Mark Goddard, best known for playing Major Don West on CBS’
Television series Lost in Space, died Tuesday in Hingham, Mass.,
several days after celebrating his 87th birthday.
He had been hospitalized with pneumonia,” and was transferred
to a rehabilitation center where doctors discovered he was in the
final stages of pulmonary fibrosis for which there is no cure.
TIM MAGUIRE
On May 27, 1995, Reeve broke his neck when he was thrown
from a horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper,
Virginia. The injury paralyzed him from the shoulders down,
and he used a wheelchair and ventilator for the rest of his life.
William Bendix in “Lifeboat” (1944) 20th Century Fox.
This is one of the iconic Hitchcock cameos mostly because of
the logistics of it. After all, this is a film about a group of people
stranded on a lifeboat. How could Hitch finagle himself in? Why
by having himself appear in an ad in a newspaper. Hitchcock
can be seen in the before-and-after photos for Reduco Obesity
Slayer.
At 5:45 PM on September 30, 1955, 24-year-old actor James
Dean was killed in Cholame, California, when the Porsche
he is driving hits a Ford Tudor sedan at an intersection.
The driver of the other car, 23-year-old California Polytechnic
State University student Donald Turnupseed, was dazed but
mostly uninjured; Dean’s passenger, German mechanic Rolf
Wütherich was badly injured but survived.
Only one of Dean’s movies, “East of Eden,” had been released
at the time of his death (“Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant”
opened shortly afterward), but he was already on his way to superstardom—and the crash made him a legend.
James Dean loved racing cars, and in fact he and his brand-
new, $7000 Porsche Spyder convertible were on their way
to a race in Salinas, 90 miles south of San Francisco.
Gene Autry, perhaps the greatest singing cowboy of all time,
was born on September 29, 1907, in Tioga, Texas.
While still a boy, Autry moved with his family to a ranch in
Oklahoma where he learned to play the guitar and sing.
The young Autry was quickly attracted to a new style of music
that was becoming popular at the time, which combined the
traditional cowboy music popular in Texas and Oklahoma and
the folk songs, ballads, and hymns of southern-style country
music. Known as country-western.
