Jim Amash

Jim Amash is a comic book artist from Pennsylvania who specializes in inking. He holds a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and became a comic book artist in 1992. Before entering the industry, he ran Acme Comics for nine years and hosted seven comic conventions.

During his time in the industry, Amash has worked with all of the major publishers, including Marvel and DC, and has also worked on a large number of Archie related comics.

He is currently an associate editor/head interviewer of Alter Ego magazine, a magazine dedicated to the Golden and Silver Ages of comics. In addition to this, he has written three biography books including John Romita and All That Jazz, Sal Buscema: Comics' Fast and Furious Artist, and his most recent one, Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur.

Waldo Waterman

Waldo Dean Waterman was an inventor and aviation pioneer from San Diego, California. He developed a series of tailless swept-wing aircraft incorporating tricycle landing gear, culminating in a low-cost and simple-to-fly flying car.

Waterman built his first aircraft, a biplane hang glider, in 1909 while still in high school. He successfully flew the biplane hang glider on a slope near his home and by auto-tow. He then took on a partner to help build a powered aircraft that he entered in the first Dominguez Air Meet in January 1910. The aircraft was not completed in time for the meet. However, he began testing the aircraft on North Island. It was under-powered and required an auto-tow assist to get airborne. He flew the aircraft with some success but crashed, breaking both ankles.

In 1911, Glenn Curtiss moved his winter headquarters to North Island and Waterman attached himself to the Curtiss camp. In early 1912, the US Navy moved its three aircraft to Curtiss' testing station. By this time Waterman was a fixture at the station and was a frequent ride-along.

In 1912, Waterman entered the University of California as a student of mechanical engineering. When World War I broke out, and after being rejected from military service because of his broken ankles and flat feet, he became head of the Department of Theory of Flight, School of Military Aeronautics at the University of California. Later he became Chief Engineer at the U.S. Aircraft Corporation and remained to liquidate the company at the end of the war. With some assets purchased from the U.S. Aircraft Corporation, Waterman moved to Santa Monica, where he became test pilot for Bach Aircraft and established the Waterman Aircraft Manufacturing Company. However, he was forced out of business when the U.S. Army began dumping war-surplus aircraft on the civilian market for a tiny fraction of what Waterman could sell his custom aircraft for.

In 1929, Waterman built his first tailless monoplane, the Whatsit, which also used the then unusual tricycle landing gear. It had a swept wing, following the work of British pioneer J. W. Dunne on his Dunne D.7 of 1911. The Whatsit had a truncated fuselage and a forward trim plane. A development of the Whatsit was the high-wing Waterman Arrowplane.

As well as the Whatsit, in 1930 Waterman produced another innovative design with a low-wing monoplane that could change the dihedral of its wings during flight for shorter takeoffs, increased flight speed, and slower landing speeds according to the designer in its debut at the National Air races in Chicago. In addition to the wing design, he also placed the landing gears not under the fuselage but outwards under the wings.

At North Island, while experimenting with the Navy's flying boats, Glenn Curtiss is known to have talked about the possibility of a flying car. In 1917 he built a flying car he called the Autoplane. The Autoplane never flew, but was exhibited at the Pan-American Aeronautic Exposition in New York City's Grand Central Palace. Waterman was certainly inspired by Curtiss and 20 years later made one of the first successful flying cars. The Waterman Arrowbile was based on the Arrowplane. It was a high-wing monoplane, with detachable wings and was powered by a Studebaker engine. Five Arrowbiles were built. Three Arrowbiles attempted a flight from Santa Monica to Cleveland but one had to turn back after only reaching Arizona. The other two finished the flight. Arrowbile No. 6 (No. 5 was never completed), rechristened the Aerobile is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (Smithsonian Air and Space museum extension in Dulles, Virginia).

In the 1960s, Waterman built and flew his last aircraft. The Early Bird was based on the original Curtiss Pusher. The Chevybird was a similar monoplane powered by a Corvair engine. In the early 1970s, Waterman directed the construction of a replica of his biplane hang glider, built in his youth. This was done in conjunction with Michael Riggs of Seagull Aircraft, based in one of Waterman's Santa Monica buildings. Waterman gave Joe Faust of the Self-Soar Association $100 to support its Low & Slow periodical, in which notes about Waldo Waterman's final aircraft construction project appeared.

In 1968, Waterman was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame.

Waterman died on December 8, 1976.

David Parry-Evans

Air Chief Marshal Sir David George Parry-Evans was a senior Royal Air Force commander.

