If they were still alive....

.....today would be the birthday of these notables:


Frederick Law Olmsted would be 189.  It would be trite to call him "ground-breaking" in his field, since he was the most influential landscape architect in American history---but it's true, and he was.  Most famously, he designed New York's Central Park, setting the bar very high for the design of subsequent civic parks and public spaces.  Some of his other grand projects were Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the Biltmore estate in Asheville, NC, Belle Isle Park in the Detroit River, and the campuses of University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.


William Desmond Taylor (L), Charlotte Shelby (R) and Mary Miles Minter (above)


Silent film director William Desmond Taylor would be 139.  His was the first lurid, very well-publicized murder in Hollywood history--and it remains officially unsolved to date.  His body was found by his manservant on the floor of his Los Angeles bungalow apartment on February 1, 1922.  He had been shot to death.  The list of suspects included some very famous names, including popular comedienne, Mabel Normand, and virginal leading lady, Mary Miles Minter.  Several books have been written, theorizing what really happened.  But it seems that no one will ever really know just who did it.  But most signs point toward one Charlotte Shelby, who was the original Hollywood "stage mother from Hell"--and the mother of Mary Miles Minter, who, it turned out, was the lover of Taylor (and whose "virginal" image--and her career, period, were shattered in the wake of the scandal).

Anita Loos would be 118.  She was a startlingly prolific screenwriter in Hollywood from the early years of silent films onward, through the end of the 1950's--an era that was inarguably one that was not very friendly to women.  She was also a playwright and author, whose most successful work was the enormously popular, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, whose lead character 'Lorelei Lee' became a signature role for both Marilyn Monroe and Carol Channing.