Jackie Robinson - Born Jan 31, 1919

Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era.^[2] Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947. When the Dodgers signed Robinson, they heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s.^[3] Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.^[4]
Robinson had an exceptional 10-year MLB career. He was the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was an All-Star for six consecutive seasons from 1949 through 1954, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949—the first black player so honored.^[5][6] Robinson played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Series championship.
In 1997, MLB retired his uniform number 42 across all major league teams; he was the first pro athlete in any sport to be so honored. MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, "Jackie Robinson Day", for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wears No. 42.
Robinson's character, his use of nonviolence, and his unquestionable talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation which then marked many other aspects of American life. He influenced the culture of and contributed significantly to the civil rights movement.^[7][8] Robinson also was the first black television analyst in MLB and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts. In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York. After his death in 1972, in recognition of his achievements on and off the field, Robinson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Conway Twitty

 gregjoens.com

Harold Lloyd Jenkins (September 1, 1933 – June 5, 1993), better known by his stage name Conway Twitty, was an American country music singer. He also had success in the rock and roll, rock, R&B, and pop genres. From 1971 to 1976, Twitty received a string of Country Music Association awards for duets with Loretta Lynn. Although never a member of the Grand Ole Opry, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.

Tom Selleck

Thomas William Selleck  (born January 29, 1945) is an American actor and film producer. He is known for starring as private investigator Thomas Magnum in the television series Magnum, P.I. (1980–1988) and as Peter Mitchell in Three Men and a Baby. Selleck had a recurring role as Lance White, the likeable and naive partner of Jim Rockford (played by James Garner) on The Rockford Files. He also played Police Chief Jesse Stone in a series of made-for-TV movies based on Robert B. Parker novels. Since 2010, he has starred as NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan in the hit crime drama Blue Bloods on CBS.

Selleck has appeared in more than 50 film and television roles since Magnum, P.I., including Three Men and a Baby, Quigley Down Under, Mr. Baseball, and Lassiter. He appeared as Dr. Richard Burke on Friends and as A.J. Cooper on the TV series Las Vegas. He also had a lead role in the television western movie The Sacketts, based on two of Louis L'Amour's books.

Chris Christie

Christopher James Christie (born September 6, 1962) is an American politician, former federal prosecutor, and political commentator who served as the 55th Governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. During his governorship, he chaired the Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission in 2017. Christie became an ABC News contributor in 2018 after leaving office.
Christie was born in Newark and raised in Livingston. He volunteered for Thomas Kean's gubernatorial campaign at age 15. After graduating in 1984 from the University of Delaware, he earned a J.D. at Seton Hall. He practiced law from 1987 to 2002. He was elected county freeholder (legislator) for Morris County, serving from 1995 to 1998. By 2002, he had campaigned for Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush; the latter appointed him U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, a position he held from 2002 to 2008.
Christie won the 2009 Republican primary for Governor of New Jersey, defeating the incumbent Jon Corzine in the general election. During his first term, he was credited with cutting spending, capping property tax growth, and was praised for his response to and recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy, and was re-elected by a wide margin in 2013.^[1] Christie is a moderate Republican relative to the national GOP.^[2][3] After the start of his second term as governor, Christie's standing was damaged by the Fort Lee lane closure scandal.^{[4][5][6][7][8]} Since then, he has ranked among the least popular governors in the United States; for example, a September 2016 poll found that he was the third least popular governor in the country, with an approval rating of 29%.^[9] By June 2017, he was found to have an approval rating of 15%, the lowest recorded for any New Jersey governor.^[10][11] As of July 2017, his disapproval rating of 69% was the highest of all governors in the nation.^[12]
Christie chaired the Republican Governors Association for the 2014 election cycle.^[13] On June 30, 2015, he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election. He suspended his candidacy on February 10, 2016,^{[14][15][16][17][18][19]} and soon after endorsed Donald Trump, who named him head of his transition planning team.^[20] Christie was strongly considered to be Trump's running mate but was not chosen. Soon after the election, Christie was replaced on the transition team by Mike Pence, as were three of Christie's associates.^[21][22][23] He chaired the Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission in 2017 after being appointed by Trump.^[24][25] He has been offered numerous positions in Donald Trump's cabinet, but only considered being the Attorney General.