Educated at Berkhamsted School, Parry-Evans joined the Royal Air Force in 1956. He became Officer Commanding No. 214 Squadron in 1974 and Station Commander at RAF Marham in 1975. He was appointed Director of Defence Policy at the Ministry of Defence in 1979, Commandant of the RAF Staff College, Bracknell, in 1981 and then Air Officer Commanding No. 1 Group at RAF Bawtry in 1982, before becoming Air Officer Commanding No. 38 Group in 1984.

He went on to be Commander-in-Chief RAF Germany and Second Tactical Air Force in 1985, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Programmes and Personnel) in 1987 and Air Member for Personnel in 1989 before retiring in 1991. In retirement he became President of the Shackleton Association.

In 1960, he married Ann Reynolds; they had two sons.

Parry-Evans died on 25 August 2020, at the age of 85, following a short illness.

Peter von Zahn

Peter von Zahn was a German author, film maker, and journalist.

Born in Chemnitz as a son of an officer, he grew up in Dresden and studied law, history, and philosophy. He was drafted at the beginning of World War II. After the war, he was one of the founders of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR). For three years, he managed the NWDR Studio in Düsseldorf where he introduced Anglo-Saxon style journalism with self-critical irony.

In 1951, he went to the United States as a foreign correspondent. He worked until a very advanced age and produced over 3000 radio shows and 1000 television films.

He received many awards such as the Adolf-Grimme-Preis (3), the DAG-Fernsehpreis in Silver and Gold, the Goldene Kamera and the Bayerischer Fernsehpreis, and is considered the standard for subsequent radio and television journalism. The State of Hamburg promoted him in 1995 to a Professor honoris causa.

He died in Hamburg aged 88.

Thomas Elmhirst

Air Marshal Sir Thomas Walker Elmhirst was a senior commander in the Royal Air Force in the first half of the 20th century and the first commander-in-chief of the Royal Indian Air Force upon Indian independence in August 1947, in which post he organised the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi following his assassination in 1948. He later became the Lieutenant-Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Guernsey from 1953 to 1958.

Thomas Elmhirst was born on 15 December 1895 to Reverend William Heaton Elmhirst (b. 1856) and Mary Elmhirst (née Knight) (b. 1863), a landed gentry family in Yorkshire, where the family seat is Houndhill. He was the fourth of eight boys and had one youngest sister. 

Elmhirst studied at the Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne, Isle of Wight in 1908, and at Dartmouth in Devon.

In April 1912, Elmhirst joined his first ship, HMS Cornwall. He was commissioned as a midshipman in the Royal Navy in 1913 and was posted to HMS Indomitable in the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron under David Beatty. When war came he served on HMS Indomitable as the ship took part in the initial bombardment of the Turkish Dardanelles forts and the Battle of Dogger Bank, where he commanded 'X Gun Turret', the last one to fire at the German ship SMS Blücher before it sank. In 1915 he was selected to be in the first draft of the Royal Naval Air Service where he served until the end of the First World War. He celebrated the armistice by flying an airship (SSZ73) under the Menai Bridge with his friend Gordon Campbell as his passenger. By 1917, he was promoted to flight lieutenant and by March 1918 to major, commanding the Naval Airship Patrol Station on Anglesey in Wales. He then became part of the newly formed Royal Air Force in 1919.

Between the wars he trialled the first gyroscopic compass for aircraft in the RAF and became Air Attaché to Turkey in the run up to the Second World War. In January 1940 returned to the Air Ministry as Deputy Director of Intelligence.

During the Second World War he ran the operations room at RAF Uxbridge during the Battle of Britain. He then commanded the Egypt Command Group under Air Marshal Tedder before becoming Second-in-Command of the Desert Air Force. He continued in this role through the battle of Alamein until after the Allied invasion of Sicily. He was then Second-in Command of British Air Forces in North West Europe until the end of the war, serving in D-Day, Normandy, the Ardennes and the advance across the France and Germany. Finally he became Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence) in August 1945.

After the war he was appointed as the Commander of the RAF in India. As independence approached, Pandit Nehru asked him to be the first Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Indian Air Force in the new Union of India.

In 1953, he ran Operation Totem, the first British nuclear bomb land tests in Emu Field, Australia. Later in 1953 he became the Lieutenant-Governor of Guernsey, welcoming Queen Elizabeth II on her inaugural tour of the island as the new monarch. He held the post for five years, retiring in 1958.

