History Brooklyn Boro

January 10, birthdays for George Foreman, Rod Stewart, Landon Collins

Brooklyn Today

January 10, 2017 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Boxing legend George Foreman celebrates his birthday today. AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley

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Greetings, Brooklyn. Today is the 10th day of the year.

Notable people born on this day include Pat Benatar and George Foreman, among others.

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ON THIS DAY IN 1910, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published an article titled “Mother Saves Boy at Fire.”

The article focused on a Brooklyn mother who saved both her son and her apartment during a fire.

“Dropping her dishcloth, she hastily noticed the smoke as coming from a closet and immediately on discovering it she ran to the kitchen, turned on the faucet, filled a large coal scuttle with water, dashed back into the room and threw the contents on the blaze,” the Eagle reported.

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NOTABLE PEOPLE born on this day include singer Pat Benatar, who was born in Brooklyn in 1953; U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, who was born in 1950; New York Giants star Landon Collins, who was born in 1993; former boxer and entrepreneur George Foreman, who was born in 1949; actor Evan Handler, who was born in 1961; singer Rod Stewart, who was born in 1945; and Olympic decathlete Bill Toomey, who was born in 1939.

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TODAY IS POETRY AT WORK DAY. It is a day to celebrate the power of poetry in the workplace. It also remembers the many poets who led an ordinary life working and writing in tandem. People are encouraged to embrace their work lives and the potential for poetry to flourish alongside — even inside — work itself. It is recognized annually on the second Tuesday in January.

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“COMMON SENSE” WAS PUBLISHED ON THIS DAY IN 1776. More than any other publication, “Common Sense” influenced the authors of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Paine’s 50-page pamphlet sold 150,000 copies within a few months of its first printing.

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THE FIRST UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY WAS HELD ON THIS DAY IN 1946. On the 26th anniversary of the establishment of the unsuccessful League of Nations, delegates from 51 nations met in London for the first meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

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PHILIP LEVINE WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1928. Poet Levine is renowned for his focus on working-class life. Starting at age 14, Levine worked in Detroit’s auto factories. The poet later said, “The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best work.” The recipient of many accolades, including the National Book Award for poetry (1980), the Pulitzer Prize (1994) and the American Academy of Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award (2013), Levine was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2011. He died in California in 2015.

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PAUL HENREID WAS BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1908. The actor once estimated that he had played in or directed more than 300 films. Though he was a staunch anti-Nazi, his early film parts included a number of German roles, including those in “Goodbye,” “Mr. Chips” and “Night Train to Munich.” He eventually moved away from the German stereotype in such films as “Of Human Bondage” and “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and as Victor Laslo in “Casablanca.” His film career cut short by the anti-Communist blacklist in Hollywood during the 1940s, Henreid found a second calling as a director, with more than 80 episodes of TV’s “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” to his credit. He died in 1992 in California.

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Special thanks to “Chase’s Calendar of Events” and Brooklyn Public Library.

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“Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.” — poet Robinson Jeffers, who was born on this day in 1887