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (born Bonickhausen dit Eiffel;^[1] /ˈaɪfəl/; French pronunciation: ​[ɛfɛl]; 15 December 1832 – 27 December 1923) was a French civil engineer. A graduate of École Centrale Paris, he made his name building various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the Garabit viaduct. He is best known for the world-famous Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, and his contribution to building the Statue of Liberty in New York. After his retirement from engineering, Eiffel focused on research into meteorology and aerodynamics, making significant contributions in both fields.

Brent Spiner

Brent Jay Spiner (/ˈspaɪnər/; born February 2, 1949) is an American actor, comedian, and singer best known for his portrayal of the android Lieutenant Commander Data in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation and four subsequent films. In 1997, he won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Data in Star Trek: First Contact, and was nominated in the same category for portraying Dr. Brackish Okun in Independence Day, a role he reprised in Independence Day: Resurgence. He has also enjoyed a career in the theatre and as a musician.

Paul Newman

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, voice actor, film director, producer, race car driver, IndyCar owner, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He won and was nominated for numerous awards, winning an Academy Award for his performance in the 1986 film The Color of Money,^[1] a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, an Emmy Award, and many others. Newman's other roles include the title characters in The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963), Harper (1966) and Cool Hand Luke (1967), as well as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Sting (1973), and The Verdict (1982). He voiced Doc Hudson in the first installment of Disney-Pixar's Cars as his final acting performance, with voice recordings being used in Cars 3 (2017).

Newman won several national championships as a driver in Sports Car Club of America road racing, and his race teams won several championships in open-wheel IndyCar racing. He was a co-founder of Newman's Own, a food company from which he donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity.^[2] As of January 2017, these donations have totaled over US$485 million.^[3] He was a co-founder of Safe Water Network, a nonprofit that develops sustainable drinking water solutions for those in need.^[4]

In 1988, Newman founded the SeriousFun Children's Network, a global family of summer camps and programs for children with serious illness which has served 290,076 children since its inception.^[5]

Ed Orgeron - LSU Football Coach

 Pencil Sketch by artist Greg Joens

Edward Jim Orgeron Jr. (born July 27, 1961)  is an American football coach and former player. He is currently the head coach at Louisiana State University (LSU). Orgeron previously served as the head football coach at University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) from 2005 to 2007 and was the interim head coach at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2013.

Mischa Barton Stamp

Mischa Barton Stamp Design.

Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming OBE (born 27 January 1965) is a Scottish-American actor, singer, writer, producer, director, and activist who has appeared in numerous films, television shows, and plays. His London stage appearances include Hamlet, the Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist (for which he received an Olivier Award), the lead in Bent, and the National Theatre of Scotland's The Bacchae. On Broadway, he has appeared in The Threepenny Opera, as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret (for which he won a Tony Award), Design for Living and a one-man adaptation of Macbeth. His best-known film roles include his performances in Emma, GoldenEye, the Spy Kids trilogy, Son of the Mask, and X2. Cumming also introduces Masterpiece Mystery! for PBS and appeared on The Good Wife, for which he has been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Satellite Award. A filming of his Las Vegas cabaret show, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs, aired on PBS stations in November 2016.
As of March 2018 he is working at the CBS TV series Instinct (stylized as INSTIИCT)^{[citation needed]} with Bojana Novakovic.
Cumming has written a novel, Tommy's Tale, and an autobiography, Not My Father's Son: A Memoir, had a cable talk show called Eavesdropping with Alan Cumming, and produced a line of perfumed products labelled "Cumming". He has also contributed opinion pieces to many publications and performed cabaret shows, I Bought a Blue Car Today and Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs.

Guy Fieri

Guy Ramsay Fieri ; born January 22, 1968)  is an American restaurateur, author, game show host, and an Emmy Award winning television personality.

Richard Dean Anderson

Richard Dean Anderson (born January 23, 1950) is an American actor and producer. He began his television career in 1976, playing Dr. Jeff Webber in the American soap-opera series General Hospital, then rose to prominence as the lead actor in the television series MacGyver (1985–1992). He later appeared in films such as Through the Eyes of a Killer (1992), Pandora's Clock (1996), and Firehouse (1997).
In 1997, Anderson returned to television as the lead actor of the series Stargate SG-1, a spin-off of the 1994 film Stargate. He played the lead from 1997 to 2005 and had a recurring role from 2005 to 2007. Since 1997, he has starred in only one film: Stargate: Continuum, released in 2008, as a spin-off film after the Stargate SG-1 series finale in 2007. He appeared in the follow-up Stargate series Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate: Universe (as Major General and later Lieutenant General Jack O'Neill).

