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 […]

Marian McPartland (1918 - 2013)

Margaret Marian Turner was born on 20 March 1918 to Frank and Janet (née Payne) Turner. She had one younger sibling, a sister, Joyce. She demonstrated early musical aptitude at the piano, and would later realize that she had perfect pitch. Margaret (Maggie to her family) studied violin from the age of nine, but never […]

Albert Murray (1916 - 2013)

Murray was born in Nokomis, Escambia County, Alabama. He attended the Tuskegee Institute and received a Bachelor’s degree in 1939. He later earned a M.A. from New York University in 1948. In 1943 he entered the U.S. Air Force, from which he retired as a major in 1962.  Murray began his writing career in earnest […]

Bert Lance (1931 - 2013)

Lance was born in Gainesville, Georgia. His father, Thomas Jackson Lance, had served as president of Young Harris College in northeast Georgia, and in 1941 the family relocated to Calhoun, in Gordon County, when Lance’s father became superintendent of that city’s schools. Lance graduated from the University of Georgia in 1951. While a student at […]

Jack Germond (1928 - 2013)

Germond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, an only child, and raised in a middle-class household in Boston and Trenton, New Jersey. When he was 13, his family moved to Mississippi, and then to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Germond finished high school. After attending Louisiana State University for one semester, he served in the U.S. Army […]

Pauline Maier (1938 - 2013)

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1938 as Pauline Rubbelke, she attended parochial schools. Her father was a firefighter and her mother was a homemaker with five children. On entering Radcliffe College as an undergraduate, her original ambition was to be in the newspaper business.  She was a writer on The Harvard Crimson and worked […]

Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941 - 2013)

Elshtain was born on January 6, 1941 in Windsor, Colorado and grew up in Timnath, Colorado. She was from a Lutheran background. She received an AB Colorado State University and masters degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Colorado. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1973, […]

Gen. David C. Jones (1921 - 2013)

Jones was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota and raised in Minot, North Dakota, where he graduated from Minot High School. He attended both University of North Dakota and Minot State Teacher’s College. While attending college he received his private pilots license from the Civilian Pilot Training Program. In April 1942 he left college to join […]

Eydie Gorme (1928 - 2013)

Gormé was born Edith Gormezano (census sources indicate Edith Garmezano) in The Bronx, New York, in 1928, the daughter of Nessim and Fortuna, Sephardic Jewish immigrants. Her father, a tailor, was from Sicily and her mother was from Turkey. Gormé was a cousin of singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka.  She graduated from William Howard Taft High School […]

William “Bill” Lynch (1941 - 2013)

Lynch was born on July 21, 1941, and grew up near the town of Mattituck in Suffolk County, Long Island, the son of William Lynch, Sr. His father worked as a potato farmer.   In the 1960s, Lynch and his wife Mary moved to Harlem, where he would become a major political figure. Lynch worked […]

Jerry Wolman (1927 - 2013)

Wolman was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the son of a grocer. He worked in the family business into his high school years, when his father had a stroke. Not graduating, Wolman joined the Merchant Marines, returned home, and moved to Washington, D.C. In the 1950s, he began his own construction […]

Ruth Asawa (1926 - 2013)

Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, one of seven children. Her father operated a truck farm until the Japanese American internment during World War II. The family lived in the assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack for much of 1942, then at Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.  Following her graduation from […]