ROSS SIMPSON
   

Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married on this day in
1954. The marriage only lasted nine months.

  
Ernie’s 1962 Chevrolet Corvair.

On January 13, 1962, Ernie Kovacs, a comedian who hosted his own
television shows during the 1950s and is said to have influenced such
TV hosts as Johnny Carson and David Letterman, died at the age of 42
after crashing his Chevrolet Corvair into a telephone pole in Los Angeles, California, while driving in a rainstorm. Kovacs, who often appeared on
camera with his trademark cigar, was found by police with an unlit cigar,
leading to speculation that he had been reaching for the cigar and lost
control of his vehicle. The Corvair was later made infamous by Ralph
Nader’s groundbreaking 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-
In Dangers of the American Automobile,” about unsafe practices in the
auto industry.

Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962)

   
Kovacs as Poet Laureate Percy Dovetonsils.

Lawrence Douglas Wilder will be 89 on January 17.           

Douglas Wilder, the first African American to be elected
governor of an American state, took office as Governor
of Virginia on January 13, 1990.He broke a number of
color barriers in Virginia politics and remains an enduring
and controversial figure in the state’s political scene.

Born in 1931 in Church Hill, a poor and segregated
neighborhood of Richmond, Wilder is the grandson of
slaves and is named for Frederick Douglass. He grew
up in the Jim Crow era, graduating from Richmond’s
Virginia Union University in 1951. Wilder fought in the
Korean War, earning the Bronze Star, before studying
law at Howard University and returning to Richmond to
practice.

Wilder entered politics by way of a special election to the
State Senate in 1969, becoming the state’s first African
American state senator since Reconstruction.

Kirstie Louise Alley

1993

A real Whistleblower!