He married firstly Katherine Gordon Black, daughter of William Black, on 16 December 1930, and had two children before Katherine's death in 1965.

On 30 October 1968, he married Marian Ferguson (née Montagu Douglas Scott), widow of Colonel Andrew Henry Ferguson. Marian was the daughter of Lord Herbert Montagu Douglas Scott and Marie Josephine Edwards, and the granddaughter of The 6th Duke of Buccleuch and Lady Louisa Hamilton. From Marian's first marriage, she was the paternal grandmother of Sarah, Duchess of York, and maternal great-grandmother of Princess Beatrice of York and Princess Eugenie of York. Together they lived at Dummer Down House, at Dummer in Basingstoke, Hants, her dower estate from her first marriage.

Thomas Elmhirst died at Dummer, Hampshire, on 6 November 1982, in his 87th year. 

Jack Currie

John Anthony Logan Currie was an officer in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and an author. After serving during the Second World War, he stayed on in the RAF and attained the rank of squadron leader. After he left the service he wrote a number of books on the RAF, three of which described his own experiences as a bomber pilot. His books portray life as it was in RAF Bomber Command during the course of the Second World War. Currie served as narrator in three BBC documentaries on the air war over Europe.

Earl Miller

Earl Miller was a New York State Trooper who was a bodyguard and close friend of future First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt during her term as First Lady of New York. 

At twelve years old, Miller left home. He served in the Navy during World War I; during this period, he became the Navy's middleweight boxing champion. He first met Eleanor's husband Franklin, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, when assigned to escort him on a trip to France. Handsome and athletic, Miller had been an alternate for the US Olympic boxing team in the 1920 Summer Olympics at Antwerp, Belgium; he also worked for a time as a circus acrobat. After joining the New York State Police, he taught boxing and judo to cadets. He later served as the personal bodyguard of Governor of New York and 1928 Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith.

In 1928, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected governor of New York. When Eleanor refused to be driven in the official limousine, preferring to drive herself, Franklin assigned Miller to be her bodyguard. Because Franklin's polio-induced paralysis kept him from regularly touring the state, Eleanor began making state visits and inspections in his place, accompanied by Miller. In the course of these trips, Eleanor and Miller quickly became close.

In World War II, Miller re-enlisted in the Navy, serving as a lieutenant commander. At first a director of physical training for a naval station in Pensacola, Florida, he was later reassigned to New York, where he stayed in Eleanor's apartment. In the 1950s, he moved to Hollywood, Florida.

Miller died on May 9, 1973.

Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasised flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in the medium of cut paper collage.

His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 on 3 November 1954. He is buried in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, in the Cimiez neighbourhood of Nice.

André Derain

André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.

Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1895 he began to study on his own, contrary to claims that meeting Vlaminck or Matisse began his efforts to paint, and occasionally went to the countryside with an old friend of Cézanne's, Father Jacomin along with his two sons. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière, and there met Matisse. In 1900, he met and shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck and together they began to paint scenes in the neighbourhood, but this was interrupted by military service at Commercy from September 1901 to 1904. Following his release from service, Matisse persuaded Derain's parents to allow him to abandon his engineering career and devote himself solely to painting; subsequently Derain attended the Académie Julian.

Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioure and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d'Automne. The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves, or "the wild beasts", marking the start of the Fauvist movement. In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to produce a series of paintings with the city as subject. In 30 paintings (29 of which are still extant), Derain presented a portrait of London that was radically different from anything done by previous painters of the city such as Whistler or Monet. With bold colors and compositions, Derain painted multiple pictures of the Thames and Tower Bridge. These London paintings remain among his most popular work. Art critic T. G Rosenthal: "Not since Monet has anyone made London seem so fresh and yet remain quintessentially English. Some of his views of the Thames use the Pointillist technique of multiple dots, although by this time, because the dots have become much larger, it is rather more simply the separation of colours called Divisionism and it is peculiarly effective in conveying the fragmentation of colour in moving water in sunlight."

In 1907 art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler purchased Derain's entire studio, granting Derain financial stability. He experimented with stone sculpture and moved to Montmartre to be near his friend Pablo Picasso and other noted artists. Fernande Olivier, Picasso's mistress at the time, described Derain as:

Slim, elegant, with a lively colour and enamelled black hair. With an English chic, somewhat striking. Fancy waistcoats, ties in crude colours, red and green. Always a pipe in his mouth, phlegmatic, mocking, cold, an arguer.

