Today is the 118th birthday of the man that once said: “I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.” He was an actor, a writer, a composer, and a sharp wit. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Noel Coward
OCCUPATION: Playwright
BIRTH DATE: December 16, 1899
DEATH DATE: March 26, 1973
EDUCATION: Chapel Royal Choir School
PLACE OF BIRTH: Teddington, Middlesex, England
PLACE OF DEATH: Blue Harbour, Port Maria, Jamaica
FULL NAME: Sir Noël Peirce Coward

BEST KNOWN FOR: British actor, songwriter and playwright Noël Coward was one of the top figures of 20th century theater, using wit to deal with major social issues.

Coward appeared professionally as an actor from the age of 12. Between acting engagements he wrote such light comedies as I’ll Leave It to You (1920) and The Young Idea (1923), but his reputation as a playwright was not established until the serious play The Vortex (1924), which was highly successful in London. In 1925 the first of his durable comedies, Hay Fever, opened in London. Coward ended the decade with his most popular musical play, Bitter Sweet (1929).

Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.

Another of his classic comedies, Private Lives (1930), is often revived. It shares with Design for Living (1933) a worldly milieu and characters unable to live with or without one another. His patriotic pageant of British history, Cavalcade (1931), traced an English family from the time of the South African (Boer) War through the end of World War I. Other successes included Tonight at Eight-thirty (1936), a group of one-act plays performed by Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, with whom he often played. He rewrote one of the short plays, Still Life, as the film Brief Encounter (1946). Present Laughter (1939) and Blithe Spirit (1941; filmed 1945; musical version, High Spirits, 1964) are usually listed among his better comedies.

It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

In his plays Coward caught the clipped speech and brittle disillusion of the generation that emerged from World War I. His songs and revue sketches also struck the world-weary note of his times. Coward had another style, sentimental but theatrically effective, that he used for romantic, backward-glancing musicals and for plays constructed around patriotism or some other presumably serious theme. He performed almost every function in the theatre—including producing, directing, dancing, and singing in a quavering but superbly timed and articulate baritone—and acted in, wrote, and directed motion pictures as well.

Coward’s Collected Short Stories appeared in 1962, followed by a further selection, Bon Voyage, in 1967. Pomp and Circumstance (1960) is a light novel, and Not Yet the Dodo (1967) is a collection of verse. His autobiography through 1931 appeared as Present Indicative (1937) and was extended through his wartime years in Future Indefinite (1954); a third volume, Past Conditional, was incomplete at his death. Among his more notable songs are “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “I’ll See You Again,” “Some Day I’ll Find You,” “Poor Little Rich Girl,” “Mad About the Boy,” and “Marvellous Party.”

Coward was knighted in 1970. He spent his last years chiefly in the Caribbean and Switzerland. One of his previously unpublished plays, The Better Half, last performed in 1922 and thought to have been lost, was rediscovered in 2007. That same year a collection of his letters was published as The Letters of Noël Coward.

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Today is the 111th birthday of the photographer Andreas Feininger.  His photography of New York City makes the viewer fall in love with the buildings and machines of it.  The viewer can hear the city in the photos.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Andreas Feininger
OCCUPATION: Photographer, Architect, Journalist
BIRTH DATE: December 27, 1906
DEATH DATE: February 18, 1999
EDUCATION: Bauhaus, Bauschule
PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France
PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York
FULL NAME: Andreas Bernhard Lyonel Feininger

BEST KNOWN FOR: Andreas Feininger was the son of Lyonel Feininger and a prolific magazine photographer and writer on photography.

Feininger was born in Paris, France, to Julia Berg and Lyonel Feininger, an American of German origin. A painter, his father was born in New York City, in 1871. His great-grandfather emigrated from Durlach, Baden, in Germany, to the United States in 1848. His younger brother was the painter T. Lux Feininger (1910–2011), who began his professional career as a photographer.

Feininger grew up and was educated as an architect in Germany, where his father painted and taught, at Staatliches Bauhaus. In 1936, he gave up architecture and moved to Sweden, where he focused on photography. In advance of World War II, in 1939, Feininger immigrated to the U.S. where he established himself as a freelance photographer. In 1943 he joined the staff of Life magazine, an association that lasted until 1962.

Feininger became famous for his photographs of New York. Other frequent subjects among his works were science and nature, as seen in bones, shells, plants, and minerals in the images of which he often stressed their structure. Rarely did he photograph people or make portraits.

Feininger wrote comprehensive manuals about photography, of which the best known is The Complete Photographer. In the introduction to one of Feininger’s books of photographs, Ralph Hattersley, the editor of the photography journal Infinity, described him as “one of the great architects who helped create photography as we know it today.” In 1966, the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) awarded Feininger its highest distinction, the Robert Leavitt Award. In 1991, the International Center of Photography awarded Feininger the Infinity Lifetime Achievement Award.

