Hattie McDaniel (1895 - 1952)

Hattie McDaniel was born June 10, 1895, in Wichita, Kansas, to former slaves. She was the youngest of 13 children. Her father, Henry McDaniel, fought in the Civil War with the 122nd USCT and her mother, Susan Holbert, was a singer of religious music. In 1900, the family moved to Colorado, living first in Fort […]

Fay Wray (1907 - 2004)

Wray was born on a ranch near Cardston in the province of Alberta, Canada, to two Mormons, Elvina Marguerite Jones, who was from Salt Lake City, and Joseph Heber Wray, who was from Kingston upon Hull, England. She was one of six children. Her family returned to the United States a few years after she […]

Thelma Ritter (1902 - 1969)

Ritter was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1902. After appearing in high school plays and stock companies, she trained as an actress at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She established a stage career but took a hiatus to raise her two children by her husband, Joseph Moran, an actor turned advertising executive.  Ritter […]

Ann Miller (1923 - 2004)

Johnnie Lucille Collier was born in Chireno, Texas to Clara Emma (née Birdwell) and John Alfred Collier, a criminal lawyer who represented the Barrow Gang, Machine Gun Kelly, and Baby Face Nelson, among others.  Her maternal grandmother was Cherokee. Miller’s father insisted on the name Johnnie because he had wanted a boy, but she was […]

Milan Bogdan (1941 - 2015)

Milan Bogdan Faaantastic!Life offers few guarantees, and we should be thankful for the ones we get. The sun will always rise in the east, E will likely always equal MC2, and when you ask Milan Bogdan how he’s doing, he will invariably reply, “Faaan-tastic!” like a boisterous drummer tagging a big blues shuffle. With a […]

Thomas Midgley (1889 - 1944)

Midgley began working at General Motors in 1916. In December 1921, while working under the direction of Charles Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of Tetraethyllead to gasoline prevented “knocking” in internal combustion engines. The company named the substance “Ethyl”, avoiding all mention of lead in […]

Max Valier (1895 - 1930)

Valier was born in Bozen (Bolzano) in the County of Tyrol (now South Tyrol) and in 1913 enrolled to study Physics at the University of Innsbruck. He also trained as a machinist at a nearby factory. His studies were interrupted by the First World War, during which he served in the Austro-Hungarian army’s air corps […]

Judith Anderson (1897 - 1992)

Anderson was born Frances Margaret Anderson in 1897 in Adelaide, South Australia to Jessie Margaret (née Saltmarsh; 19 October 1862 – 24 November 1950) and James Anderson Anderson. She attended Norwood High School, and began acting in Australia before moving to New York in 1918. Anderson established herself as a dramatic actress of note, making […]

Ann Rutherford (1917 - 2012)

Rutherford was born in Vancouver, to John Rutherford, a former operatic tenor, and Lucille Mansfield, a silent film actress. While Rutherford was still a baby, the family moved to San Francisco. Soon afterwards, her parents separated and Lucille Mansfield moved to Los Angeles with Ann Rutherford and her sister Judith.  While roller skating home from […]

Kathryn Grayson (1922 - 2010)

She was born Zelma Kathryn Elisabeth Hedrick in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the daughter of Charles E. Hedrick and Lillian Grayson Hedrick (1897–1955). Charles was a building contractor-realtor.  Lillian was of British descent and Charles was of German and Sicilian descent.  The Hedrick family later moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she was discovered singing on […]

Kay Francis (1905 - 1968)

Francis was born Katharine Edwina Gibbs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1905. Her parents, Joseph Sprague Gibbs and his actress wife Katharine Clinton Francis, had been married in 1903; however, by the time their daughter was four, Joseph had left the family. Francis inherited her unusual height from her father, who stood 6′ 4″; she […]

Milton Hershey (1857 - 1945)

Milton S. Hershey was born on September 13, 1857, to Veronica “Fanny” Snavely and Henry Hershey. His family were members of Pennsylvania’s Mennonite community. His ancestors were Swiss and German and had settled in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. He grew up speaking the Pennsylvania Dutch language. Like many rural young people of the time, […]

Lena Baker (1900 - 1945)

Baker was born June 8, 1900, to a poor black family of sharecroppers and raised near Cuthbert, Georgia. Her family moved to the county seat when she was a child. As a youth, she worked for a farmer named J.A. Cox, chopping cotton.  By the 1940s, Baker was the mother of three children and worked […]

Elizabeth Ann Duncan (1904 - 1962)

Elizabeth Ann Duncan was born about 1904. She was described as a drifter, said to have married 20 times and at one time operating a brothel in San Francisco. She had one child, Frank, and made him the center of her life.  At times distressed about her life, Elizabeth Duncan tried to commit suicide. During […]

Teresa Lewis (1969 - 2010)

Teresa Wilson grew up in poverty in Danville, Virginia, where her parents both worked in a textile mill. Teresa sang in a church during her youth. At 16, she dropped out of school and married a man she met at that church. The couple had one daughter, Christie Lynn Bean, but the marriage soon ended […]

Frances Newton (1965 - 2005)

Frances Elaine McLemore Newton (April 12, 1965 – September 14, 2005) was executed by lethal injection in the state of Texas for the April 7, 1987 murder of her husband, Adrian, 23, her son, Alton, 7, and daughter, Farrah, 21 months.  All three victims were shot with a .25 caliber pistol which belonged to a […]

Kimberly McCarthy (1961 - 2013)

McCarthy was born on May 11, 1961, in Greenville, Texas. She worked as an occupational therapist in a nursing home. She was briefly married to the founder of the New Black Panther Party, Aaron Michaels, with whom she had one son. During her adult life, she developed an addiction to crack cocaine. In 1990, she […]

Suzanne Basso (1954 - 2014)

Basso was born on May 15, 1954 to a family from Schenectady, New York. She was one of eight children born to Florence (née Garrow) and John Richard Burns. Florence was the elder sister of spree killer Robert Garrow. Of the three girls in the family, she was the youngest.  She married a Marine named […]

Zach Sobiech (1995 - 2013)

At age 14, Sobiech was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer which mostly strikes children. CBS reported that during his treatment he underwent 10 surgeries and 20 rounds of chemotherapy. He started writing music after his diagnosis.  In May 2012 his doctors informed him that he had up to a year to live. Sobiech recorded […]

Talia Castellano (1999 - 2013)

Talia Joy Castellano was born on August 18, 1999, in Orlando, Florida, and grew up in and around central Florida with her mother, Desiree Castellano, and in New York City with her father, Marc Winthrop. She had three siblings: Kaitlyn, Jackson Winthrop and Mattia Castellano.  When she was 7 years old, Talia Castellano began experiencing […]

Monty Oum (1981 - 2015)

Oum dropped out of high school and began putting together fan videos as early as 2002. In January 2007, he discovered some reverse engineering techniques online that allowed him to extract models from Halo 2 and, utilizing assets from Super Smash Bros. Melee, created the “ultimate showdown” between a SPARTAN (Halo) and Samus Aran (Metroid) […]

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. […]