For some reason, December 15 is host to an unusual combination of birthdays. They seem to come in sets, like the engineers Gustave Eiffel, born in 1832, and Charles Duryea, born in 1861. Eiffel, of course, is known for the Eiffel Tower, although really he was just one of the designers. It wasn’t even his idea; two other engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, had dreamed it up in 1884 as the main attraction for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Eiffel was already considered the foremost engineer in France (at the time, that probably meant he was the best in the world), and he gave his approval for additional study of the project. Another designer, Stephen Sauvestre, added some features, including the observation decks at the first and top levels. At that point Eiffel got interested. The three existing engineers had patented their design for the tower, so Eiffel simply bought the rights. He took over the project and got it financed and built, but the idea that he designed it by himself is just a myth.
Charles Duryea designed and built one of the first gas-powered autos in the US, in 1893. He and his brother Frank, who drove and raced the cars Charles built, formed the first automobile company in the US, the Duryea Motor Wagon Company. It was in business from 1895 to about 1916. His very first car, which looked like a horse wagon with a motor (since that’s what it was), was discovered sitting in a Massachusetts barn in 1920, where it had been since 1894 — it’s now in the Smithsonian.
Another farm in the northeastern US was owned by Max Yasgur, who was also born on December 15, in 1919. It was a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, and in 1969, he rented it to some music producers for the Woodstock Music Festival. Yasgur himself didn’t sing or play any instruments, but he did receive a full-page obituary in Rolling Stone magazine; they hardly ever do that for non-musicians.
On the strength of that, we can include Yasgur in the set of musical birthdays on December 15. This set also includes Stan Kenton, a popular band leader in the Big Band Era, and one of the most popular musicians in the US in the late 1940s. As the rock and roll era arose, Kenton’s orchestra declined in popularity — they couldn’t compete with the publicity rock and roll was getting from disk jockeys like Alan Freed, another December 15 celebrant who was the first radio host and concert promoter to focus on the new music. He’s coined “rock and roll.”
But Freed also promoted rhythm and blues music, like the tunes being offered up by groups like Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles and Diana Ross and the Supremes. What was the link between those bands? It was Cindy Birdsong, who was a member of both, and also, as you might guess, born on December 15. At the same time, though, another trend in rock and roll was just getting started: the British Invasion. British rock bands were starting to get popular in the US, starting with the Beatles. And the second British group to achieve US hits was the Dave Clark Five, led by (obviously) Dave Clark. You get one guess about what day he was born.
Music and engineering aren’t the only careers December 15 birthdays follow, though. In fact, some December-fifteenthers have more than one career. Nickolas Dallis, for example, was a psychiatrist in Toledo, Ohio, when he had an idea about a comic strip about a handsome young doctor’s adventures with patients. He launched the strip Rex Morgan, M.D. in 1948, and kept working as a psychiatrist. In the 1950s he started working with juvenile courts, and incorporated his experiences into the strip Judge Parker, which also became successful. When he retired from his medical practice in 1961 he kept writing his comics (he didn’t draw the strips), and added Apartment 3-G, yet another successful strip. He used pen names for his first two strips: Dal Curtis for Rex Morgan, and Paul Nichols for Judge Parker. Apartment 3-G was published under his nickname, Nick Dallis.
Business leaders are represented on December 15 by J. Paul Getty, born in 1892 and founder of the Getty Oil Company. The 1966 Guinness Book of World Records listed Getty as the richest private citizen on Earth, but he was notorious for being frugal to an extreme. His mansion in England (he had quite a few others in various locations) featured a pay phone so his guests couldn’t charge their phone calls to his account. He did spend money on art though, and founded the Getty museums that have huge collections. His grandson, J. Paul Getty III, wasn’t born on December 15, but after he was kidnapped and held for ransom in 1973, and December 15 was the day he was rescued.
That leaves science, which is well represented by Freeman Dyson, born December 15, 1923. He was mainly a physicist (astrophysics, quantum physics, and nuclear physics), but also contributed to statistics, math, and engineering. His engineering work was mostly theoretical, but big. Really big. He came up with the idea of the Dyson Sphere. If a civilization is advanced enough, he reasoned they would need to capture all the solar energy from their sun. The solution would be to demolish some giant planets the size of Jupiter and use the matter to build a big ball with the sun in the center capturing 100% of the solar power. Dyson never went into detail about exactly how to do it, leaving that as an exercise for the reader (or for a sufficiently advanced civilization).
Finally, December 15 is Zamenhof Day. It’s the most widely celebrated holiday in Esperanto culture. It’s the birthday of L.L. Zamenhof, who created the language. There really is an Esperanto culture, and there are even a few hundred families in the world considered to be native Esperanto speakers. That is, the parents speak Esperanto at home, and their children grew up with it as their first language. There are even Esperanto magazines, including Monato, a monthly news journal. You can read it online at monato.be (Google Translate will render it in English). This month’s issue would be Decembro — but 15 in Esperanto is just 15.
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