Today, Feininger’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, London‘s Victoria and Albert Museum, and the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

Source: Andreas Feininger – Wikipedia

Source: Andreas Feininger | Biography | GALLERY M

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Today is the 113th birthday of the fashion designer Christian Dior.  The artistry he created, the way he was able to manipulate fabric, to form it around a woman’s frame, is pure genius. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Christian Dior
OCCUPATION: Fashion Designer
BIRTH DATE: January 21, 1905
DEATH DATE: c. October 23, 1957
EDUCATION: École des Sciences Politiques
PLACE OF BIRTH: Granville, France
PLACE OF DEATH: Montecatini, Italy
REMAINS: Buried, Cimetière de Callian, Var, France

BEST KNOWN FOR: Christian Dior was a French fashion designer whose post–World War II creations were wildly popular, and whose legacy continues to influence the fashion industry.

Christian Dior was born on January 21, 1905, in Granville, a seaside town in the north of France. He was the second of five children born to Alexandre Louis Maurice Dior, the owner of a highly successful fertilizer manufacturer, and his wife, Isabelle. When he was a boy, Dior’s family moved to Paris, where he would spend his youth. Although Dior was passionate about art and expressed an interest in becoming an architect, he submitted to pressure from his father and, in 1925, enrolled at the École des Sciences Politiques to begin his studies in political science, with the understanding that he would eventually find work as a diplomat.

After his graduation in 1928, however, Dior opened a small art gallery with money he received from his father, who had agreed to lend his son his financial support on the condition that the family name would not appear above the gallery door. In the few years it was open, Dior’s gallery handled the works of such notable artists as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Max Jacob. He was forced to close the gallery in 1931, a year that included the deaths of both his older brother and mother and the financial collapse of his father’s business.

Following the closing of his gallery, Dior began to make ends meet by selling his fashion sketches, and in 1935, landed a job illustrating the magazine Figaro Illustré. Several years later, Dior was hired as a design assistant by Paris couturier Robert Piguet. However, when World War II began the following year, Dior served in the south of France as an officer in the French army.

Following France’s surrender to Germany in 1940, Dior returned to Paris, where he was soon hired by couturier Lucien Lelong. Throughout the remaining years of the war, Lelong’s design house would consistently dress the women of both Nazis and French collaborators. During this same time, Dior’s younger sister, Catherine, was working for the French Resistance. (She was captured and sent to a concentration camp, but survived; she was eventually released in 1945.)

In 1957, several months after appearing on the cover of Time magazine, Christian Dior traveled to Italy to vacation in the town of Montecatini. While there, on October 23, 1957, he suffered what was his third heart attack and died, at the age of 52.

Marcel Boussac sent his private plane to Montecatini to bring Dior’s body back to Paris, and Dior’s funeral was attended by an estimated 2,500 people, including all of his staff and many of his most famous clients. He was buried in Cimetière de Callian, in Var, France. At the time of his death, Dior’s house was earning more than $20 million annually.

Source: Christian Dior

Source: Christian Dior – Wikipedia

Source: Christian Dior – Fashion Designer – Biography.com

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Today is the 58th birthday of a girl that will always be only 20 years old: Dorothy Stratten. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

NAME: Dorothy Stratten
OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Model
BIRTH DATE: February 26, 1960
DEATH DATE: August 14, 1980
PLACE OF BIRTH: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
PLACE OF DEATH: West Los Angeles, California
CAUSE OF DEATH: Gunshot
REMAINS: Buried, Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, CA
ORIGINALLY: Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten
AKA: Dorothy Hoogstraten
HEIGHT: 5′ 9″

BEST KNOWN FOR: Dorothy Stratten was a Playboy model and actress before she was murdered at the age of 20.

Dorothy Stratten was born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten on February 26, 1960, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. After high school, Stratten began dating Paul Snider, a small-time promoter who encouraged her to take a few nude photos to enter Playboy’s 25th Anniversary Playmate search in 1978. Though she lost the Anniversary contest, Stratten did become a playmate for the magazine’s August 1979 issue. Stratten and Snider were soon married, and her career grew to include film offers and the coveted title of Playmate of the Year in 1980.

After being cast in Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed, Stratten and the director began having an affair. As her fame grew, Snider became increasingly jealous and resentful. Shortly after Stratten and Snider separated, on August 14, 1980, she visited Snider at his home in West Los Angeles, California. There, Snider shot her to death before turning the gun on himself.

Stratten’s murder was depicted in two films. In 1981’s Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, Jamie Lee Curtis portrayed Stratten and Bruce Weitz played Paul Snider. Bob Fosse‘s 1983 feature film, Star 80, starred Mariel Hemingway as Stratten and Eric Roberts as Snider.

In 1983 film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “Miss Stratten possessed a charming screen presence and might possibly have become a first-rate comedienne with time and work.”

Singer Bryan Adams’s 1983 single “The Best Was Yet To Come” was dedicated to Dorothy Stratten.

In 1984, Peter Bogdanovich’s book about Stratten was published, titled The Killing of the Unicorn. Four years later, at age 49, Bogdanovich married Stratten’s sister, Louise, who was 20. Bogdanovich had paid for Louise’s private schooling and modeling classes following Stratten’s death. They divorced in 2001 after being married for 13 years.

British band Bush dedicated the song “Dead Meat” on their album The Science of Things to Stratten.

FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
They All Laughed (14-Aug-1981)
Galaxina (6-Jun-1980)
Skatetown, USA (Oct-1979)

Source: Dorothy Stratten

Source: Dorothy Stratten – Wikipedia

Source: Dorothy Stratten – Model, Actress, Film Actor/Film Actress, Film Actress – Biography.com

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Today is the 117th birthday of the artist William H. Johnson. His primitive style of painting African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance has become the visual record of the jazz and poetry that was created in that period. His works are complexly simple and effortlessly convey entire stories. The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: William H. Johnson
OCCUPATION: Painter
BIRTH DATE: March 18, 1901
DEATH DATE: April 13, 1970
EDUCATION: National Academy of Design
PLACE OF BIRTH: Florence, South Carolina
PLACE OF DEATH: Central Islip, Long Island, New York

BEST KNOWN FOR: William H. Johnson was an artist who made use of as primitive style of painting to depict the experience of African-Americans during the 1930s and ’40s.

Artist William Henry Johnson was born on March 18, 1901, in the small town of Florence, South Carolina, to parents Henry Johnson and Alice Smoot, who were both laborers. Johnson realized his dreams of becoming an artist at a young age, copying cartoons from the paper as a child. However, as the oldest of the family’s five children, who lived in a poor, segregated town in the South, Johnson tucked away his aspirations of becoming an artist, deeming them unrealistic.

But Johnson finally left South Carolina in 1918, at the age of 17, to pursue his dreams in New York City. There, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design and met Charles Webster Hawthorne, a well-known artist who took Johnson under his wing. While Hawthorne recognized Johnson’s talent, he knew that Johnson would have a difficult time excelling as an African-American artist in the United States, and thus raised enough money to send the young artist to Paris, France, upon his graduation in 1926.

After arriving in Paris, William H. Johnson was exposed to a greater variety of art and culture. Renting a studio on the French Riviera, Johnson met other artists who influenced his style of artwork, including German expressionist sculptor Christoph Voll. Through Voll, Johnson met textile artist Holcha Krake, whom he would eventually marry.

After several years in Paris, in 1930, Johnson ventured back to the United States with a newfound desire to establish himself in the art scene of his home country. While his unique form of artwork was appreciated when he returned to the United States, he was shocked by prejudice that he encountered in his hometown. There, he was arrested for painting on a local building that had become a brothel. Not long after the incident, a frustrated Johnson left South Carolina for Europe once again.

In late 1930, Johnson moved to Denmark and married Krake. When the two weren’t traveling to foreign areas such as North Africa, Scandinavia, Tunisia and other parts of Europe for artistic inspiration, they stayed in their quiet neighborhood of Kerteminde, Denmark. The peace didn’t last long, however; the increasing threat of World War II and growing Nazism led the interracial couple to move to New York in 1938.

Though they had moved to avoid any conflict with the Nazis, William and Holcha still faced racism and discrimination as an interracial couple living in the United States. The artistic community of Harlem, New York, which had become more enlightened and experimental following the Harlem Renaissance, embraced the couple, however.

Around this time, Johnson took a job as an art teacher at the Harlem Community Art Center, also continuing to create art in his spare time. Transitioning from expressionism to a primitive style of artwork, or primitivism, Johnson’s work during this time displayed brighter colors and two-dimensional objects, and often included portrayals of African-American life in Harlem, the South and the military. Some of these works, including paintings depicting black soldiers fighting on the front lines as well as the segregation that took place there, served as commentaries on the treatment of African Americans in the U.S. Army during World War II.

While his paintings of African Americans in the United States began to gain attention after they were showcased in exhibitions during the early 1940s, the break of the new decade marked the beginning of a downward spiral for the artist. In 1941, a solo exhibition was held for Johnson at Alma Reed Galleries. The following year, a fire destroyed Johnson’s studio, leaving his artwork and supplies reduced to ashes. Two years later, in 1944, Johnson’s beloved wife of 14 years, Krake, died of breast cancer.

Following Krake’s death, the already unhinged artist became mentally and physically unstable. Though his mind was begging to slip, Johnson still created artwork that would go on to be appreciated for years, including his “Fighters for Freedom” series, featuring paintings of famous American leaders such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Johnson went from one location to the next in an attempt to find comfort and stability after losing his wife, first traveling to his hometown of Florence, South Carolina, then to Harlem, and finally to Denmark in 1946. The following year, however, Johnson was hospitalized in Norway due to his growing mental illness, caused by syphilis. He was transferred to the Central Islip State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Central Islip, Long Island, New York, where he would spend the next 23 years of his life, away from the attention that he’d garnered for his artwork. He died there in 1970, during his extended stay at the hospital.

Source: William H. Johnson – Painter – Biography.com

Source: William Johnson (artist) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: William H. Johnson | Smithsonian American Art Museum

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Today is the 101st birthday of the architect I.M. Pei.  I first witnessed his work in person with the I. Magnin on Pine, the store is long gone and windows have been chopped into the previously clean and sleek white stone facade, but you can still see a hint of his vision.  You just have to know where to look.  I have gone on to appreciate and become a fan of his work.  Adding beauty to utilitarian things is a service to the world. His longevity is admirable.  The world is a better place because he is in it.

