If they were alive today...

...the following notables would be celebrating their birthday:







Religious reformer Martin Luther would be a sprightly 528!


Dapper cinema fashionplate, Adolph Menjou would be 121.  Unfortunately, he proved himself to be something of a scoundrel during the McCarthy era, when he "named names" and helped to ruin the careers/lives of several people.



Perennial movie bad-guy, Jack Palance was born 92 years ago.  His movie heyday was the 1950's, but perhaps he's best-remembered for his Oscar acceptance speech in 1991 (for City Slickers), when he dropped to the floor and did several one-armed pushups on the stage at the age of 72.

Remarkably prolific director of monster-hit films in the 1980's and 90's ( Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Home Alone, and its sequels), John Hughes would be 61. He tragically died of a heart attack while walking in Manhattan in August, 2009.




The founder of Bethlehem Steel, Charles M. Schwab would be 149 today.  He was one of the wealthiest men of the early 20th Century...and he lost almost everything through high-living, extravagant mansions and women galore.  And that was before the Depression.  When the stock market crashed in 1929, his fate was further sealed and he ended his days living in a small apartment in New York.  At the peak of his salad days, he built what remains the largest private home in the history of Manhattan: "Riverside," an enormous, 75-room French chateau that took up an entire city block (73rd/74th Sts. between West End and Riverside).  When his fortune was lost, he tried to sell it at a drastic discount, but there were no takers.  He then tried to donate it to the city for use as the mayoral mansion, but then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia deemed it far too grand for Depression-era New York.  The mansion was leveled in 1949 and replaced by a dreary, post-war apartment building called, almost tauntingly, "The Schwab House" (photos below before, and after).  He may have had a crummy ending, but what a life he had while he was riding high!

That's the Ansonia Apartments in the background.  It remains today a landmark building on Broadway.

The Hudson River is in the distance.  Schwab kept a full-time organist on call to play the
enormous pipe organ he had in the mansion.



Here's the inner entryway, with the Aeolian pipe organ.



And, yes:  This is what we have today.