Hit the Ball Tiger!

On December 30, 1975 in Cypress, California was born a kid that was going to win 74 official PGA Tour events including 14 majors titles in …GOLF! This guy is known as “Tiger” Woods!

This American professional golfer whose achievements to date rank him among the most successful golfers of all time he is the highest-paid athlete in the world according to Forbes for several years.

Woods turned professional in 1996, and by April 1997 he had already won his first major, the 1997 Masters in a record-breaking performance. He first reached the number one position in the world rankings in June 1997. Through the 2000s, Woods was the dominant force in golf.

After some problems in his personal life he lost form, and his ranking gradually fell to a low of No. 58 in November 2011. But “Tiger” was born a golfer! He is coming back and as of November 25, 2012, he is ranked No. 3!

Woods has broken numerous golf records. He has been world number one for the most consecutive weeks and for the greatest total number of weeks of any other golfer

He is the synonym of golf nowadays and we love to see more…

Happy Birthday Tiger!

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You’ll Never Know Barbra…

On December 29, in 1955 a thirteen year old girl sung a beautiful song: You’ll Never Know

She was an American actress and singer that her discography consists of 117 singles, 33 studio albums, and numerous compilations, live albums and soundtracks and she is the second best-selling female recording artist of all time and has sold more than 240 million records worldwide. Barbra Streisand!

“You’ll Never Know” is a popular song with music written by Harry Warren and the lyrics by Mack Gordon. The song is based on a poem written by a young Oklahoma war bride named Dorothy Fern Norris.

The song was first introduced in the 1943 movie Hello, Frisco, Hello where it was sung by Alice Faye. The song won the 1943 Academy Award for Best Original Song, one of nine nominated songs that year. It was also performed by Faye in the 1944 film Four Jills in a Jeep but she never released a record of the ballad. Then follows an outstanding history for this song!

It was recorded in 1943 by, among others, Frank Sinatra and Dick Haymes, (Sinatra’s version spent two weeks at number 2), in Britain, was recorded by Vera Lynn and it was popular during the ongoing Second World War, than Rosemary Clooney recorded the song with Harry James in 1952, and a version was recorded in 1954 by Big Maybelle. Bette Midler performed the song for the Bette Midler Sings the Rosemary Clooney Songbook. Quite a few…

The song was the opening song on Barbra Streisand 4-CD box-set Just for the Record (1991).

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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Tennis match with Chris Evert!

On 21 December, in 1954 a world no. 1 professional tennis player was born: Christine Marie “Chris” Evert

Chris was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to Colette Thompson and Jimmy Evert, and raised in a devout Roman Catholic family. Her father was a professional tennis coach, and tennis was a way of life in his family.

She was a huge tennis star winning 18 singles championships and three doubles titles. Overall Evert won 157 singles championships and 29 doubles titles.

Evert reached 34 Grand Slam singles finals, more than any player, man or woman, in the history of professional tennis. She reached the semifinals or better, in singles, of 52 of the 56 Grand Slams she played, including the semifinals or better of 34 consecutive Grand Slams played from the 1971 U.S. open through the 1983 French Open (Roland Garos). Evert never lost in the first or second round of a Grand Slam singles tournament.

Chris’ affairs and weddings were some of the stories! The romance with the top men’s player Jimmy Connors captured the public’s attention in the 1970s, mostly after they both captured the singles titles at Wimbledon in 1974. They got engaged, when she was 19, but the romance did not last. A wedding was planned for November 8, 1974, but it was called off. In 1979, Evert married the British tennis player John Lloyd and changed her name to “Chris Evert-Lloyd.” The marriage ended in divorce in 1987. Then in 1988, Evert married two-time Olympic downhill skier Andy Mill and they have three sons together. This also ended in a bad divorce on December 4, 2006, with Evert paying Mill a settlement of U.S. $7 million. Recently Evert and Australian golfer Greg Norman were married on June 28, 2008, in the Bahamas. But after 18 months of marriage they announced their divorce.

All the above was “food” for the media. The bottom line is that Chris was one of the biggest and most inspirational woman tennis player of all times. And this is it in our hearts!

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Through paper we travel with Frank Sinatra to New York!

As today, December 12 in 1915 in Hoboken, New Jersey a star was born. The name was …Frank Sinatra!

Sinatra was the only child of Italian immigrants Natalie Della (Garaventa) and Antonino Martino Sinatra.

