Maria’s first academic interest was music—first piano, then percussion. He also took to sports and cars, of which he made drawings. By 1946 he had joined a musicians’ union.  De Maria studied history […]

Virginia E. Johnson (1925 - 2013)

Virginia Johnson was born in Springfield, Missouri, the daughter of Edna (née Evans) and Hershel “Harry” Eshelman, a farmer. Her paternal grandparents were members of the LDS Church, and her father had Hessian ancestry. When she was five, her family moved to Palo Alto, California, where her father worked as a groundskeeper for a hospital. […]

Dennis Farina (1944 - 2013)

Farina was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Sicilian-American parents Joseph Farina, a doctor, and his wife Yolanda Donati. His father was from Villalba, Sicily. He had three brothers and three sisters.  Before becoming an actor, Farina served three years in the United States Army, followed by 18 years in the Chicago Police Department’s burglary division, […]

Cory Monteith (1982 - 2013)

Cory Monteith Monteith was born in Calgary, Alberta, on May 11, 1982, the younger son of Ann McGregor, an interior decorator, and Joe Monteith, a military man who served in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. He had an older brother named Shaun. Monteith’s parents divorced when he was seven years old, and he and […]

Leonard Garment (1924 - 2013)

Garment was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was a graduate of Brooklyn Law School (1949) and that same year he joined the law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin, and Todd. He became the head of litigation and a partner in the late fifties. (Later the firm would be called Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & […]

Edmund Morgan (1916 - 2013)

Morgan was the second child of Edmund Morris Morgan and Elsie Smith Morgan. His mother had been raised in a New England family that practiced Christian Science, though she distanced herself from the faith. His father, descended from Welsh coal miners, taught law at the University of Minnesota. His sister was Roberta Mary Morgan, better […]

Dean Meminger (1948 - 2013)

Meminger was born in Walterboro, South Carolina, and starred at Rice High School in New York City.  He attended Marquette University, where he played for coach Al McGuire. He helped Marquette win the 1970 National Invitational Tournament. Marquette’s 1970 team was ranked 8th in the country and was invited to the NCAA tournament. Following a […]