Brother Oswald (1911 - 2002)

Brother Oswald Musician. Born Beecher Ray Kirby, he was a Dobro guitar and banjo player best known as Bashful Brother Beecher. In 1934, taking the stage name Pete Kirby, he joined Roy Acuff’s Crazy Tennesseans in 1934, which became the Smoky Mountain Boys. In 1939, the Smoky Mountain Boys joined the cast of the Grand […]

Bruce Alford, Sr (1922 - 2010)

Professional Football Player, Official. For six seasons (1946 to 1951), he played at the right-end and defensive back positions in the All-America Football Conference and National Football League with the New York Yankees and New York Yanks. Born Herbert Bruce Alford, he was raised in Waco, Texas where he attended high school and played collegiate […]

Bruce Bennett (1906 - 2007)

Harold Herman Brix was the fourth child in a family of five of an immigrant couple from Germany. His eldest brother, and their father’s favored son, Herman, died before Harold’s birth; and he was given his middle name in this child’s memory. To please his father, by high school, he had discontinued using his own […]

Bruce Cabot (1904 - 1972)

Cabot was born Étienne Pelissier Jacques de Bujac in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to a prominent local lawyer, Colonel Etienne de Bujac, and Julia Armandine Graves, who died shortly after giving birth to him. Leaving the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee without graduating, Cabot worked at many jobs, including as a sailor, an insurance […]

Bruce Catton (1899 - 1978)

Author, Historian, Pulitzer Prize Winner. A prolific and popular American Civil War historian, he is best remembered for his books on the American Civil War, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1954 for “A Stillness at Appomattox.” Born Charles Bruce Catton, his father was a Congregationalist minister who moved the family to Benzonia, Michigan to […]

Bruce Chatwin (1940 - 1989)

Author. Charles Bruce Chatwin, who seldom used his first name, was born in Sheffield in Yorkshire, although his parents came from Birmingham and he spent much of his youth in that city. His father was a solicitor who, at the time of his children’s birth (another son, Hugh, was born in 1944) was serving abroad […]

Bruce Conner (1933 - 2008)

Artist and filmmaker. Born in in McPherson, Kansas, he was world renowned as a pioneering collage filmmaker and Beat-era assemblage artist,  recognized for his work in many creative disciplines. His gauzy assemblages of scraps salvaged from abandoned buildings, nylon stockings, doll parts, and other found materials initially gained him art-world attention. Best remembered for his […]

Bruce Conner (1933 - 2008)

Artist and filmmaker. Born in in McPherson, Kansas, he was world renowned as a pioneering collage filmmaker and Beat-era assemblage artist,  recognized for his work in many creative disciplines. His gauzy assemblages of scraps salvaged from abandoned buildings, nylon stockings, doll parts, and other found materials initially gained him art-world attention. Best remembered for his […]

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 […]

Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889 - 1919)

Bruce Frederick Cummings was born in Barnstaple in 1889. He was a naturalist at heart and ended up working at the British Museum’s department of Natural History in London. Having begun his journal at the age of thirteen, Cummings continued to record his observations there — gradually moving from dry scientific notes to a more […]

Bruce Lee (1940 - 1973)

Bruce Lee Bruce Lee (Chinese: 李小龍; born Lee Jun-fan, Chinese: 李振藩; November 27, 1940 – July 20, 1973) was a Hong Kong American martial artist, Hong Kong action film actor, martial arts instructor, philosopher, filmmaker, and the founder of Jeet Kune Do. Lee was the son of Cantonese opera star Lee Hoi-Chuen. He is widely […]

Bruce Reynolds (1931 - 2013)

Bruce Richard Reynolds was born at Charing Cross Hospital, Strand, London, the only child of Thomas Richard and Dorothy Margaret (née Keen). He was initially brought up in Putney, and his mother, a nurse, died in 1935 when he was aged four. His father, a trade-union activist at the Ford Dagenham assembly plant, remarried and […]

Bruno Cremer (1929 - 2010)

Bruno Cremer (6 October 1929 – 7 August 2010) was a French actor born in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne. Cremer is best known for portraying Jules Maigret on French television, from 1991 to 2005. Bruno Cremer attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school. His career on stage included creating the role of Thomas Beckett in the 1959 world […]

Bruno Gerussi (1928 - 1995)

Actor. Gerussi was born of Greek heritage in 1928 in Medicine Hat, Alberta. He attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in Banff, Alberta, and would go onto an acting career that would span over 40 years and become one of Canada’s most recognizable actors. He began is acting career in 1954 when he became […]

Bruno Hauptmann (1899 - 1936)

Bruno Hauptmann was born Bruno Richard Hauptmann in Kamenz, near Dresden in what was then the German Empire, the youngest of five children. Neither he nor his family and friends used the name “Bruno,” although prosecutors in the Lindbergh kidnapping trial referred to him by that name. He had three brothers and a sister. At […]

