Curated playlist
American Freemasons
- Mark TwainMark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835, shortly after Halley's Comet swept past the Earth, and he came to believe the two of them were bound together. In 1909 he wrote it plainly. "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is…
- Clark GableClark Gable arrived in Hollywood as an extra in 1924, barely able to afford a meal, and left it more than three decades later as the man the American Film Institute ranked seventh among the greatest male screen legends of classical…
- Donn F. EiseleDonn Eisele spent the 27th of January 1966 recovering from shoulder surgery in a hospital. Exactly one year later, on the 27th of January 1967, three astronauts who had taken his place died in the Apollo 1 spacecraft fire. That pair of…
- Louis B. MayerLouis B. Mayer was the son of a Yiddish-speaking scrap metal dealer from a Ukrainian village, and he died the highest-paid man in the United States for nine consecutive years. Between those two facts lies one of the most improbable stories…
- Gus GrissomGus Grissom was born in Mitchell, Indiana, on the 3rd of April 1926, the son of a railroad signalman and a homemaker. His nickname came from a friend who misread "Griss" upside down on a scorecard. That accidental name would one day be…
- Jack L. WarnerJack Leonard Warner ran Warner Bros. Studios for more than half a century, longer than any other pioneering Hollywood mogul. His career began with a pawned horse and a borrowed chair, and it ended with an estate valued at $15 million and a…
- John WayneMarion Robert Morrison weighed thirteen pounds when he was born at 224 South Second Street in Winterset, Iowa, on the 26th of May 1907. A fireman in Glendale, California, later renamed him for the dog he never went anywhere without, a huge…
- William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film. The budget had ballooned from $7 million to $15 million, and everyone on the lot knew that if the picture failed,…
- Buzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon at 03:15:16 on the 21st of July 1969 (UTC), nineteen minutes after Neil Armstrong first touched the surface. His first words, spoken into the silence of the lunar landscape, were simply: "Beautiful view."…
- Wally SchirraWally Schirra was the only astronaut to fly in all three of America's first crewed space programs: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. That distinction alone would be enough to earn him a place in history. But the full arc of his life reaches…
- Carl LaemmleCarl Laemmle arrived in New York on the 14th of February 1884, seventeen years old, with fifty dollars in his pocket and a ticket stub from the SS Neckar. He had sailed from Bremerhaven two weeks earlier, leaving behind Laupheim, a small…
- Scottie PippenScottie Pippen grew up in Hamburg, Arkansas, the youngest of twelve children, and was not offered a single college scholarship out of high school. He walked on to the University of Central Arkansas, a school competing in the NAIA rather…
- Henry FordHenry Ford once wrote that any customer could have a car painted any color he wanted, so long as it was black. The line has outlived almost everything else about him. The man who said it was born on a farm in Greenfield Township, Michigan,…
- Shaquille O'NealShaquille Rashaun O'Neal was born on the 6th of March, 1972, in Newark, New Jersey, to a mother named Lucille and a biological father, Joe Toney, who would vanish from his life before it had barely begun. Toney was imprisoned for drug…
- Edgar MitchellEdgar Dean Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the Moon, and on his way home, something happened to him that no training could have prepared him for. Floating back toward Earth after Apollo 14, Mitchell experienced what he would later…
- Nathan Bedford ForrestNathan Bedford Forrest enlisted in the Confederate Army on the 14th of June 1861, as a private. He left it as a lieutenant general. No other soldier in the Civil War made that journey without prior military training. The man who would earn…