NAME: I. M. Pei
DATE OF BIRTH: April 26, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH: Guangzhou, China
SPOUSE: Eileen Loo (m. 1942)
CHILDREN: Li Chung Pei, Chien Chung Pei, Liane Pei, T’ing Chung
AWARDS: Pritzker Architecture Prize, More
EDUCATION: Harvard Graduate School of Design (1942–1946)

BEST KNOWN FOR: Ieoh Ming Pei, commonly known as I. M. Pei, is a Chinese American architect often called the master of modern architecture. Born in Guangzhou and raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the gardens at Suzhou.

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in China in 1917, the son of a prominent banker. At age 17 he came to the United States to study architecture, and received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from MIT in 1940. Upon graduation he was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, the MIT Traveling Fellowship, and the AIA Gold Medal. In 1942, Pei enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he studied under Walter Gropius; six months later, he volunteered his services to the National Defense Research Committee in Princeton. Pei returned to Harvard in 1944 and completed his M.Arch in 1946, simultaneously teaching on the faculty as an assistant professor (1945–48). Awarded the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship by Harvard in 1951, he traveled extensively in England, France, Italy and Greece. I. M. Pei became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1954.

In 1948, William Zeckendorf invited Mr. Pei to accept the newly created post of Director of Architecture at Webb & Knapp, a real estate development corporation, resulting in many large-scale architectural and planning projects across the country. In 1955 he formed the partnership of I. M. Pei & Associates, which became I. M. Pei & Partners in 1966, and Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in 1989. The partnership received the 1968 Architectural Firm Award of the American Institute of Architects.

Mr. Pei’s personal architectural style blossomed with his design for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (1961–67). He subsequently gained broad national attention with the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington (1968–78) and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston (1965-79) — two of some thirty institutional projects executed by Mr. Pei. Others include churches, hospitals, and municipal buildings, as well as schools, libraries, and over a dozen museums. His most recent works include the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Grand Louvre in Paris, the Miho Museum in Shiga, Japan, the Schauhaus at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, and the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg. Among Mr. Pei’s skyscraper designs are the 72-story Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong and the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He has completed two projects in his native China: the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing (1982) and the Suzhou Museum in Suzhou (2006), each designed to graft advanced technology onto the roots of indigenous building and thereby sow the seed of a new, distinctly Chinese form of modern architecture.

Mr. Pei’s deep interest in the arts and education is evidenced by his numerous memberships on Visiting Committees at Harvard and MIT, as well as on several governmental panels. He has also served on the AIA Task Force on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. A member of the AIA National Urban Policy Task Force and of the Urban Design Council of the City of New York, he was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, and to the National Council on the Arts by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. In 1983, Mr. Pei was chosen the Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize: he used the $100,000 award to establish a scholarship fund for Chinese students to study architecture in the United States (with the strict proviso that they return to China to practice their profession). Among the many academic awards bestowed on Mr. Pei are honorary doctorates from Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, New York University, Brown University, the University of Colorado, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the American University of Paris. Most recently he was awarded the Laura Honoris Causa by the University of Rome, in 2004.

Mr. Pei is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a Corporate Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Design, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1975 he was elected to the American Academy itself, which is restricted to a lifetime membership of fifty. Three years later he became Chancellor of the Academy, the first architect to hold that position, and served until 1980. Mr. Pei was inducted a “Membre de l’Institut de France” in 1984, and decorated by the French government as a Commandeur in the “Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” in 1985. On July 4, 1986, he was one of twelve naturalized American citizens to receive the Medal of Liberty from President Ronald Reagan. Two years later French president François Mitterrand inducted I. M. Pei as a Chevalier in the Légion d’Honneur, and in November 1993 he was raised to Officier. Also in 1993 he was elected an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 1997 the Académie d’Architecture de France elected him Foreign Member.

Among Mr. Pei’s many professional honors are The Arnold Brunner Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1963); The Medal of Honor of the New York Chapter of The American Institute of Architects (1963); The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Medal “for distinguished contribution to the field of architecture” (1976); The Gold Medal for Architecture of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1979); The Mayor’s Award of Honor for Art and Culture (New York City, 1981); and The Gold Medal of Alpha Rho Chi, the national professional fraternity of architects (1981). In 1979, I. M. Pei received The AIA Gold Medal—the highest architectural honor in the United States. Three years later he received the Grande Médaille d’Or from the Académie d’Architecture de France. In 1989, the Japan Art Association awarded him the Praemium Imperiale for lifetime achievement in architecture, and in the following year UCLA bestowed the University’s Gold Medal. In 1991, Mr. Pei received the Excellence 2000 Award and the Colbert Foundation’s First Award for Excellence. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush (1993); the Medal of Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts (1994); the Jerusalem Prize for Arts & Letters by The Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design of Jerusalem (1994); and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Medal by the Municipal Art Society of New York City (1996). Of the many honors extended, Mr. Pei has accepted the Independent Award of Brown University (1997), the Edward MacDowell Medal of the MacDowell Colony (1998), and the American Philosophical Society’s Thomas Jefferson Medal for distinguished achievement in the arts (2001). Most recently he was awarded the Henry C. Turner Prize for Innovation in Construction Technology awarded by the National Building Museum (2003); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (2003); and the Erwin Wickert Foundation Orient und Okzident Preis (2006).

