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One of the greatest of the transition singers between the crooners and the rockers, Johnnie Ray was the only son of Elmer and Hazel Ray. He was born and raised in Oregon where he loved hiking in nature. He was close with his older sister, sometimes hiking with her. After he became famous, he corrected any reporter who asked him whether he preferred living in Los Angeles or New York. He insisted Oregon always would be his home.
Ray lost a large part of his hearing at age 13 in an accident while at a Boy Scout event. His hearing loss was not known to his immediate family for several months; they knew only that he became more withdrawn. After high school, he began singing locally in a wild, flamboyant style, unlike any other white singer up to that time. At age 25 he became an American sensation. The following year, during his first concert tour of the United Kingdom, Ray started attracting mobs of young people who rioted in front of him. In 1954, at age 27, he became the first American performer to draw crowds in Australia.
Ray's early songs, such as the 1952 45 RPM record, "Cry" / "The Little White Cloud That Cried," were major successes. Following up on that hit single, later the same year (1952) Ray had a #4 United States hit with a cover of the 1930 standard "Walkin' My Baby Back Home." In 1954, he covered The Drifters' R & B hit "Such A Night." Ray's version, released a short time after The Drifters' version, peaked at #18 on the American charts.
In 1954, Johnnie Ray co-starred alongside Marilyn Monroe, Donald O'Connor, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor and Ethel Merman in the 20th Century Fox film version of There's No Business Like Show Business (1954). Monroe's hatred of the film was widely publicized, and it was a disappointment both at the box office and with critics. After Monroe's premature death, There's No Business Like Show Business (1954) was remembered for her dancing and singing "Heat Wave". Ray's character, Steve Donahue, sings and dances with his family in vaudeville until he surprises them by becoming a Catholic priest. Much later, he returns to the family, explaining that the parish is allowing him to perform with them while wearing clothing that is similar to theirs. Ray never appeared in another A-list motion picture.
His cover of "Just Walkin' In The Rain", which had been composed years earlier by two incarcerated men, rose to #2 on the American charts in December 1956. His last major hit song in the United States came in 1957: "You Don't Owe Me A Thing." His recordings reached many more people in the United Kingdom than in the United States for the next four years.
In 1960, Ray's record label dropped him. Another label signed him in 1961 then dropped him a short time later. He never released another recording. From 1961 until his death in 1990, his popularity could be measured only by the venues where he performed and the number of tickets sold. Ray never played a stadium or large concert hall in the United States again.
In 1987, Ray performed in the relatively small auditorium at El Camino College in Torrance, California, a far cry from the nearby Hollywood Bowl where he had performed on August 27, 1955. Even that far back, according to a Los Angeles Times display ad for the Hollywood Bowl that can be found in the newspaper's August 23 edition in its database, Johnnie Ray was billed as one of six attractions at the "8:30 Pops" concert. (Performers were billed in this order: Johnny Green, Johnnie Ray, Helen O'Connell, Les Baxter, Four Freshmen, Leo Diamond.) It was the only appearance Ray ever made at the Hollywood Bowl.
Ray's brushes with the law during two visits to Detroit (1951 and 1959) resulted from a sting operation that police officers throughout the United States routinely did to apprehend gay men. In the aftermath of the 1951 arrest, Ray pled guilty and paid a fine. He was acquitted of the 1959 charge. Some writers have said Ray's trouble in Detroit may have contributed to a decline in his popularity in his home country. His 1951 arrest, however, was not reported in any newspapers at the time because there was no trial and his career did not take off until a few months later. By the time of his arrest and acquittal at the end of 1959, his career already had slipped considerably.
Other music historians have cited an equally important factor in Ray's fade from public view: an operation he underwent in New York in 1958 that he and his surgeon hoped would restore his hearing. The surgeon botched the procedure and his hearing worsened, thereby making it much harder for him to communicate with musicians who backed him and with record producers and sound engineers. Ray had to deal with the worst fate that could befall a solo performer in the 1960s as younger fans lionized groups that wrote their own songs: Ray no longer introduced new material to concertgoers or record buyers.
During his heyday, Johnnie Ray married a Los Angeles woman named Marilyn Morrison. Newspaper columnist Louella Parsons wrote about the couple many times between 1952 and 1954 as they frequently separated and reconciled, or so the columnists claimed. A biographer speculated decades later that music business bigwigs, which included Morrison's father, had arranged the marriage to divert the public's attention from Ray's alleged homosexuality. But during Ray's declining years, he had to cope with a media cover-up that was even more devastating: columnist Earl Wilson untruthfully reported that Ray's 1958 botched surgery was a total success. As new generations came along, no one in the music business knew or cared why Ray was unable to communicate with musicians and other people he needed for a comeback.
At the same time Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly replaced him on the Billboard charts, syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen continued to write about him as if he were still on the A list. New Yorkers who saw them together noticed that they were openly affectionate in public. For many years, they speculated that she was blurring the boundary between her career and personal life, using her column to try to advance Ray's career.
