Top 10 May 2 Birthdays
Somewhat Honorable Mention: May 2, 1879: James F. Byrnes. The good: He was briefly a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, before President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that, with World War II raging, he would be more valuable in the State Department. There, he was the Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, and then the Director of the Office of War Mobilization. In this last capacity, he directed the building of the atomic bomb that ended the war. He then served as the 1st postwar Secretary of State.
The bad: As a U.S. Senator before all this, and as Governor of South Carolina after this, he was an ardent segregationist.
Somewhat Honorable Mention: May 2, 1892: Manfred von Richthofen. "The Red Baron" fought for Imperial Germany, an enemy of freedom. But he was the most successful fighter pilot of World War I, shooting down 80 opposing planes, before meeting his own doom in 1918.
10. May 2, 1946: David Suchet. He's English, despite his French-sounding name and his portrayal, in 13 TV mini-series from 1989 to 2013, of Agatha Christie's private detective Hercule Poirot.
9. May 2, 1946: Lesley Gore. In 1963, she began a string of hits with "It's My Party," making her, at the time, the youngest singer ever to hit Number 1.
8. May 2, 1922: A.M. Rosenthal. From 1943 to 1999, Abraham Michael Rosenthal worked for The New York Times, eventually becoming a news columnist and its executive editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1960, and guided the paper through the Vietnam War, Watergate and its publication of The Pentagon Papers.
7. May 2, 1844: Elijah McCoy. He invented a lubrication system for steam engines, which, in the era of massive railroad building, made him perhaps the richest black person on the planet. People wanting to avoid inferior copies of his invention asked for "the real McCoy," leading to that expression entering the American lexicon.
6. May 2, 1972: Dwayne Johnson. He's made so many hit movies that it's easy to forget that he started out as one of the biggest "professional wrestlers" of all time. "Do you smell what The Rock is cooking?"
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1885: Hedda Hopper. The top gossip columnist of "The Golden Age of Hollywood."
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1887: Vernon Castle. He and his wife Irene formed a legendary dance team.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1894: Norma Talmadge. One of the top stars of silent films, she failed to make the move to "talkies."
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1907: Pinky Lee. Host of a kids' TV show in the early 1950s, Paul Rubens has admitted to basing Pee-Wee Herman on him.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1921: Satyajit Ray. One of the most honored directors in Indian film.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1922: Roscoe Lee Browne. He was a distance runner, whose best chance at the Olympics was canceled due to World War II, in which he served in the U.S. Army in Italy. He began acting with Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival Theater, and became perhaps the 1st black actor to be “One of those actors who’s on every show,” also known as, “Oh yeah, uh, him! I don’t know his name, but I like him!” He won an Emmy Award for a guest appearance on The Cosby Show in 1986, and lived until 2007.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1937: Lorenzo Music. You might not know his name or his face, but you may know his voice, and you certainly know his work. He was a writer and performer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. He co-created The Bob Newhart Show and, with his wife Henrietta, wrote its theme song.
He wrote episodes for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spinoff, Rhoda. In the latter, he played the heard-but-never seen Carlton the Doorman. And he was the first voice of the comic-strip cat Garfield.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1952: Christine Baranski. A winner of 2 Tony Awards, she is better known for playing Maryann Thorpe on Cybill, and Diane Lockhart on The Good Wife and its spinoff The Good Fight.
5. May 2, 1887: Eddie Collins. Maybe the greatest 2nd baseman of all time. He was a part of the Philadelphia Athletics' "$100,000 Infield" in the early 1910s, and later helped the Chicago White Sox win 2 Pennants, winning a World Series and losing another. He was not part of the fixing of the 1919 Series: The players who were in on it thought he was too honest not to blow the whistle on them.
He finished his career with a .333 batting average, 3,315 hits, 745 stolen bases, 8 Pennants and 6 World Championships. He was 1 of the 11 living members of the Baseball Hall of Fame who attended its opening.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1932: Maury Allen. One of the great New York sportswriters, he covered the Yankees for the New York Post from 1961 to 1988. He wrote biographies of New York sports legends Dixie Walker, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Casey Stengel, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Joe Namath, Billy Martin, Lou Piniella, Reggie Jackson, Ron Guidry, and, collectively, the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers and the 1969 New York Mets.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1953: Jamaal Wilkes. The forward won 2 National Championships at UCLA, and 4 NBA Championships with the Los Angeles Lakers. He was the 1975 NBA Rookie of the Year, and a 3-time All-Star, and was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1958: David O'Leary. The centreback made 722 appearances for North London soccer team Arsenal, a team record. With them, he won 2 Football League titles and 2 FA Cups, including a Cup in his last game for the team. He also played for the Republic of Ireland in the 1990 World Cup.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1966: Dan Epstein. His writing on rock and roll is excellent, but it was his writing on baseball that caught my attention. He wrote Big Hair and Plastic Grass, about the changes in the sport in the 1970s; and Stars and Strikes, specifically about the 1976 season. His latest is The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson, a collaboration with Munson's New York Yankees teammate Ron Blomberg.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1967: David Rocastle. A midfielder, "Rocky" was a teammate of O'Leary on Arsenal's 1989 and 1991 Football League Champions, making him one of England's earliest black soccer stars. Such was the esteem in which he was held that, when he died of cancer on the morning of a North London Derby in 2001, opposing Tottenham fans, who normally hate Arsenal even more than Red Sox fans hate the Yankees, observed the pregame moment of silence.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1968: Jeff Agoos. The centreback is the only player to win 5 MLS Cups: 1996, '97 and '99 with D.C. United, and 2001 and '03 with the San Jose Earthquakes. He was a 3-time MLS All-Star, helped the U.S. national team win the 2002 CONCACAF Gold Cup, played in the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, and was elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1969: Brian Lara. I don't know what makes a cricket player great, but "The Prince of Port of Spain" is considered one of the greatest batsmen in the sport's history. He holds the record for the highest individual score in first-class cricket, with 501 not out Warwickshire against Durham at Edgbaston in Birmingham, England in 1994. Trinidad's new national stadium is named for him.
