10. March 16, 1955: Bob Ley. In 1979, he was the 1st on-air host for ESPN. He stayed with them until retiring in 2019, and is their longest-tenured on-air personality.
9. March 16, 1949: Victor Garber. He was the 1st actor to play the title role in the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd. He's best known for playing Agent Jack Bristow on Alias. He's also played Dr. Martin Stein on The CW's Arrowverse superhero shows, and Admiral Halsey on The Orville. He is probably the only actor to have played both Jesus and Liberace.
8. March 16, 1956: Ozzie Newsome. He could be a Hall-of-Famer twice over, and I don't mean in both the College and Pro Football versions, although he is, following 2 All-America team berths at the University of Alabama. A 3-time Pro Bowl tight end with the original version of the Cleveland Browns, he caught 662 passes for 7,980 yards, including 47 touchdowns.
He remained with the Browns in a front office role, and remained with them after they moved to become the Baltimore Ravens. He built a perennial Playoff contender that won Super Bowls XXXV and XLVII. He remains the only person to be beloved by football fans in both Cleveland and Baltimore.
7. March 16, 1903: Mike Mansfield. The Democrat was first elected to the U.S. Senate from Montana in 1952, despite the Eisenhower landslide. In 1961, he was named Senate Majority Leader, and held that post longer than anyone, until his retirement in 1977. President Jimmy Carter then appointed him U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and he was kept in that post by Ronald Reagan, for 3 full terms.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1912: Pat Nixon. The First Lady of the United States from January 20, 1969 to August 9, 1974, and no one ever blamed her for her husband's dirty deeds.
Somewhat Honorable Mention: March 16, 1927: Daniel Patrick Moynihan. America's all-time greatest political transvestite. He served Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as Assistant Secretary of Labor. After a few years teaching at Harvard University, he was brought back to the White House by President Richard Nixon, as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, producing Supplemental Security Income (SSI). He served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon and President Gerald Ford, and in 1976 won the 1st of 4 terms as a U.S. Senator from New York.
But in 1965, he issued a report titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, one of the earliest examples of "blaming the victim." In 1970, he gave Nixon the phrase "benign neglect," suggesting it as a race relations policy.
In 1994, as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he chose not to hold hearings on health care reform, doing more to prevent it at that time than any Republican did. So if you don't have health insurance now, he is someone you can blame. Interviewed about it on Meet the Press by Tim Russert, a former staffer of his, he told two horrible lies: "We don't have a health care crisis, but we do have a welfare crisis."
6. March 16, 1949: Erik Estrada. One of the earliest Hispanic TV stars, he starred as Patrolman Frank "Ponch" Poncherello on CHiPs from 1977 to 1983. And yet, Italian-Americans never accused him of what would now be called cultural appropriation.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1916: Mercedes McCambridge. She won an Oscar for All the King's Men, and was nominated for another for Giant. But she may now be best remembered as the voice of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1920: Leo McKern. From 1975 to 1992, he played defense attorney Horace Rumpole in the BBC/PBS series Rumpole of the Bailey.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1941: Bernardo Bertolucci. He wrote the screenplay for Once Upon a Time in the West. He directed Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor (winning the Oscar for Best Director), The Sheltering Sky and Stealing Beauty.
Dishonorable Mention: March 16, 1941: Chuck Woolery. He was the original host of both Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection, and has hosted other game shows. In recent years, he has exposed himself as a right-wing conspiracy nut. This man was married to actress Jo Ann Pflug, and let her get away, so how sane can he be? (Regrettably, it appears that it wasn't politics that broke them up: She's a Republican, too.)
5. March 16, 1789: Georg Ohm. No, he didn't invent the Buddhist mantra. But he did discover that there is a direct proportionality between the potential difference (voltage) applied across a conductor and the resultant electric current. This relationship is known as Ohm's law, and the ohm, the standard unit of electrical resistance, is named after him.
4. March 16, 1926: Jerry Lewis. He was frequently a rotten person, including to his actual kid, singer Gary Lewis. But he was a comedy genius and a good singer, spending 10 years alongside singer Dean Martin; and he raised billions of dollars for muscular dystrophy research, especially through his annual Labor Day telethon from 1966 to 2010.
Somewhat Honorable Mention: March 16, 1906: Henny Youngman. He was not a comedy genius, but he was "The King of the One-Liners." Most notably, "Take my wife, please!"
