Jean Stapleton  (Jeanne Murray)
(January 19, 1923 – May 31, 2013)

Television and movie actor William Talman, best known for playing
Los Angeles District Attorney Hamilton Burger in the CBS television
series Perry Mason (Sept. 21, 1957 – May 22, 1966).

Talman is also known for being the first actor in Hollywood to film an
antismoking public service announcement for the American Cancer
Society. A lifelong heavy smoker, he was diagnosed with lung cancer,
and knew he was dying when he filmed the commercial.

The short film began with the words: “Before I die, I want to do what I can
to leave a world free of cancer for my six children. Talman requested that
the commercial not be aired until after his death.

William Talman as seen in a 1957 episode of Perry Mason.

Family Circle, 1962: Colgate’s Soaky Santa bath suds was a popular stocking stuffer.

Dick and Jane are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp
for a series of basal readers written by William S. Gray to teach
children to read. The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray
Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books
through the final version in 1965. These readers were used in
classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking
countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their
popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students
in the United States used them.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens
(November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910)

Samuel Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri,
on November 30, 1835.

Clemens was apprenticed to a printer at age 13 and later worked
for his older brother, who established the Hannibal Journal. In
1857, the Keokuk Daily Post commissioned him to write a series
of comic travel letters, but after writing five he decided to become
a steamboat captain instead. He signed on as a pilot’s apprentice
in 1857 and received his pilot’s license in 1859, when he was 23.

Clemens piloted boats for two years, until the Civil War halted
steamboat traffic. During his time as a pilot, he picked up the
term “Mark Twain,” a boatman’s call noting that the river was
only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation.

When Clemens returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia
City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed
by “Mark Twain” and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly
50 years.