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Today is the 102nd birthday of Dick Proenneke.  Who doesn’t love a recluse?  Especially one that is not writing a manifesto and sending letter bombs, but is simply building a log cabin in the Alaska wilderness and talking to himself.  A lot.  I will watch this series on PBS whenever it is on, it is my “Law and Order,” so to speak.  The take away from Dick’s story is that he did all this after he retired, so it is never too late to follow your dreams.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Dick Proenneke
DATE OF BIRTH: May 4, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH: Primrose, Harrison Township, Lee County, Iowa
DATE OF DEATH: April 20, 2003
PLACE OF DEATH: Hemet, Riverside County, California, USA
RESIDENCE: Twin Lakes, Alaska
OCCUPATION: naturalist, carpenter, mechanic
AWARDS: 1999 National Outdoor Book Award

BEST KNOWN FOR: Richard Louis “Dick” Proenneke was an American naturalist, who lived alone in the high mountains of Alaska at a place called Twin Lakes. Living in a log cabin he constructed by hand, Proenneke made valuable recordings of both meteorological and natural data.

Proenneke’s father, William Christian Proenneke, served in World War I and later made his living as a well driller. His mother, Laura was a homemaker. His parents married in late 1909, or early 1910, and had three daughters and three sons: Robert, Helen, Lorene, Richard (Dick), Florence, and Raymond (Jake). The year of Richard’s birth is often given as 1917, but social security and census records have him born in Primrose, Harrison Township, Lee County, Iowa, on May 4, 1916.

Proenneke enlisted in the United States Navy the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor and served as a carpenter. He spent close to two years at Pearl Harbor and was later stationed in San Francisco waiting to join a new ship assignment. After hiking a mountain near San Francisco he contracted rheumatic fever and was hospitalized at Norco Naval Hospital for six months. During his convalescence the war ended and he was given a medical discharge from the Navy in 1945. According to friend and writer Sam Keith, the illness was very revealing for Proenneke, who decided to devote the rest of his life to the strength and health of his body.

Following his discharge from the Navy, Proenneke went to school to become a diesel mechanic. The combination of his high intelligence, adaptability, and strong work ethic turned him into a very skilled mechanic. Though quite adept at his trade, Proenneke yielded to his love of nature and moved to Oregon to work at a sheep ranch. He moved to Shuyak Island, Alaska, in 1950.

For several years, he worked as a heavy equipment operator and repairman on the Naval Air Station at Kodiak. Proenneke spent the next several years working throughout Alaska as both a salmon fisherman and diesel mechanic. He worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service at King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula. His skills as a mechanic were well-known and extremely sought after, and he was able to put away a modest nest egg for retirement.

On May 21, 1968, Proenneke arrived at his new place of retirement at Twin Lakes. Beforehand, he made arrangements to use a cabin on the upper lake of Twin Lakes owned by retired Navy captain Spike Carrithers and his wife Hope of Kodiak (in whose care he had left his camper). This cabin was well situated on the lake and close to the site which Proenneke chose for the construction of his own cabin.

Proenneke’s cabin is hand-made and is notable for its remarkable craftsmanship due to his skill as a carpenter and wood worker, and because of the films he made of the complete construction procedure. Most of the structure and the furnishings are made from materials in and about the site, from the gravel taken from the lake bed to create the cabin’s base, to the trees he selected, cut down, and then hand-cut with interlocking joints to create the walls and roof rafter framing. The window openings were planned and cut to suit. The fireplace and flue were made from stones he dug from around the site and meticulously mortared in place to create the chimney and hearth. He used metal containers for food storage—one-gallon cans were cut into basin shapes and buried below the frost line. This ensured that fruits and perishables could be stored for prolonged periods in the cool earth yet still be accessible when the winter months froze the ground above them. Proenneke’s friend, bush pilot and missionary Leon Reid “Babe” Alsworth, returned periodically to bring food and orders that Proenneke placed through him to Sears.

Proenneke remained at Twin Lakes for the next sixteen months when he left to go home for a time to visit relatives and secure more supplies. He returned to the lakes in the following spring and remained there for most of the next thirty years, going to the contiguous United States only occasionally to be with his family. He made a film record of his solitary life which was later recut and made into the documentary Alone in the Wilderness. It has aired on PBS numerous times. With a score of 9 out of 10 from the aggregation of nearly 2000 votes at the Internet Movie Database, the documentary is one of the highest rated of all time. In 2011 a sequel was produced after it was discovered that Proenneke had shot enough footage for at least two more programs. Alone in the Wilderness: Part 2 premiered on December 2, 2011. A premiere date for Part 3 has yet to be announced.