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1969: Judah Friedlander. The comedian played Frank Rossitano on the sitcom 30 Rock, but is probably best known for his customized baseball caps and T-shirts.
3. March 16, 1959: Flavor Flav. William Jonathan Drayton Jr. has often seemed like the clown in the rap group public enemy, to Chuck D's more serious lead. But Chuck stood up for him when told to drop Flav from the group, saying, "This man can play a dozen instruments. I can't even play the lotto." Yeah, boy.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1942: Jerry Jeff Walker. The country singer is best known for the story-song "Mr. Bojangles."
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1954: Nancy Wilson. Not to be confused with the jazz singer of the same name, she is the lead guitarist for the rock band Heart, with her sister Ann as the lead singer, although Nancy had the lead vocal on their 1st Number 1 hit, "These Dreams." Nancy is the blonde, Ann is the brunette.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1991: Wolfgang Van Halen. The son of Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli, In 2006, only 15 years old, he replaced Michael Anthony as the bass guitarist in his father's band. When Eddie died in 2020, the band Van Halen died with him, and Wolfgang started a new project, Mammoth WVH, in which he plays all instruments.
2. March 16, 1938: Carlos Bilardo. A midfielder, he helped Estudiantes de La Plata win the South American club soccer championship, the Copa Libertadores, in 1968, 1969 and 1970. He managed them to a league title in 1982. He managed the Argentina national team to win the 1986 World Cup, and back into the Final in 1990.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1960: Duane Sutter. One of 6 brothers to play in the NHL, the right wing was a member of all 4 New York Islander Stanley Cup winners: 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1983. For the last 3, he was joined by his brother Brent, a center.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1989: Theo Walcott. A forward, he scored a key goal for North London soccer team Arsenal in the 3rd Round of the 2014 FA Cup, but was injured later in the game, and missed the team's Cup win. That made it all the most special when he scored the winning goal for them in the 2015 FA Cup Final. He helped them win it again in 2017.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1994: Joel Embiid. Born in Cameroon and raised in Florida, the center for the Philadelphia 76ers is already a 5-time All-Star, and in this 2021-22 season, leads the NBA in scoring average.
Honorable Mention: March 16, 1999: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. The 1st baseman has a ways to go before he matches his Hall of Fame father, but led the American League in home runs in 2021.
1. March 16, 1751: James Madison. He was a graduate of what became Princeton University. He served 2 separate tenures representing Virginia in the Congress of the Confederation, after the Articles of Confederation. For his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, he drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson later considered more important than his Presidency.
He was the leading debater of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, to the point where he became known as the Father of the Constitution. Together with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, he wrote The Federalist Papers, to try to get the 2 largest States to ratify the Constitution: Hamilton and Jay focused on their native New York, Madison on Virginia. Both did. And if that was the extent of Madison's influence, he would still be in this Top 10.
He was elected to the 1st Congress, and was, for all intents and purposes, the 1st House Majority Leader. In 1801, Jefferson named him U.S. Secretary of State, with the idea of making Madison his successor. It worked: In 1808, Madison was elected the 4th President of the United States. At 5-foot-4 and maybe 100 pounds, he remains the shortest and the lightest person to hold the office.
His tenure was difficult. He remains the only President to have 2 Vice Presidents die in office, George Clinton in 1812 and Elbridge Gerry in 1814. He was pushed into the War of 1812 with Britain, but the surge of patriotism probably got him re-elected in 1812. In 1814, with the British advancing on Washington, he became the only President, the only Commander-in-Chief, to personally command troops in battle. This was nearly a disaster, and the Madison family barely got out of the capital in time before the British burned it.
But when the U.S. won the Battle of Baltimore a few days later, and gained a peace they could live with, Madison was hailed as a hero. He is still regarded as the leader of the later Founding Fathers, the ones involved with the production of the Constitution rather than that of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution, and as one of the nation's leading intellectual giants.
In 1928, 1934 and 1945, the U.S. Department of the Treasury printed $5,000 bills with Madison's picture on them. President Richard Nixon had them removed from circulation, due to criminal concerns.
Still alive as of this writing: Ley, Garber, Newsome, Estrada, Woolery, Friedlander, Flav, Wilson, Van Halen, Bilardo, Sutter, Walcott, Embiid, Guerrero.