At Montmartre, Derain began to shift from the brilliant Fauvist palette to more muted tones, showing the influence of Cubism and Paul Cézanne. (According to Gertrude Stein, Derain may have been influenced by African sculpture before the Picasso.) Derain supplied woodcuts in primitivist style for an edition of Guillaume Apollinaire's first book of prose, L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909). He displayed works at the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich in 1910, in 1912 at the secessionist Der Blaue Reiter and in 1913 at the seminal Armory Show in New York. He also illustrated a collection of poems by Max Jacob in 1912.

At about this time Derain's work began overtly reflecting his study of the Old Masters. The role of color was reduced and forms became austere; the years 1911–1914 are sometimes referred to as his gothic period. In 1914 he was mobilized for military service in World War I and until his release in 1919 he would have little time for painting, although in 1916 he provided a set of illustrations for André Breton's first book, Mont de Piete.

After the war, Derain won new acclaim as a leader of the renewed classicism then ascendant. With the wildness of his Fauve years far behind, he was admired as an upholder of tradition. In 1919 he designed the ballet La Boutique fantasque for Diaghilev, leader of the Ballets Russes. A major success, it would lead to his creating many ballet designs.

The 1920s marked the height of his success, as he was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1928 for his Still-life with Dead Game and began to exhibit extensively abroad—in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio.

During the German occupation of France in World War II, Derain lived primarily in Paris and was much courted by the Germans because he represented the prestige of French culture. Derain accepted an invitation to make an official visit to Germany in 1941, and traveled with other French artists to Berlin to attend a Nazi exhibition of an officially endorsed artist, Arno Breker. Derain's presence in Germany was used effectively by Nazi propaganda, and after the Liberation he was branded a collaborator and ostracized by many former supporters.

A year before his death, he contracted an eye infection from which he never fully recovered. He died in Garches, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France in 1954 when he was struck by a moving vehicle.

Germaine Acogny

Germaine Acogny is a Senegalese dancer and choreographer. She is responsible for developing "African Dance", as well as the creation of several dance schools in both France and Senegal. She has been decorated by both countries, including being an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and a Knight of the National Order of the Lion.

Born in Benin in 1944 to a Senegalese civil servant, Germaine Acogny was also a descendant of the Yoruba people through her grandmother. When she was 10, the family moved to Dakar, Senegal, where she spent the remainder of her childhood. After showing a natural ability in dancing, she decided to pursue this as a career, moving to France in the 1960s to study modern dance and ballet.

Upon her return to Senegal, she began to teach dance locally, both privately and as part of the local secondary education system. During this period she developed a new style, which she would later call the "African dance". After choreographing dance to the poem Femme Noir, Femme Nu, she came to the attention of the author - President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal. After realising they had similar aspirations for African identity and culture, he sent her to work with choreographer Maurice Béjart in Brussels, Belgium. With the assistance of Senghor and Béjart, she founded Mudra Afrique, a school of dance in 1977.

While Béjart initially set the curriculum, which included Acogny's modern dance techniques. He eventually recruited more dance teachers from the United States and attempted to take over Acogny's portion of the curriculum; she confronted him and demanded she was made the sole director of the school instead. He agreed, and she combined the work of the foreign teachers with her own within the school. She continued to develop the African dance as an ongoing hybrid between modern western styles and traditional African techniques. In 1980, she wrote and published Danse Africaine (African Dance), which set the standard for Senegalese dance. She left Mudra Afrique in 1982.

Three years later, she founded Studio Ecole Ballet Theatre in Toulouse, France, alongside her husband Helmut Vogt. She returned to Senegal to in 1995, and opened the dance school l'Ecole des Sables there three years later. She involved the local villagers in the performances, with the studio set in the open air overlooking the ocean. Around the same time as the new school opened, she began collaborating with overseas choreographers such as Susanne Linke and Kota Yamasaki to with on her company Jant-Bi to develop three hour dances for evening performances. Between 1997 and 2000, she was the Artistic Director of the Dance section of the Paris-based Afrique en Creation.

On February 17, 2021, she received the Golden Lion for Dance by the Venice Biennale.

John Simpson Owen

John Simpson Owen was a Ugandan-born British conservationist who served as Director of the Tanzania National Parks from 1960 to 1972, during which time he was responsible for the establishment and management a network of National Parks, the Promotion of Scientific Research as a basis for conservation and wildlife tourism in the Seringeti National Park. He was awarded the World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal in 1973 for this and its contribution to the economy of a developing country. He was also the recipient of the Order of the Golden Arc from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1955 for his campaigning work to secure the future pensions of the Sudanese Civil Servants.

Owen died on February 23, 1995. 

Victor Barker

Victor Barker, born Lillias Irma Valerie Barker and called Valerie Arkell-Smith after marriage and who also went by the pseudonyms John Hill and Geoffrey Norton, was a transgender man who is notable for having married a woman. He was an officer of the National Fascisti, as well as a bankrupt and a convicted criminal.

Barker was born Lillias Irma Valerie Barker on 27 August 1895 in Saint Clement on the Channel Island of Jersey, the child of Thomas William Barker, farmer and architect, and his wife, Lillias Adelaide Hill. The family moved to Surrey in 1899.

In April 1918, Barker married an Australian, Lieutenant Harold Arkell Smith, in Milford, Surrey. The marriage lasted only a short period and the husband returned to Australia early the following year. On 26 August 1918, Barker enrolled as a member of the Women's Royal Air Force. After the war, Barker moved in with Ernest Pearce-Crouch, also of the Australian Imperial Force; the couple had a boy and a girl. After they had moved to a farm at Climping near Littlehampton, West Sussex, Barker started to dress in a more masculine way.

Barker left Pearce-Crouch in 1923 and began a relationship with Elfrida Emma Haward. Although Barker was presenting as a woman when Haward first met him, Barker wrote that he told her that he was "a man who had been injured in the war; that I was really a man acting as a woman for family reasons. I made some excuse about it being my mother's wish, and she believed it." The couple began living at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. By then, Barker had begun to use the name Sir Victor Barker. On 14 November 1923 at St Peter's Church, Brighton, Barker and Haward wed in what was later judged to be an illegal marriage.

In 1926 while living in London, Barker received a letter addressed to a different Colonel Barker, inviting him to join the National Fascisti. Barker replied to the misdirected letter with the missive "why not", reasoning that membership of what was a macho group would help him pose as a man. He lived at the National Fascisti headquarters in Earl's Court where he worked as secretary for the group's leader Henry Rippon Seymour, also involving himself in training young members in boxing and fencing. Barker involved himself in the kind of rough-housing that became the hallmark of the group and later recalled that "I used to go out with the boys to Hyde Park and we had many rows with the Reds." That he was assigned female at birth was never picked up on by his fellow members.

In 1927, he was brought before the Old Bailey on charges of possessing a forged firearm certificate after Rippon Seymour had pulled Barker's revolver on another member, Charles Eyres, in a dispute over party funds. "Colonel Barker" was found not guilty and left the group soon after the trial.

As Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker, restaurant proprietor, he was made bankrupt in 1928; the London Gazette notice was amended some months later to "Lillias Irma Valerie Arkell-Smith ... commonly known as Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker".

In 1929, Barker was arrested at the Regent Palace Hotel, London, for contempt of court for failing to appear in connection with the bankruptcy proceedings. Barker was held in Brixton prison before transfer to a woman's prison, Holloway.

He was ultimately charged with, and convicted of, making a false statement on a marriage certificate. The judge, Sir Ernest Wild, the Recorder of London, sentenced him to nine months' imprisonment for perjury; from the bench, Wild said that Barker had "profaned the house of God". After being released from Holloway, Barker moved to Henfield, West Sussex, where he lived as John Hill. While there, in 1934, he was arrested for theft but acquitted. In 1937 when employed as a manservant in London, he pleaded guilty to theft and was fined.

Later, he wrote about his life several times in popular newspapers and magazines. As Colonel Barker, he appeared in a Blackpool sideshow called "On a Strange Honeymoon" in the 1930s.

He died in obscurity, under the name Geoffrey Norton, on 18 February 1960. The probate notice refers to Lillias Irma Valerie Arkell-Smith or Geoffrey Norton, married woman, with an address in Kessingland, Suffolk.

Alan L. Hart

Alan L. Hart (born Alberta Lucille Hart, also known as Robert Allen Bamford Jr., October 4, 1890 – July 1, 1962) was an American physician, radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, writer, and novelist.

Hart pioneered the use of x-ray photography in tuberculosis detection and helped implement TB screening programs that saved thousands of lives.

As a fiction author, Hart published over 9 short stories and 4 novels, which incorporated drama, romance, and medical themes.

Circa 1917, Hart was one of the first trans men to undergo hysterectomy in the United States.