In 2007 Proenneke’s cabin was included in the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1999, at age 82, Proenneke returned to civilization and lived the remainder of his life with his brother Raymond “Jake” Proenneke in Hemet, California. He died of a stroke on April 20, 2003, at the age of 86. He left his cabin to the National Park Service, and it remains a popular visitor attraction in the still-remote Twin Lakes region of Lake Clark National Park.

Sam Keith, who got to know Proenneke at the Kodiak Naval Station and went on numerous hunting and fishing trips with him, suggested that Proenneke’s journals might be the basis for a good book. Proenneke agreed to whatever changes Keith wanted to make. In 1973, Keith published the book One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey, based on Proenneke’s journals and photography. After years in print it was re-issued in a new format in 1999, winning that year’s National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA). A hardcover “commemorative edition”, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the publication of One Man’s Wilderness, was published by Alaska Northwest Books in 2013. In 2003, some of the copyrighted text from the book and some of Proenneke’s film were used with permission in the documentary Alone in the Wilderness, which began appearing on U.S. Public Television. It follows Proenneke’s life as he builds a cabin from the surrounding natural resources and includes his film footage and narration of wildlife, weather, and the natural scenery while he goes about his daily routine over the course of the winter months.

In 2005, the National Park Service and the Alaska Natural History Association published More Readings From One Man’s Wilderness, another volume of Proenneke’s journal entries. The book, edited by John Branson, a longtime Lake Clark National Park employee and friend of Proenneke, covers the years when the park was established. Dick had a very close relationship with the Park Service, assisting them in filming sensitive areas and notifying them if poachers were in the area.

Source: Proenneke’s Cabin – Lake Clark National Park & Preserve (U.S. National Park Service)

Source: Richard Proenneke – Wikipedia

Source: Alone in the Wilderness, the story of Dick Proenneke, by Bob Swerer Productions

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Today is the 126th of the author and Nobel Prize Winner Pearl S. Buck.  Her stories stand the test of time and help define an era.  Her life story alone is enough to become fascinated by her and want to know more.  Do yourself a favor and read some of her work this summer.  The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss because she has left.

NAME: Pearl S. Buck
OCCUPATION: Civil Rights Activist, Women’s Rights Activist, Author
BIRTH DATE: June 26, 1892
DEATH DATE: March 06, 1973
PLACE OF BIRTH: Hillsboro, West Virginia
PLACE OF DEATH: Danby, Vermont
AKA: Sai Zhenzhu
ORIGINALLY: Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker
NOBEL PRIZE for Literature 1938
PULITZER PRIZE for Fiction 1932 for The Good Earth

BEST KNOWN FOR: Pearl S. Buck was the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer in 1932.

Today is the birthday of novelist Pearl S. Buck, born in Hillsboro, West Virginia (1892). Her parents were Christian missionaries in China who returned to America for Pearl’s birth. But when she was three months old, they headed back to China. Buck’s father, Absalom, was a fundamentalist Presbyterian preacher — and a distant father. In many of the villages where he traveled, he was the first white person the villagers had ever seen, and they were put off by him. They were unimpressed by his fire-and-brimstone sermons, and he estimated that he converted about 10 people over the course of 10 years. Still, he kept trying. Pearl’s mother, Caroline, resented being so far from her home in West Virginia. She tried her best to keep the mud walls and floors of their hut clean, and she planted American flowers everywhere. Finally, when Pearl was four, she told her husband that they were moving to a city or she was going home. So they moved to the city of Zhenjiang, but all they could afford there were three crowded rooms in an apartment in one of the poorest sections of the city, a district full of prostitutes and drug addicts. Absalom and Caroline receive a small stipend for their work as missionaries, but Absalom squandered much of the family’s budget on his pet project: translating the New Testament into Chinese. He spent 30 years working on it. Buck wrote: “He printed edition after edition, revising each to make it more perfect, and all her life [my mother] went poorer because of the New Testament. It robbed her of the tiny margin between bitter poverty and small comfort.“

Chinese was Buck’s first language, and her nurse told her bedtime stories about dragons and tree spirits. As a young girl in the village, she wandered through the countryside. In the city, she and her brother explored the streets and markets, watching puppet shows and sampling food. She was embarrassed by her blue eyes and blond hair, but she didn’t let it hold her back. She enthusiastically joined in local celebrations, big funerals and parties.

When Buck was a teenager, her parents sent her to an English-language school for foreign girls like her. She did not fit in and was lonely, but fascinated by Shanghai. As a pupil, she was required to teach a knitting class at the Door of Hope, a shelter for girls and women who had been forced into prostitution and sex slavery. Usually, the white students from Miss Jewell’s did not speak Chinese, but since Buck did, the women there told her all their stories of rape, abuse, and violence.

After a year there, Buck went to Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. She arrived as a total misfit. A woman named Emma Edmunds, a rural girl who became one of Buck’s best friends at college, said about that first day: “I saw this one girl and she looked even more countrified than me. Her dress was made of Chinese grass linen and nobody else had anything like that. It had a high neck and long sleeves, and her hair was in a braid turned under at the back.” But she cut her hair and bought some American clothes, and she managed to fit in well enough.