Kilgallen's column as it appeared in the New York Journal-American on September 15, 1965 included a plug for his current show at New York's Latin Quarter nightclub, owned by the father of future star television newscaster Barbara Walters, and it also plugged a gig he had scheduled for October in Las Vegas. Neither Kilgallen nor any other journalist revealed that immediately before the Latin Quarter gig had started, Ray and his new manager lived in Spain for eight months during which time they settled a debt of many thousands of dollars that he owed to the IRS. Ray's manager from the previous decade, Bernie Lang, allegedly had been responsible for the accumulation of the IRS debt, and this presents yet another factor that likely contributed to Ray's disappearance from the public eye. Unlike the trouble that Col. Tom Parker caused Elvis, the way Bernie Lang treated Johnnie Ray has interested few people over the years. Lang was interviewed after Ray's death and maintained his innocence.
Ray had a minor comeback in the United States in the early 1970s, making TV appearances on The Andy Williams Show (1962) and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962). Record labels and songwriters continued to ignore him, however. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, nostalgia for music without electric guitar distortion drew American television viewers to such prime-time shows as Happy Days (1974) and The Love Boat (1977), but Ray never appeared on-camera. His 1950s recordings can be heard playing in the background of two 1974 Happy Days episodes. In 1982, MTV put in heavy rotation the video for "Come On, Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners. The opening verse name-checked Johnnie Ray and the video included 28-year-old news footage of emotional girls greeting Ray as he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London. But most of the target audience for the song and especially for the MTV video had never heard of him. They tuned out the black-and-white footage and the lyrics, which Dexys Midnight Runners sang with a heavy English accent. American listeners were clueless about the words that open the song. They were almost unintelligible in the era before Google: "Poor old Johnnie Ray / sounded sad upon the radio, etc."
Ray continued to perform in Las Vegas but attracted much less attention than headliners Frank Sinatra, Wayne Newton and Liberace. His popularity never waned at large concert venues in England, Scotland, and Australia. The summer of 1989 saw Ray headlining and filling up those foreign venues, but when he performed in his beloved Oregon in October of that year, more than half the seats were empty.
Very soon after returning from Oregon, which he said was his actual home, to Los Angeles, where he lived out of necessity, he began showing symptoms of cirrhosis of the liver. His overseas fans didn't have access to this information. The American media now included many more entertainment news outlets than it had in the era when Parsons and Wilson had made a fuss over Ray, but all journalists, including those on Entertainment Tonight, ignored the fact that he was dying.
In 1990, he was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for three weeks without attracting attention. When he entered an irreversible coma on February 23, 1990, a newspaper wire service finally picked up the story, followed by frequent announcements on CNN until he died the next day. His loyal fans in Europe and Australia had not known he was ill and were shocked and saddened. He was 63.- Forbes grew up in wealthy circumstances. He later studied at Princeton University in the US state of New Jersey. He then served in the US Army and took part in World War II. From 1949 he was politically active in New Jersey and was a member of the Senate from 1951 to 1959. In 1954 his father died and from that time on his son ran the media company together with his brother Bruce Charles Forbes. When he died in 1964, he ran the business alone. Malcolm Forbes made Forbes magazine one of the most successful papers on the international media market. He increased the number of buyers from 100,000 to around 750,000.
The publisher achieved the increase in sales and thus popularity of the magazine, which has its headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City, with rankings of the richest people in the world. They became the most popular topic rankings. Forbes has also been publishing its magazine on the German market since 1989. Over time, he also created rankings on other topics such as the list of the world's most successful companies or the list of the 13 highest-earning dead people. Since 2004, the magazine has published an annual ranking of the most powerful women in the world. With the rankings, the paper not only serves the curiosity of its readers, but they are also the basis for recognized indicators of the measured content. Forbes has thus surpassed its biggest competitor, Fortune Magazine.
Forbes' other publications include Nation's Heritage Magazine and Egg, a journal for art lovers. Outside of his business activities, Malcolm Forbes particularly attracted attention for his luxurious lifestyle. In doing so, he shaped the public image of the typical representative of capitalism, which he also maintained. The entrepreneur and multimillionaire spent around two million dollars on his last birthday party, to which he invited around 1,000 guests to Tangier. This penchant for lavish luxury further increased the popularity of his magazine. Forbes was considered a fanatical motorcycle lover and rider. He organized an annual "Friendship Tours" in which countless Harley-Davidson riders took part.
One of his extravagant hobbies was ballooning. The publisher's possessions alone in the form of real estate, paintings and luxury cars as well as his magazines were valued at around one billion US dollars during his lifetime.
Malcolm Forbes died of a heart attack in New Jersey on February 24, 1990. - Sandro Pertini was born on 25 September 1896 in Stella, Savona, Italy. He was married to Carla Voltolina. He died on 24 February 1990 in Rome, Lazio, Italy.
- Shingo Kanemoto was born on 12 October 1932. He was an actor, known for Gatchaman (1972), Gatchaman The Movie (1978) and Golgo 13: The Professional (1983). He died on 24 February 1990 in Japan.