MLK

Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his assassination in 1968. Born in Atlanta, King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi helped inspire.


King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.


On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. The following year, he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In his final years, he expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War. He alienated many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". J. Edgar Hoover considered him a radical and made him an object of the FBI's COINTELPRO from 1963 on. FBI agents investigated him for possible communist ties, recorded his extramarital liaisons and reported on them to government officials, and on one occasion mailed King a threatening anonymous letter, which he interpreted as an attempt to make him commit suicide.
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted and imprisoned of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting. Sentenced to 99 years in prison for King's murder, effectively a life sentence as Ray was 41 at the time of conviction, Ray served 29 years of his sentence and died from hepatitis in 1998 while in prison.
King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971; the holiday was enacted at the federal level by legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also rededicated for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (/poʊ/; born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. He is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction.^[1] He was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Janis Joplin Pop Art

Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970), nicknamed 'Pearl,' was an American rock, soul, and blues singer and songwriter, and one of the most successful and widely known female rock stars of her era.^[1][2][3] After releasing three albums, she died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. A fourth album, Pearl, was released in January 1971, just over three months after her death. It reached number one on the Billboard charts.
In 1967, Joplin rose to fame following an appearance at Monterey Pop Festival, where she was the lead singer of the then little-known San Francisco psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company.^[4][5][6] After releasing two albums with the band, she left Big Brother to continue as a solo artist with her own backing groups, first the Kozmic Blues Band and then the Full Tilt Boogie Band. She appeared at the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour. Five singles by Joplin reached the Billboard Hot 100, including a cover of the Kris Kristofferson song "Me and Bobby McGee", which reached number 1 in March 1971.^[7] Her most popular songs include her cover versions of "Piece of My Heart", "Cry Baby", "Down on Me", "Ball and Chain", and "Summertime"; and her original song "Mercedes Benz", her final recording.^[8][9]
Joplin, a mezzo-soprano^[10] highly respected for her charismatic performing ability, was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Audiences and critics alike referred to her stage presence as "electric". Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its 2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time^[11] and number 28 on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry Association of America certifications of 15.5 million albums sold.^[12]

Cary Grant

Cary Grant
January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986

Cary Grant was an English-American actor, known as one of classic Hollywood's definitive leading men. He began a career in Hollywood in the early 1930s, and became known for his transatlantic accent, debonair demeanor, light-hearted approach to acting, and sense of comic timing. He became an American citizen in 1942.

Happy Birthday, Mohamed Ali!

Muhammad Ali aka born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; (January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer, activist, and philanthropist. Nicknamed "The Greatest", he is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated sports figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest boxers of all time.

Kevin Costner

Kevin Michael Costner (born January 18, 1955) is an American actor, director, producer, and musician. His accolades include two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, one Primetime Emmy Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Costner began his acting career with Sizzle Beach, U.S.A. (1981). Following a few minor supporting parts, he rose to prominence with his portrayal of Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (1987). This was followed by a widely successful period in his career with starring roles in such films as; Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990), for which he won two Academy Awards, JFK (1991), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and The Bodyguard (1992). In 1995, Costner starred in and co-produced Waterworld. The most expensive film ever made at the time, it was a major box office failure which marked a significant downturn in his career.[1][2] His second directorial feature The Postman (1997) was another disappointment which marked a massive downfall of his career as a leading man.[3] He has since starred in numerous films to rejuvenate his leading man status, including Message in a Bottle (1999), For Love of the Game (1999), Thirteen Days (2000), 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001), Dragonfly (2002), Rumor Has It (2005), The Guardian (2006), Mr. Brooks (2009), 3 Days to Kill (2014), Draft Day (2014), and Criminal (2016). All of these films however have been either critical or commercial failures, failing to reboot his status.[4] Nevertheless in recent years he has had supporting parts in critically favoured films including The Upside of Anger (2005), Man of Steel (2013), Hidden Figures (2016), and Molly's Game (2017).

On television, Costner portrayed Devil Anse Hatfield in the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys (2012), winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. Since 2018, he stars as John Dutton on drama series Yellowstone.