After college, Buck went back to China, where she met an American agricultural economist and missionary named John Lossing Buck. They were married, and in 1921 she gave birth to a daughter, Carol. But things began to fall apart. Her mother died not long after Carol was born, and her father moved in with the young couple. Her father and husband disliked each other, and increasingly, she didn’t like either of them very much. Her daughter, Carol, had a rare developmental disability. On top of everything, the political situation in China was so tense that at one point the Bucks had to hide in the basement of a peasant family’s home to escape Nationalist soldiers, and they ended up fleeing to Japan as refugees.

In 1929, Buck took nine-year-old Carol to an institution in New Jersey, where she hoped she would receive better care than Buck could provide — she called it “the hardest thing I ever did.” She didn’t have enough money to pay for the expensive tuition, so she borrowed money from a member of the Mission Board. Her marriage fell apart, and she was even more desperate for money, so she started writing. Her first novel was called East Wind, West Wind (1930), and she hoped it would cover the school fees, but it didn’t sell well. The following year she published The Good Earth (1931), chronicling the dramatic life of a Chinese peasant farmer named Wang Lung from his wedding day through his old age. The Good Earth was a huge best-seller, and Buck won the Pulitzer Prize and, a few years later, the Nobel Prize in literature.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, she said: ” My earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China. […] Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.”

APPEARS ON POSTAGE STAMP:

USA, Scott #1848 (5 cents, issued 25-Jun-1983)

Source: Pearl S. Buck – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Pearl S. Buck – Author, Civil Rights Activist, Women’s Rights Activist – Biography.com

Source: Pearl Buck – Biographical

Source: Pearl S. Buck

It's Words To Live By July on my instagram account! 
I will be posting a quote that I love every day for the month of July. 
@TheRealSPA

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 84th birthday of the architect and designer Michael Graves.  You know his products, you love his products.  That dish scrubber didn’t grow on a tree or out of the ground, someone designed it and in a lot of cases, he did.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Michael Graves
OCCUPATION: Architect
BIRTH DATE: July 9, 1934
DATE OF DEATH: March 12, 2015
EDUCATION: Harvard University
PLACE OF BIRTH: Indianapolis, Indiana

BEST KNOWN FOR: Michael Graves is an American postmodernist architect who designed the Indianapolis Art Center and restored the Washington Monument.

Michael Graves was an American architect and designer, one of the principal figures in the postmodernist movement.

Graves trained to be an architect at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio) and at Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.), earning a master’s degree at Harvard in 1959. He then studied in Rome from 1960 to 1962 and upon his return to the United States took a teaching position at Princeton University (N.J.), becoming a full professor there in 1972.

Graves began his career in the 1960s as a creator of private houses in the abstract and austere style of orthodox Modernism, his compositions influenced by the work of Le Corbusier. In the late 1970s, however, Graves began to reject the bare and unadorned Modernist idiom as too cool and abstract, and he began seeking a richer architectural vocabulary that would be more accessible to the public. He soon drew remarkable attention with his designs for several large public buildings in the early 1980s. The Portland Public Service Building (usually called the Portland Building) in Portland, Ore. (1980), and the Humana Building in Louisville, Ky. (1982), were notable for their hulking masses and for Graves’s highly personal, Cubist interpretations of such classical elements as colonnades and loggias. Though somewhat awkward, these and other of Graves’s later buildings were acclaimed for their powerful and energetic presence.

By the mid-1980s Graves had emerged as arguably the most original and popular figure working in the postmodernist idiom. He executed architectural and design commissions for clients around the world. In the early 1980s he created a playful and iconic teakettle (as well as a number of additional products) for the Alessi design firm, and he later created a line of household items, including kitchenware and furniture, for the discount retailer Target.

Among his later large-scale projects were the restoration of the Washington Monument (2000) and the expansion of the Detroit Institute of Arts (completed 2007). In 2001 Graves was awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (AIA) for lifetime achievement.

Source: Michael Graves

Source: Michael Graves – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Michael Graves, 80, Dies; Postmodernist Designed Towers and Teakettles – The New York Times

Source: Michael Graves – Architect – Biography.com

It's Words To Live By July on my instagram account! 
I will be posting a quote that I love every day for the month of July. 
@TheRealSPA

come find me, i’m @

It’s been a while since I have done a week in review, there is no reason as to why I stopped. There may be a reason, this particular post format is the one and only time I voice any opinion and I have purposefully crafted Waldina to focus on people that I find inspiring. If I have learned one thing from reading about successful social media accounts and blogs it is the importance of sticking to your ‘brand’ and not inputting any wild cards. Meaning, I post about lives that inspire me and people expect that when they visit here. I wouldn’t mind posting a rant every now and then. I need an amnesty post or something. Until then, I will keep to my own lane.

This week on Waldina, I celebrated the birthdays of a lot of people. Since I haven’t done a week in review in six months, it would be excessive. But I do have a new exciting stat for the website: sometime last week, it had it’s half-millionth visitor! That very much impresses me. To think that I started this blog as an exercise in focusing on something positive every day, not really trying to find the audience or anything. Fast forward three or so years and thousands of people have found something to like here also. I have long-professed the unofficial tag line of Waldina is “Something For Everyone and Everything For No One”.