- In the tragic history of Boston Red Sox baseball from 1919 through 2003, the era characterized by the "Curse of the Bambino' (which was brought down on the BoSox after the franchise sold the greatest player in the history of the game to the New York Yankees so Red Sox owner Harry Frazee' could get the funds to finance the play that served as basis for the musical No, No, Nanette (1930)), perhaps no event is more tragic -- not the loses in the seventh, final and deciding games of the 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986 World Series -- than what transpired on August 18, 1967. On that day, Tony Conigliaro, the 22-year-old Red Sox right fielder who appeared fated for greatness and a Hall of Fame career, was hit in the left cheek by a fastball thrown by California Angels pitcher Jack Hamilton in a home game at Fenway Park.
The pitched ball shattered Conigliaro's cheekbone and cracked the orbital bone encasing his left eye. More ominously, the impact severely damaged the retina of his left eye. The beaning was so severe that Conigliaro dropped down to the ground face first, sprawled before home plate, as if pole-axed, bleeding from the nose and eye. Pitcher Jack Hamilton, who approached the prone Conigliaro to assess his condition, was restrained and lead away by his own catcher, Buck Rodgers, so as not to be affected by the sight of the carnage.
Conigliaro was taken off the field in a stretcher, and pictures of him with a ghastly black eye were carried by the press after he had recovered. (One picture would grace the cover of "Sports Illustrated" magazine in 1970, to advertise an excerpt from his just-published biography, "Seeing It Through", the title a pun on the effect of the injury on his eyesight.) The injury was so severe, he missed the rest of the season, and the Red Sox's first trip to the World Series in 21 years, the so-called "Impossible Dream" pennant. He would not return to the Red Sox for 18 months.
Anthony Richard Conigliaro, who was known and loved by Red Sox fans as "Tony C", was a local boy, born in Revere, Massachusetts, a seaside suburb of Boston. He made his major league debut with the Red Sox in 1964, as a 19-year old, and was a leading candidate for rookie of the Year Honors, batting .290 with 24 home runs and 52 RBI in 111 games when his season ended with a broken arm in August. The following year, the 20-year old Tony C. became the youngest player to lead a major league in home runs when he topped the American League with 32 dingers. In the fateful year of 1967, Tony C. was selected for the All-Star Game. It was the season in which, at the age of 22, he would became the youngest A.L. player to hit a total of 100 home runs. He also was the New England teeny-boppers' favorite player, having launched a singing career.
According to sabremetrics, the study of baseball statistics, the player most similar to Tony C. when he was 20 and 21 was Mickey Mantle while the player most similar to him at the age of 22 was Frank Robinson, both first-ballot Hall of Famers. (The player most similar, statistically, when he was 24 and 25 years old, after his return to the Red Sox, was Jose Canseco, an outstanding player who might have made the Hall of Fame but for his lackadaisical attitude and public revelation of steroid abuse -- his own and that of other players.)
In August 1967, Tony C. was replaced in the line-up by Ken Harrelson, who was traded to Cleveland after the 1968 season in which "The Hawk" lead the A.L. in runs batted in (R.B.I.). With right field now his for the taking, Conigliaro came back to the Red Sox for the 1969 season and played 141 games, slugging 20 homers and batting in 82 runs, a performance that saw him win the Hutch Award for "Comeback Player of the Year". The following year, Tony C. set career-highs of 36 home runs and 116 RBIs, but he was traded after the end of the season, in October, to the California Angels. He proved a flop in Anaheim, batting just .222 with four homers and 15 RBIs in a half-season of 74 games, hampered by poor eye-sight. In 1975, the year that the Red Sox would win their first A.L. pennant since '67, Tony C. tried another comeback, but he soon retired permanently due to the bad eyesight caused by his beaning eight years earlier.
Tony C. remained a popular figure in the greater Boston area, running a nightclub with his former major league player brother Billy Conigliaro. It was while being driven to the airport by brother Billy that Tony C., after having interviewed for a broadcasting job, suffered a heart-attack on January 3, 1982, four days short of his 37th birthday. Tony C.'s heart stopped for many minutes, and he subsequently suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. Conigliaro remained in a vegetative state until his death on February 24, 1990. He was 45 years old. In commemoration, the Red Sox wore black armbands that season, in which they won the American League East pennant.
The Red Sox Nation mourned the death of their tragic hero, and continues to mourn, marking the 40th anniversary of the beaning that derailed such a promising career, and seemed to curse Tony C. On August 18, 2007, his memory was honored before a game at Fenway Park, and a section of seats at the venerable ball-yard was named "Conigliaro's Corner" to honor the late, lamented, never-to-be-forgotten Tony C.
The Tony Conigliaro Award is given annually to the major league player who best overcomes an obstacle and continues to play well through the adversity. - Krunoslav Quien was born on 5 March 1917 in Zadar, Croatia, Austria-Hungary [now Croatia]. He was a writer, known for Kaya (1967), Crazy Days (1977) and Whatever You Can Spare (1979). He died on 24 February 1990 in Split, Croatia, Yugoslavia [now Croatia].
- Jure Kastelan was born on 18 December 1919 in Zakucac, Croatia, Yugoslavia. Jure was a writer, known for Brod (1957) and Tifusari (1963). Jure died on 24 February 1990 in Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia.