Richard Owen Cambridge, poet, b. 1717. This article says he had “a penchant for writing verse and building boats.”

George Henry Kingsley, physician and world traveller, b. 1827. He wrote about his travels and also educated his daughter, Mary Henrietta Kingsley, at home and allowed her to help him in his scientific studies until his death in 1892. After her father’s death, Mary Henrietta became a world traveller in her own right, especially making several trips to Africa. She wrote Travels in West Africa about the animals, plants and people she encountered in her travels. She died in Africa nursing soldiers during the Boer War.

Graham Hough, literary critic and scholar, b. 1908. “The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that it has no attachment to any of the powers that control the modern world, may set it free to do the only thing that in this age it can do —to keep the neglected parts of the human experience alive until the weather changes; as in some unforeseeable way it may do.”

George Washington Gale Ferris, engineer and inventor, b. 1859. He developed the Ferris wheel for the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Robert Lawson wrote a children’s fiction book called The Great Wheel that tells the story of this event. We read it aloud last year in our homeschool and found it to be a good story.

Paul O. Zelinsky, Caldecott award winner and creator of the book The Wheels on the Bus. b. 1953. He’s illustrated some beautiful fairy tale books. Rapunzel is the one for which he won the Caldecott Medal, and he’s also done versions of Rumplestilskin and Hansel and Gretel.

My Aunt Audrey, b. 19??. She was actually only my great aunt-by-marriage, and even that marriage ended in divorce. And she never was sure whether her birthday was on February 14th or 15th. It got recorded in the family Bible as one date and handed down verbally as the other. My Aunt Audrey was a character: soft and sentimental and at the same time, tough as nails. She and her second husband, Charlie, lived in Fort Worth for a good while, and they liked to go to the wrestling matches on Saturday nights. I never knew anyone else who did that. They collected salt and pepper shakers and were as poor as church mice, but Charlie took good care of Aunt Audrey, unlike her first husband, the one who was actually related to me. Husband #1 was an alcoholic who gave me my first taste of beer. He gave me a sip when I was two or three years old, and I spit it out at him. Served him right. I miss Aunt Audrey. My urchins would have gotten a kick out meeting her and Uncle Charlie.