Renzo Piano

Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. 

His notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (with Richard Rogers, 1977), The Shard in London (2012), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (2015), İstanbul Modern in Istanbul (2022)[1] and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens (2016). He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998.

Piano has been a Senator for Life in the Italian Senate since 2013.

Guido Piovene

Guido Piovene was an Italian writer and journalist.

Piovene was born on July 27, 1907 in Vicenza to a noble family, Piovene graduated in philosophy in Milan and then devoted himself to journalism, notably collaborating with Corriere della Sera, La Stampa and Il Tempo. He took part in the anti-fascist resistance with the Movimento Comunista d'Italia. According to Felice Chilanti's daughter, he wrote the statutes for its youth association COBA.

His 1970 novel Le stelle fredde (The Cold Stars) won the Strega Prize. In 1974 he co-founded the newspaper Il Giornale with Indro Montanelli.

Piovene died on November 12, 1974.

Owen Davis

Owen Gould Davis was an American dramatist known for writing more than 200 plays and having most produced. In 1919, he became the first elected president of the Dramatists Guild of America. He received the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Icebound, His plays and scripts included works for radio and film.

Before the First World War, he wrote racy sketches of New York high jinks and low life for the Police Gazette under the name of Ike Swift. Many of these were set in the Tenderloin, Manhattan. Davis also wrote under several other pseudonyms, including Martin Hurley, Arthur J. Lamb, Walter Lawrence, John Oliver, and Robert Wayne.

Davis was born into a large family in Portland, Maine. They moved to Bangor, where he lived until he was 15. As a boy, Davis wrote plays for his eight siblings, who performed them for the town. His parents were Owen Warren Davis, an iron manufacturer, and his wife Abigail Augusta Gould. His brother William Hammatt Davis later served as chairman of the National War Labor Board in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. Davis attended the University of Tennessee in 1888–1889 and transferred to Harvard University in 1890, completing his degree there in three years. At Harvard, he was active with the Society of Arts drama organization. For a time, he coached a New York preparatory school's football team.

He married Elizabeth Drury Breyer, an actress, in 1901 or 1902, and they had two sons. Both entered the theater world; Owen Davis Jr. became an actor, and Donald Davis a playwright.

For the first two decades of his writing career, Davis produced melodramas that followed a formula. His entry in the Encyclopedia of American Drama notes, "The plays all contain life-threatening, visually exciting predicaments out of which the good emerge at the ultimate expense of the villains who put them there." In 1897, Through the Breakers, Davis's first play, opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It ran for three years. His first Broadway play was Reaping the Whirlwind, which opened on September 17, 1900. He wrote or was otherwise involved in 75 additional Broadway productions, either under his own name or as John Oliver. Davis was on the staff of Paramount Pictures as a screenwriter from 1927 to 1930. His work during that time included They Had to See Paris (1929) and So This Is London (1930), both of which starred humorist Will Rogers. Davis wrote scripts for the radio program The Gibson Family, which presented each episode in the form of a Broadway musical. Davis wrote two autobiographies, I'd Like to Do It Again, which was published in 1931, and My First Fifty Years in the Theatre, which focused on the years 1897–1947.

On October 13, 1956, Davis died in New York City at age 82. He had been suffering from a long illness and had recently been released from a hospital after three years. He was survived by his wife, their second son Donald, one of his brothers, William Hammatt Davis, and a sister, Perley Davis.

Asbjørn Lindboe

Asbjørn Lindboe was a Norwegian politician of the Agrarian Party who served as Minister of Justice from 1931–1933 under prime ministers Peder Kolstad and Jens Hundseid. He later served as County Governor of Nord-Trøndelag from 1946–1959.

Lindboe was the son of Trondheim lawman and parliamentary representative Jacob Albert Lindboe (Liberal). He became an MSc. in 1914, and was a deputy clerk in Nordfjord 1914–1915, an attorney at Trondheim City Attorney General 1915–1919 and a private practice lawyer in Trondheim 1919–1931 (Supreme Court Attorney from 1925). He was then Minister of Justice in the Agrarian Party Governments of Kolstad and Hundseid from 1931 to 1933. From 1933 he was a magistrate in the Inderøy magistrate's office, a position he held until he was dismissed by the occupying authorities in 1943. On 23 November 1945, he was appointed County Governor of Nord-Trøndelag, and assumed office in 1946. He resigned after having reached the age limit in 1959, and move to Bærum.

Lindboe died on March 8, 1967.