Somewhat Honorable Mention: May 2, 1975: David Beckham. He was not the greatest soccer player of his generation, but he was the most famous. Playing for Manchester United, a team known for accepting it when their players cheat (he was, at the least, a beneficiary of a massive amount of cheating by teammates), he was a member of teams that won 6 Premier League titles, 2 FA Cups, and the 1999 UEFA Champions League, marking the only "European Treble" in English soccer history.
It was only natural that Real Madrid, a team also known for being lax with the rules and getting away with it, would make him one of their "Galacticos," big-name signings for whom anything less than winning the Champions League would be considered a failure. But in 4 seasons with the team, he won just 1 La Liga title, and they didn't mind at all when he wanted to go to America.
Like Pelé, Beckham was seen as the man who would finally get Americans to like soccer and, unlike Pelé, keep them liking it after he was gone. He joined MLS' signature team, the Los Angeles Galaxy, and they finally won the MLS Cup in 2011 and '12, at which point he was far from the most important player on the team from a competitive standpoint. In the end, "The Beckham Experiment" was a wash: The growth of MLS over those 5 years had little to do with him.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1985: Sarah Hughes. She won the Gold Medal in women's figure skating for the U.S. at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.
Somewhat Honorable Mention: May 2, 1990: Paul George. A 7-time NBA All-Star, the forward calls himself "Playoff P." He's gotten to the Conference Finals with the 2013 and '14 Indiana Pacers, and the '21 Los Angeles Clippers, but never to the NBA Finals.
4. May 2, 1903: Benjamin Spock. He won a Gold Medal as part of a U.S. rowing team at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and went on to write The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which became one of the biggest-selling books of all time. His tagline for young parents was, "Trust yourself: You know more than you think you do."
He later became an antiwar activist, and finished 5th in popular votes in the 1972 U.S. Presidential election. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry insisted until his death that he had never heard of Dr. Spock when he created the character Mr. Spock.
3. May 2, 1895: Lorenz Hart. With Richard Rodgers, he formed one of the greatest songwriting teams ever. Their songs include "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "Blue Moon," "I Could Write a Book," "Isn't It Romantic?", "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Manhattan," "My Funny Valentine," "My Romance," "Thou Swell," and "Where Or When." Unfortunately, his alcoholism led to the end of his partnership with Hart, and then his death, both at age 48.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1897: John Frederick Coots. With Haven Gillespie, he wrote "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town." With Sam M. Lewis, he wrote "For All We Know." In 1940, to celebrate the Stanley Cup won by his hometown hockey team, he wrote "The Rangers Victory Song."
Sometimes listed as "J. Fred Coots," that name inspired the name of the Today Show chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1924: Theodore Bikel. An actor and folksinger, in 1959, he co-founded the Newport Folk Festival. In 1962, he witnessed Bob Dylan's 1st-ever performance of "Blowin' in the Wind" in a club on Macdougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village. With his own show about to begin in a club across the street, he then became the 2nd person to sing it live.
In 1964, he played the Hungarian speech professor Zoltan Karpathy in the film version of My Fair Lady. He played Tevye the Dairyman onstage, even before the man's story was turned into the musical Fiddler On the Roof; and, having done that show on Broadway, he played the role more than any other actor has. In 1990, he appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation as Sergey Rozhenko, adoptive father of Worf.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1929: Link Wray. The guitarist's 1958 instrumental "Rumble" was a big hit, and is often credited as being a progenitor of both heavy metal and punk rock.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1936: Engelbert Humperdinck. Why Arnold George Dorsey chose to take the very silly-sounding name of a 19th Century German composer as his stage name, I may never know. But he was a big pop singer in the 1960s, and has been a Las Vegas headliner ever since.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1948: Larry Gatlin. A wide receiver at the University of Houston, he and his brothers Steve and Rudy, as Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers, have been country music superstars for nearly half a century.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1950: Lou Gramm. The lead singer of many Republicans' least-favorite rock band, Foreigner.
Honorable Mention: May 2, 1985: Lily Allen. One of the top British singers of the 21st Century.
2. May 2, 1860: Theodor Herzl. A journalist and playwright, he formed the Zionist Organization in 1897, promoting Jewish immigration to what was then British-controlled Palestine, in an effort to form a Jewish state. Although it was not achieved until well after his death, the State of Israel considers him "The Spiritual Father of the Jewish State."
1. May 2, 1729: Empress Catherine II of Russia. Born as Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a German Princess, and died as Catherine the Great, she achieved more in her 34 years on the throne than most monarchs ever do in their reigns. Every so often, Russia falls into being a backward country, and needs a major modernization, and she led one.
She also won victories over Prussia, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire, and extended her empire from Finland to Alaska. (What would Sarah Palin have said if she saw that from her house?) The stories of her private life were exaggerated by her enemies, but she did fool around a lot. And she was naked at the time of her death, but it was from a rather mundane cause, a stroke while taking a bath.
Two things made me hesitate in putting her at Number 1. Like her Prussian contemporary, Frederick the Great, she was part of the partitions and dissolution of the Polish state of that time. And, also like Frederick, she had an anti-Semitic streak. But she didn't target people specifically for being Jewish, like some other European dictators have done.
Still alive as of this writing: Suchet, Johnson, Baranski, Wilkes, O'Leary, Agoos, Lara, Beckham, Hughes, George, Humperdinck, Gatlin, Gramm, Allen.
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