During the Great Depression, his mother Dolly provided money to her son for outings with friends and expensive clothes. In 1938, Sinatra was arrested for carrying on with a married woman, a criminal offense at the time. For his livelihood, he worked as a delivery boy, and later as a riveter at a shipyard, but music was Sinatra’s main interest, and he listened carefully to big band jazz. He began singing for tips at the age of eight, standing on top of the bar at a local nightclub in Hoboken. Sinatra began singing professionally as a teenager in the 193’0s, while he learned music by ear and never went to a music school to learn how to read music.

In May 1941, Sinatra was at the top of the male singer polls in the Billboard and Down Beat magazines. On December 30, 1942, Sinatra made a “fabulous opening” at the Paramount Theater in New York. Jack Benny said, “I thought the goddamned building was going to cave in. I never heard such a commotion… All this for a fellow I never heard of.” When Sinatra returned to the Paramount in October 1944, 35,000 fans caused a protest parade outside the theater because they were not permitted to get in.

And a great career started that is going to last about five decades!

Sinatra had three children, Nancy, Frank Jr., and Tina, all with his first wife, Nancy Sinatra. He was married three more times, to actresses Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and finally to Barbara Marx.

Sinatra used to love glamorous surroundings and he appreciated to have people always around!  He acknowledged this, telling in an interviewer in the 1950’s: “Being an 18-karat manic-depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.” In her memoirs My Father’s Daughter, his daughter Tina wrote about the “18-karat” remark: “As flippant as Dad could be about his mental state, I believe that a Zoloft a day might have kept his demons away. But that kind of medicine was decades off.”

Apart of his personal life no one can forget his big hits as an actor or as a singer.

Autumn in New York, Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!, April in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Someone to Watch Over Me, Love and Marriage, Stardust, Strangers in the Night, Somethin’ Stupid” (with Nancy Sinatra), My Way, Something, Theme from New York, New York, Teach Me Tonight, Mack the Knife …we could write forever…

This is Frank Sinatra, our Frankie!

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With few wise words Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement

“When baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game, and so, I’ve played my last game.”

With these words Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement on December 11, 1951.

A three-time MVP winner and 13-time All-Star, DiMaggio is the only player to be selected for the All-Star Game in every season he played. During his thirteen years with the Yankees, the club won ten American League pennants and nine World Series championships. He is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak (May 15 – July 16, 1941), a record that as of today still stands. DiMaggio was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.

DiMaggio made his major league debut on May 3, 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. The Yankees had not been to the World Series since 1932, but they won the next four Fall Classics. In 1939, DiMaggio was nicknamed the “Yankee Clipper” by Yankee’s stadium announcer Arch McDonald, when he likened DiMaggio’s speed and range in the outfield to the then-new Pan American airliner.

In January 1937, DiMaggio met actress Dorothy Arnold. They married at San Francisco’s St. Peter and Paul Church on November 19, 1939, as 20,000 well-wishers jammed the streets. Their son, Joseph Paul DiMaggio III, was born at Doctors Hospital on October 23, 1941. In the September 1949 issue of SPORT magazine, Hank Greenberg said that DiMaggio covered so much ground in center field that the only way to get a hit against the Yankees was “to hit ’em where Joe wasn’t.” On February 7, 1949, DiMaggio signed a record contract worth $100,000 and became the first baseball player to break $100,000 in earnings.

Marilyn Monroe? Yes of course! According to her autobiography, Marilyn Monroe originally did not want to meet DiMaggio, fearing that he was a stereotypical arrogant athlete! Their marriage was filled with “violence”. One typical forceful incident occurred immediately after the skirt-blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch, the very known Marilyn’s pose. The couple had a “yelling battle” in the theater lobby. A month later, she filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. That was exactly 274 days after the wedding.

DiMaggio was a heavy smoker for much of his adult life. After a lung cancer operation he returned to his Florida home on January 19, 1999, where he died on March 8.

Joe, “Joltin’ Joe” or “The Yankee Clipper” was an american baseball hero. You can find tones of memorabilia about him. And people love them!

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DuBarry Was a Lady. Porter said…

In December 6, 1939 , a musical, with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, premieres in New York City.

The musical DuBarry Was a Lady opened on Broadway at the 46th Street Theater, transferred to the Royal Theater on October 21, 1940 and closed December 12, 1940, after 408 performances.