The Stats:

Visits This Week: 2,345
Total Visits: 500,673
Total Subscribers: 854
Total Posts: 2,176
Most Popular Post Last Quarter: Happy 80th Birthday Dyan Cannon

There are a lot of tumblr blogs that I manage because there are a lot of different interests that I have and I feel that more specific blogs seem more organized. One blog splintered into 11 total. I’ll sum up the combined totals. If you follow @TheRealSPA, they all get filtered through there.

The Stats:

Posts This Week: 559
Total Posts: 39,570
Total Subscribers: 14,121

View this post on Instagram

some of the most extraordinary lives are lived by the most ordinary of men. . #Resist #Insist #Enlist #Persist #rebel #PNW #PhotoOfTheDay #DailyPhoto #seattle #dailyinspiration #StyleIcon #History #Legend

A post shared by 𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚝𝚝 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚎𝚛-𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗 (@therealspa) on Jun 16, 2017 at 7:29am PDT

This week at @TheRealSPA on Instagram, I posted a few photos of the profiles I posted on Waldina.

The Stats:

Total Posts: 85
Total Followers: 809
Total Following: 312

View this post on Instagram

My favorite place to go to decompress. Yesterday was a lot of fun, a lot of dogs, a lot of walking, just a lot of everything. Today, it's just a lot of sunshine. . #petsofinstagram #PetLover #DogLovers #Doggie #AnimalLover #Animal #PNW #Dogstagram #InstaPet #SeattlePet #PhotoOfTheDay #DailyPhoto #DogsOfInstagram #RescueDog #dogs #Poodle #Seattle #DailyScraps #SenorScraps @SenorScraps @DogsOfInstagram #Poodle

A post shared by scraps (@senorscraps) on Jun 13, 2017 at 7:16am PDT

This week at @SenorScraps on Instagram, Scraps posted a photo of himself sun bathing on the dock at the lake house. Also, notice how many followers he has.

The Stats:

Total Posts: 106
Total Followers: 1,116
Total Following: 791

**Today, I deleted my twitter. It’s for garbage people and they do not address cyber bullying. Think about all the people that have tweeted crazy stuff that has gotten them fired and/or universally hated. This includes our current president. I see no need to be apart of that group.**

This week at @TheRealSPA on twitter, I blocked our President, his family and representatives, our Vice President and his family, various other Republican representatives and Fox News personalities. I also reported our President for abusive hate speech. If Twitter does not block him, I am quitting it. I know my number of followers are low and will mean nothing, I also know I do not need to be part of something that supports cyber bullying

Total Tweets: 1,492
Following: 422
Followers: 151

come find me, i’m @

Today is the 83rd birthday of the architect and designer Michael Graves.  You know his products, you love his products.  That dish scrubber didn’t grow on a tree or out of the ground, someone designed it and in a lot of cases, he did.  The world is a better place because he was in it and still feels the loss that he has left.

NAME: Michael Graves
OCCUPATION: Architect
BIRTH DATE: July 9, 1934
DATE OF DEATH: March 12, 2015
EDUCATION: Harvard University
PLACE OF BIRTH: Indianapolis, Indiana

BEST KNOWN FOR: Michael Graves is an American postmodernist architect who designed the Indianapolis Art Center and restored the Washington Monument.

Michael Graves was an American architect and designer, one of the principal figures in the postmodernist movement.

Graves trained to be an architect at the University of Cincinnati (Ohio) and at Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.), earning a master’s degree at Harvard in 1959. He then studied in Rome from 1960 to 1962 and upon his return to the United States took a teaching position at Princeton University (N.J.), becoming a full professor there in 1972.

Graves began his career in the 1960s as a creator of private houses in the abstract and austere style of orthodox Modernism, his compositions influenced by the work of Le Corbusier. In the late 1970s, however, Graves began to reject the bare and unadorned Modernist idiom as too cool and abstract, and he began seeking a richer architectural vocabulary that would be more accessible to the public. He soon drew remarkable attention with his designs for several large public buildings in the early 1980s. The Portland Public Service Building (usually called the Portland Building) in Portland, Ore. (1980), and the Humana Building in Louisville, Ky. (1982), were notable for their hulking masses and for Graves’s highly personal, Cubist interpretations of such classical elements as colonnades and loggias. Though somewhat awkward, these and other of Graves’s later buildings were acclaimed for their powerful and energetic presence.

By the mid-1980s Graves had emerged as arguably the most original and popular figure working in the postmodernist idiom. He executed architectural and design commissions for clients around the world. In the early 1980s he created a playful and iconic teakettle (as well as a number of additional products) for the Alessi design firm, and he later created a line of household items, including kitchenware and furniture, for the discount retailer Target.

Among his later large-scale projects were the restoration of the Washington Monument (2000) and the expansion of the Detroit Institute of Arts (completed 2007). In 2001 Graves was awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (AIA) for lifetime achievement.

Source: Michael Graves

Source: Michael Graves – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Source: Michael Graves, 80, Dies; Postmodernist Designed Towers and Teakettles – The New York Times

Source: Michael Graves – Architect – Biography.com

come find me, i’m @