Thursday, February 12, 2009
Shared and shared alike
If there exists a shared date of birth more impressive than the one that took place exactly two hundred years ago today, I’ve never heard about it. At The Mount, the large Georgian home in Shrewsbury, West Midlands, built by his father, Charles Robert Darwin was born on the twelfth of February, 1809. He was the fifth of Robert and Susannah (Wedgwood) Darwin’s six children. On the very same day, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second child and first son of Thomas and Nancy (Hanks) Lincoln, drew his first breaths in a crude one-room log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky. Happy bicentennial, gentlemen!
With all the hoopla and celebration of this momentous coincidence we’re seeing right now, there’s no need for me to add my own two cents (Lincoln pennies, of course). The worldwide influence and renown of Lincoln and Darwin remains strong, well over a century since their deaths. Instead, I want to talk about shared birthdates.
To suggest that there has never been a more impressive accident of birth on the same day should imply that someone has done a search for such coincidences. To my knowledge, not very much has been said about it. Googling same birthdate, one finds a lot of links to pages where you can look for artists or musicians or whatever who share your birthday (but not necessarily birthdate ... same day, same year). There are also links to the birthday problem exercise in probability. Luckily, the #2 link is for FamousBirthdays.com, where the “by date” frame displays a sorted list of the birthdates of several thousand people. Within that long list, I found over 100 shared birthdates of at least a small bit of interest. There were, in fact, more than that, but I had no idea who the individuals were.
Reviewing the pairs (and even a few trios), I saw quite a variety. Some of the pairs were, shall we say, cognitively dissonant. Margaret Thatcher and Lenny Bruce, Al Gore and Rhea Perlman, Hubert Humphrey and Vincent Price, Lynne Cheney and David Crosby, Madeleine Albright and Trini Lopez, Rudy Giuliani and Gladys Knight, Greta Garbo and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Ray Kroc and Larry Fine (of the Three Stooges), and the topper, IMHO—Mike Ditka and Lee Harvey Oswald.
It’s odd to see people for whom I have widely divergent mental images joined by a common birthdate. Consider, perhaps, Nomar Garciaparra and Monica Lewinsky, Jimmy Hoffa and Mel Allen, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Griffith, Condoleezza Rice and Yanni, Federico Fellini and DeForest Kelley, Anouk Aimée and Casey Kasem. On the other hand, some pairs are remarkably convergent—hockey Hall of Famers Patrick Roy and Mario Lemieux, John Hughes and Cybill Shepherd, Matthew Broderick and Rosie O’Donnell, Albert Finney and Glenda Jackson, Tommy Lee Jones and Oliver Stone, Eminem and Wyclef Jean, Neil Diamond and Aaron Neville, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Herschel Walker, Daryl Hannah and Julianne Moore, Edward Norton and Christian Slater. For some reason, George W. Bush and Sylvester Stallone seem sort of similar too.
Then there are the trios. Pam Grier and Philip Michael Thomas share their birthdate with Hank Williams Jr. Divine, John Lithgow, and Jeannie C. Riley were born on the same day. Hillary Clinton shares her birthdate with both Pat Sajak and Jaclyn Smith. Funnymen Danny DeVito and Lorne Michaels are joined by Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver.
Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter, who played Alex P. Keaton’s parents on Family Ties, were born on the same day. Carol Channing and Norman Mailer. Michael Caine and Quincy Jones. Doris Day and Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola and David Frost. David Letterman and Tom Clancy. Van Morrison and Itzhak Perlman. Julie Christie and Pete Rose. Herb Alpert and Richard Chamberlain. Jeff Daniels and Margaux Hemingway. Eva Longoria and Will.i.am. Merle Haggard and Billy Dee Williams. Andre Agassi and Uma Thurman. Alvin Ailey and Robert Duvall. Don Everly and Garrett Morris. Rip Torn and Mamie Van Doren.
More pairs that don’t quite compute—Roger Ebert and Paul McCartney, Charles Kuralt and Roger Maris, Vanessa Redgrave and Boris Spassky, John Denver and Ben Kingsley, Harry Caray and Ralph Ellison, Barbara Feldon and Andrew Young, Pearl Bailey and Sam Walton, Sugar Ray Leonard and Bob Saget, Marv Albert and Chick Corea, Chet Atkins and Audie Murphy, Jamie Farr and Jean Marsh, Freddie Mercury and Loudon Wainwright III.
There are others, but I actually want to get back to the original angle about impressive and important shared birthdates. I think you’ll agree that none of these come anywhere close to the Darwin-Lincoln pair we’re honoring today. The only other shared birthdate I came across that’s even remotely in the same sort of ballpark occurred on May 6, 1856. That’s the day on which Sigmund Freud and Robert E. Peary were born.