In the show starred Bert Lahr, Ethel Merman and the gorgeous Betty Grable with her million dollar legs, and among many beautiful Porter’s songs, “Friendship” was one of the highlights. Because of the huge success the musical was made into a 1943 film, DuBarry Was a Lady, starring Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and Gene Kelly.A great performance from a great musician  and a great cast! Exactly 73 years ago…

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Duke in Cotton Club Premiere!

In 1927, a band started to perform at Harlem’s Cotton Club. With a weekly radio broadcast, famous white clientele nightly poured in to see them. The Band belonged to young Duke Ellington and the first night at Cotton Club was on December 4, 1927!

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, this American composer, pianist, and big-band leader wrote over 1,000 compositions. According to Bob Blumenthal’ s of The Boston Globe opinion, “In the century since his birth, there has been no greater composer, American or otherwise, than Edward Kennedy Ellington.” A major figure in the history of jazz, Ellington’ s music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular, and classical.

In Cotton Club period “Duke Ellington and his Kentucky Club Orchestra” grew to a ten-piece organization; they developed their own sound by displaying the non-traditional expression of Ellington’ s provisions, the street rhythms of Harlem, and the exotic-sounding trombone snarls, high-squealing trumpets, and muggy saxophone blues licks of the band members.

Amazing Duke!

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Maria Callas: La Divina!

Maria Callas, was an American-born in New York City from Greek parents soprano and one of the most famous opera singers of the 20th century.

That day the calendar was on December 2, 1923.

Callas combined an imposing bel canto performance, a wide-ranging voice and great dramatic gifts. She was a tremendously adaptable singer, and she performed a repertoire ranged from classical opera to the bel canto operas! She sung Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini further, to the works of Verdi and Puccini; and, in her early career, to the music dramas of Wagner. Her extraordinary musical and theatrical talents led to her being hailed as La Divina.

She was raised by an overbearing mother; she received her musical education in Greece and established her career in Italy. Forced to deal with the constraints of wartime poverty and with myopia that left her nearly blind onstage, she endured struggles and scandal over the course of her career. She turned herself from a heavy woman into a graceful and glamorous one after a weight loss, which might have contributed to her vocal decline and the premature end of her career.

The press exulted in publicizing Callas’s supposedly temperamental actions, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi and her love affair with Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis. Her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press.

However, her artistic accomplishments were such that Leonard Bernstein called her “The Bible of opera”!

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Mark Twain’s birthday!

November 30, 1835, Mark Twain was born! Happy birthday Mark, wherever you are…

It’s really very hard to say just a few things about the life of this gigantic American writer. So we just write a tiny summary of his exciting life and we propose very few paper suggestions from the millions are in existence!

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain,was an American writer and humorist. He is most noted for his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),the latter frequently called “the Great American Novel.”

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later offer the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion’s newspaper. After working as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion. He was a disappointment at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His lectures were also well received. Twain finally had found his calling.

He accomplished great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit, sarcasm and satire earned admiration from critics and nobles, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

He lacked financial acumen, and though he made a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he misspent it on various ventures, in particular the Paige Compositor, and was forced to declare bankruptcy. With the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers he eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain worked hard to ensure that all of his creditors were paid in full, even though his bankruptcy had relieved him of the legal duty.

Twain was born during a visit by Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it” as well. He died the day following the comet’s subsequent return. He was acclaimed as the “greatest American humorist of his age,” and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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Charles I and Hirohito. What do they have in common?

What happened on November 19, 1928 exactly 412 years ago? Or even 84 years ago?

Charles I was the King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649.

Charles was born in Dunfermline Palace, Fife, on 19 November 1600. Charles was accused of treason against England by using his power to pursue his personal interest rather than the good of England. So, the King was declared guilty at a public session on Saturday 27 January 1649 and sentenced to death. The execution took place at Whitehall on a scaffold in front of the Banqueting House. I’m sure you’re capable enough to find some of the King’s paper items!

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the same exact date – well some centuries later – TIME magazine on 19 November 1928 presented its cover in color for the first time. The subject was another monarch: Japanese Emperor Hirohito.

Hirohito, officially called in Japan Emperor Shōwa, was the 124th Emperor of Japan according to the traditional order, reigning from December 25, 1926 until his death in 1989.

You can find a lot of paper items original or reproductions on these two topics. Well, probably not Charles I manuscripts but you can make it for the TIME magazines!

Many people collect manuscripts, engravings, magazines and postage stamps. It’s really fun to collect!

Some paper ideas from the same date from the past!

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