Honorable Mention: February 18, 1892: Wendell Willkie. A corporate lawyer from Indiana, he was unexpectedly chosen as a compromise candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1940, preventing the nomination of an isolationist candidate, and thus guaranteeing that, whoever won the general election, the Republican nominee or a re-elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that President would be willing and prepared to take on the Nazi threat.
It was the closest of FDR's 4 runs for President, and he and Willkie built a bipartisan alliance afterward. Willkie spent much of 1941 speaking about the need to stand up to the Nazis, and much of 1942 and 1943 raising money for the war effort. Unfortunately, as the 1944 campaign got underway, while Republicans engaged in a whispering campaign that FDR was dying, both Willkie and his 1940 running mate, Senator Charles McNary of Oregon, died before that election, so FDR outlived both of them -- barely.
Dishonorable Mention: February 18, 1516: Queen Mary I of England. Succeeding her late teenage half-brother, King Edward VI, in 1553, she acted more like their father, King Henry VIII, except she embraced the Catholic Church that he kicked out of England, even marrying Spain's Catholic King Philip II. Her reign was brutal enough to give her the nickname Bloody Mary. But she was never in good health, and she died after only 5 years on the throne, replaced by her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I.
10. February 18, 1933: Yoko Ono. She was a little-known artist when she met John Lennon in 1966. He made her world-famous, and she made him a Walrus who knew it was time to stop being a Mop Top.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1952: Judy "Juice" Newton. A country star in the early 1980s.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1994: Jung Ho-seok. a.k.a. J-Hope of the Korean "boy band" BTS.
9. February 18, 1933: Bobby Robson. A forward, he played for West London soccer team Fulham, and for Birmingham-area team West Bromwich Albion. He was selected for the England national team for the 1958 and 1962 World Cups, but was in decline by the time a team was chosen for 1966, winning the World Cup on home soil.
He went into management, and in 1978, he led Ipswich Town in Suffolk to win the FA Cup Final over highly-favored North London team Arsenal. In 1981, he led Ipswich to win the UEFA Cup, Europe's secondary tournament (now named the UEFA Europa League). That got him hired to manage the national side, getting to the Quarterfinal of the World Cup in 1986, and the Semifinal in 1990.
He led PSV Eindhoven to the Dutch league title in 1991 and 1992, FC Porto to the Portuguese league title in 1995 and 1996, FC Barcelona to Spain's Copa del Rey in 1997, and, perhaps most improbably, his hometown team Newcastle United to 3rd- and 4th-place finishes in the Premier League and thus to places in the UEFA Champions League. Following his death, both Ipswich and Newcastle dedicated statues of him outside their stadiums.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1967: Roberto Baggio. "The Divine Ponytail" starred for 2 of Italy's biggest teams, Turin's Juventus and AC Milan. He was known for his skill at taking penalties, which made it ironic that the thing he's best known for now is missing the penalty that cost the Italy national team the 1994 World Cup Final.
Dishonorable Mention: February 18, 1975: Gary Neville. The longtime right back for Manchester United didn't just look like a rat, he was a really dirty player.
8. February 18, 1932: Miloš Forman. He directed the film versions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair, Ragtime and Amadeus.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1950: John Hughes. His teen comedies of the 1980s don't hold up well. But Planes, Trains and Automobiles will live forever.
7. February 18, 1922: Helen Gurley Brown. The longtime editor of Cosmopolitan turned it into America's foremost magazine for women.
6. February 18, 1848: Louis Comfort Tiffany. The son of the founder of Tiffany and Company, his designs made the company world-famous. If not for him, Truman Capote might have written Breakfast at Saks.
5. February 18, 1862: Charles M. Schwab. Founder of Bethlehem Steel. Charles R. Schwab, the equity securities magnate, appears not to be related to him.
4. February 18, 1925: George Kennedy. Imagine being so good of an actor that you've got so many roles that you've forgotten one. He was a panelist on a 1978 installment of Match Game, and host Gene Rayburn acknowledged a contestant's answer by saying, "George Kennedy has played a cop." George knew what the answer should have been, and said, "I've never played a warden." In fact, he had, on a 1964 episode of Gunsmoke.
He played a lot of policemen, and a judge in the miniseries Lonesome Dove. But he's probably best known for being on the other side of the law: He won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the prisoner Dragline in Cool Hand Luke.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1919: Jack Palance. He played cowboys: Good, bad, and, in City Slickers, a little of both. He played Fidel Castro in a movie about Che Guevara. He played gangsters, including the Joker's former boss in the 1989 Batman. He played Andrew Jackson, Count Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Devil Anse Hatfield (of Hatfields vs. McCoys fame), and a Wild West version of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1954: John Travolta. The biggest heartthrob actor of his generation fell into a repeating pattern of disastrous films and big comebacks. I didn't really want to mention him, but if I hadn't, you might have told me, "Up your nose with a rubber hose."
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1968: Molly Ringwald. She's done well as an adult actress, but she'll forever be remembered for her teenager roles.
3. February 18, 1931: Toni Morrison. She is the most recent of only 7 writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize for Literature. The former is open only to Americans, while the latter is open to the entire world. The other 6: Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Pearl S. Buck, John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1929: Len Deighton. He was not only one of the top spy novelists of the 20th Century, he was also an artist: He designed the cover of the 1st British edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
Honorable Mention: February 18, 1931: Johnny Hart. He created the comic strip B.C., and co-created The Wizard of Id with Brant Parker.
2. February 18, 1745: Alessandro Volta. He invented the voltaic cell, the first battery. The unit of electrical power, the volt, is named for him.
1. February 18, 1898: Luis Muñoz Marín. The founding father of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, he served as Governor from 1949 to 1965, and convinced the U.S. federal government to upgrade its status from colony to Commonwealth in 1952, ratifying its Constitution.
The airport in the capital of San Juan is named for him. So are many schools in Hispanic neighborhoods in America, including in the formerly-white neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey where my parents grew up: One of their schools, Broadway Junior High School, is now the Luis Muñoz Marín School For Social Justice.
Still alive as of this writing: Ono, Newton, J-Hope, Baggio, Neville, Travolta, Ringwald, Deighton.