Henry Silva (September 15, 1926 – September 14, 2022)
    
    
    
 

Henry Silva, the rugged New York actor who portrayed heavies
and heroes of various ethnicities in a career highlighted by
turns in A Hatful of Rain, The Manchurian Candidate and
Johnny Cool, has died.

Silva died Wednesday of natural causes at the Motion Picture
& Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills.

Silva also played the Draconian commander “Killer” Kane in
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).
(The Hollywood Reporter)

On September 16, 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth,
England, bound for the Americas with 102 passengers. The
ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists—half
religious dissenters and half entrepreneurs—had been
authorized to settle by the British crown. However, stormy
weather and navigational errors forced the Mayflower off
course, and on November 21 the “Pilgrims” reached
Massachusetts, where they founded the first permanent
European settlement in New England in late December.

Thirty-five of the Pilgrims were members of the radical
English Separatist Church, who traveled to America to
escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England, which
they found corrupt.

TIM MAGUIRE

Oliver Stone in Vietnam.

William Oliver Stone is a film director, producer, and screenwriter. He won an Academy Award for Best
Adapted Screenplay as writer of Midnight Express
(1978), and wrote the gangster film remake Scarface
(1983). Stone achieved prominence as writer and          
director  of the war drama Platoon (1986), which
won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best
Picture. Platoon was the first in a trilogy of films  
based on the Vietnam War, in which Stone served
as an infantry soldier. He continued the series with
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—for which Stone
won his second Best Director Oscar. Stone is 76
years old today. 

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (1902 – 1968)

Writer John Steinbeck was presented the U.S. Medal of Freedom
on September 14, 1964. Steinbeck had already received numerous
other honors and awards for his writing, including the 1962 Nobel
Prize and a 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck, a native Californian, studied writing intermittently at
Stanford between 1920 and 1925 but never graduated. He moved
to New York and worked as a manual laborer and journalist while
writing his first two novels, which were not successful. He married
in 1930 and moved back to California with his wife. His father, a government official in Salinas County, gave the couple a house to
live in while Steinbeck continued writing.

His first novel, Tortilla Flat, about the comic antics of several
rootless drifters who share a house in California, was published
in 1935. The novel became a financial success.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United
States. The lyrics came from the "Defence of Fort M’Henry", a
poem written on September 14, 1814, by 35-year-old lawyer and
amateur poet Francis Scott Key after witnessing the bombardment
of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in Outer
Baltimore Harbor in the Patapsco River during the Battle of
Baltimore in the War of 1812 (below). Key was inspired by the large
U.S. flag, with 15 stars and 15 stripes, known as the Star-Spangled
Banner, flying triumphantly above the fort during the U.S. victory.        

The poem was set to the tune of a popular British song written by
John Stafford Smith.

Francis Scott Key   (1779 – 1843)

He became a successful lawyer in Maryland and
Washington, D.C., and was later appointed U.S.
attorney for the District of Columbia.