Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Fergie Jenkins Canada's 1st MLB Hall of Famer

Ferguson Arthur "Fergie" Jenkins
 (born December 13, 1943, Chatham, Ontario, Canada)




"During his 19-year Major League Baseball career, Jenkins, a pitcher, gained the respect of teammates and the sporting world alike. His number 31 was retired by the Chicago Cubs in 2009, and in 2011, Jenkins was honoured by Canada Post by creating his own postage stamp for Black History Month."

"With 284 career wins, 3,192 Major League strikeouts, and as a member of both the Baseball, and Canadian Baseball Hall’s of Fame, Jenkins is truly a baseball legend. More importantly, he is also a role model for young baseball players and Black athletes in Chatham-Kent and across North America."

"Jenkins is known as one of the “12 Black Aces,” a group of African American MLB pitchers who have won at least 20 games in a single season."
                                                                                                     (Read More)

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Special People

 I can't get the thought out of my head that the people in these images are 
Very Special People.
Can someone tell me their story? I feel like if I could pick a place to be born, just from looking at the people, their place would be right at the top of my list. This is not the first time I've seen these images and every time I see them they invoke the same feeling. I guess I'll have to give Kudos to the photographer for finding and sharing these captivating photos but I don't think they would have been possible without these people.

Nubia Mother Of Egypt - Dr. Ben Jochannan

"We come from the foothills, of the Mountain of the Moon,
 where the God Hapi dwells."


Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan (born December 31, 1918),
 also known as Dr. Ben, is an African American writer and historian.
 He is considered one of the more prominent Afrocentric scholars.
 In the following video he discusses the origins of Egypt in Nubia.

Leontyne Price


Mary Violet Leontyne Price 
(born February 10, 1927) is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.[1][2][3]
One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant", "soaring" and "a Price beyond pearls", as well as "genuinely buttery, carefully produced but firmly under control", with phrases that "took on a seductive sinuousness." [4] Time magazine called her voice "Rich, supple and shining, it was in its prime capable of effortlessly soaring from a smoky mezzo to the pure soprano gold of a perfectly spun high C."[5]
lirico spinto (Italian for "pushed lyric") soprano, she was considered especially well suited to the roles of Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini, as well as several in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
After her retirement from the opera stage in 1985, she continued to appear in recitals and orchestral concerts for another 12 years.
Among her many honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964), the Spingarn Medal (1965),[6] the Kennedy Center Honors (1980), the National Medal of Arts (1985), numerous honorary degrees, and nineteen Grammy Awards, 13 for operatic or song recitals, five for full operas, and a special Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, more than any other classical singer. In October 2008, she was one of the recipients of the first Opera Honors given by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Leontyne Price was born in Laurel, Mississippi. Her father James worked in a lumber mill and her mother Katie was a midwife who sang in the church choir. They had waited 13 years for a child, and Leontyne became the focus of intense pride and love. Given a toy piano at the age of three, she began piano lessons with a local teacher. When she was in kindergarten, her parents traded in the family phonograph as the down payment on an upright piano. At 14, she was taken on a school trip to hear Marian Anderson sing in Jackson, an experience she later said was inspirational.

If you have the time, do treat yourself to this video


See Wikipedia for more of her Bio.