Bruno Hauptmann (1899 - 1936)

Hauptmann was born Richard Hauptmann in Kamenz, near Dresden in what was then the German Empire, the youngest of five children. (The name “Bruno,” used sometimes by prosecutors in the Lindbergh kidnapping trial was not used by family or friends.) He had three brothers and a sister. At age 11, he joined the Boy Scouts […]

Bryan Budd (1977 - 2006)

Born in Belfast together with twin sister Tracy, Bryan Budd moved to the north of England as a child. He attended Thomas Sumpter School in Scunthorpe. Budd had been in the British Army for ten years, serving with the elite Pathfinder Platoon, which carries out reconnaissance deep behind enemy lines. As part of the Pathfinders, […]

Bryan Murray (1942 - 2017)

Bryan Murray began his coaching career as coach with the Rockland Nationals in 1976 when the team went all the way and won the Centennial Cup of the CJHL. He earned a good reputation as a coach and was offered a position with the Pembroke Lumber Kings, and then with the Regina Pats of the […]

Bryce Courtenay (1933 - 2012)

Author. He was one of Australia’s most commercially successful authors, having published 21 novels between 1989 and 2012, most of which are set in historical fiction Australia, his adopted country or South Africa, his country of birth.  He began working at the age of 17 in an African mine, earning money to attend the London […]

Brynn Omdahl Hartman (1958 - 1998)

Model, Actress, and wife of television actor and comedian Phil Hartman. She died by killing herself with a gun after shooting her husband as he slept. Born Vicki Jo Omdahl, the daughter of an engineer and owner of a retail shop, she was an average student growing up in an average family in a small […]

Bubber Miley (1903 - 1932)

Bubber Miley was born in Aiken, South Carolina, United States, into a musical family. At the age of six, he and his family moved to New York City where, as a child, he occasionally sang for money on the streets, and later, at the age of fourteen, studied to play the trombone and cornet. In 1920, […]

Buck O’Neil (1911 - 2006)

Born in rural Carrabelle, Florida, Buck O’Neil was initially denied the opportunity to attend high school due to racial segregation; at the time, Florida had only four high schools specifically for African Americans. However, after working a summer in a celery field with his father, O’Neil left home to live with relatives and attend Edward […]

Buck Owens (1929 - 2006)

Owens was born on a farm in Sherman, Texas, to Alvis Edgar Owens, Sr. and his wife, Maicie Azel Ellington. Midway Mall, at 4800 Texoma Parkway, now sits where his father’s farm once was. (U.S. Highway 82 through Sherman was named Buck Owens Freeway in his honor).  “‘Buck’ was a donkey on the Owens farm,” […]

Bud Abbott (1895 - 1974)

Bud Abbott Abbott was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, into a show business family. His parents, Rae (Fisher) and Harry Abbott, worked for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Abbott dropped out of school as a child and began working for his father in Coney Island. His father, now an employee of the Columbia Burlesque […]

Bud Adams (1923 - 2013)

Born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma on January 3, 1923, Adams was the son of K. S. “Boots” Adams and Blanch Keeler Adams. He became an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation by virtue of his maternal line. Two of his great-grandmothers were Cherokee women who married European-American men: Nelson Carr and George B. Keeler, who played […]

Bud Collyer (1908 - 1969)

In 1950 Bud Collyer got the job which genuinely made him a household name: Beat the Clock, a game show that pitted couples (usually, but not exclusively, married) against the clock in a race to perform silly (sometimes messy) tasks, which were called “problems” but could with more accuracy be called “stunts.” The grand prizes […]

Bud Geary (1898 - 1946)

Actor. Born in Salt Lake, Utah, he appeared in 258 films between 1920 to 1946. Noted most for roles as the villain or tough guy, his credits include “Robin Hood” (1922), “Flying G-Men” (1939), “Adventures of Red Ryder” (1940), “The Masked Marvel” (1943) and “Hop Harrigan” (1946). He also appeared in many Republic and RKO’s […]

Bud Shank (1926 - 2009)

Clifford Everett “Bud” Shank, Jr. (May 27, 1926 – April 2, 2009) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton’s Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as […]

Bud Tingwell (1923 - 2009)

Tingwell was born in the Sydney suburb of Coogee, the son of William Harvey Tingwell and Enid (née Green). As an adolescent, his father encouraged him to be an accountant, but Tingwell failed the entrance exam. While still at school, he became a cadet at Sydney radio station 2CH, soon becoming the youngest radio announcer […]

Bud Yorkin (1926 - 2015)

Bud Yorkin was born in Washington, Pennsylvania. He earned a degree in engineering from Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. In 1954, Bud Yorkin became the producer of NBC’s The Tony Martin Show, a 15-minute variety program which preceded the nightly news on Monday evenings. In 1955, he produced and directed the live 11-episode […]