1921 births

Peggy Jane Rea (March 31, 1921 – February 5, 2011) was an American actress known for her many roles in television, often playing matronly characters.

Morton Landers Curtis (November 11, 1921 – February 4, 1989) was an American mathematician, an expert on group theory and the W. L. Moody, Jr. Professor of Mathematics at Rice University.Born in Texas, Curtis earned a bachelor's degree in 1948 from Texas A&I University, and received his Ph.D. in 1951 from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Raymond Louis Wilder. Subsequently, he taught mathematics at Florida State University before moving to Rice. At Rice, he was the Ph.D. advisor of well-known mathematician John Morgan.Curtis is, with James J. Andrews, the namesake of the Andrews–Curtis conjecture concerning Nielsen transformations of balanced group presentations. Andrews and Curtis formulated the conjecture in a 1965 paper; it remains open. Together with Gustav A. Hedlund and Roger Lyndon, he proved the Curtis–Hedlund–Lyndon theorem characterizing cellular automata as being defined by continuous equivariant functions on a shift space.Curtis was the author of two books, Matrix Groups (Springer-Verlag, 1979), and Abstract Linear Algebra (Springer-Verlag, 1990).

Harry Ruilton Watson (August 31, 1921 – June 8, 2001) was an American child actor, a U.S. Coast Guard combat photographer in World War II, and a pioneer in television journalism.

Lynn Davis Compton (December 31, 1921 – February 25, 2012), known as Buck Compton, was an American jurist, police officer, and soldier. In his legal career, he served as a prosecutor and California Court of Appeal judge, and is most notable as having been the lead prosecutor in Sirhan Sirhan's trial for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Previously, he served with the Los Angeles Police Department. During World War II, he was a commissioned officer with E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, in the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army. Compton was portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers by Neal McDonough.

David Weidman (June 28, 1921 – August 6, 2014) was an American animator, animation artist and silkscreen print artist known for his mid-century modern works, including posters, prints and ceramics. Weidman began his career in animation as a background artist during the 1950s and 1960s. During his later life, Weidman's silkscreens were featured in the sets of the AMC television series, Mad Men, which revived interest in his work. In 2010, the Los Angeles Times referred to Weidman as possibly "the most famous unknown artist."Weidman was born in the Belvedere Gardens section of present-day East Los Angeles on June 28, 1921. He initially attended Garfield High School, but transferred to Manual Arts High School to focus on an art career. He received a scholarship to Otis Art Institute, but never attended because of the outbreak of World War II, which led to his enlistment in the United States Navy. He used the GI Bill to enroll at Jepson Art Institute following the war. He met his future wife, Dorothy, at Jepson, where she was a silkscreen instructor. The couple married in 1953.Weidman began his career with animator John Hubley. He then became a background artist and painter at United Productions of America, better known as UPA. He is credited with helping UPA develop the "distinctive modern style" which became a hallmark of the animation studio's productions. His television series and special credits with UPA animation included The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo, The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show and Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962). Aside from his work at UPA, Weidman also worked on television shorts for Crusader Rabbit, Popeye, and Fractured Fairy Tales.David Weidman briefly left animation after to focus on silkscreening after becoming frustrated with a group-centered animation process. Weidman developed a blotting process to create original works. In a 2013 interview with Greater Long Beach, he described how he utilized pictures of objects or blocks of color with "varying degrees of transparency." His prints often mimic the backdrops he painted for 1960s era animated cartoons. He opened a small gallery and workshop located behind a liquor store on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. He gained a corporate clientele, who used his prints in hotels and other public buildings. However, he disliked having to tailor his work, telling Find Art in a 2014 interview, "When clients began dictating to me the color and the subject, they took me off my rails." He created thousands of silkscreens, but few were purchased by collectors. Some works were priced as low as ten dollars. His printing shop gradually transformed into a custom framing business.Weidman returned to animation during the middle of the 1960s. He worked on Wacky Races and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines for Hanna-Barbera. He also returned to UPA to work on Uncle Sam Magoo (1970), the last Mr. Magoo television special.While he continued to produce posters and ceramics for decades, Weidman stopped creating silkscreen prints around 1980 due to the work-intensive nature of the process. He did not begin creating new silkscreens again until his artwork was "discovered" or "rediscovered" circa 2008 when he was well into his 80s.Interest in Weidman's pieces were revived with the premiere of Mad Men, which first aired in 2007. Mad Men's set designer, Claudette Didul, is quoted in an article by David A. Keeps of the Los Angeles Times, "The style is very distinctive and indicative of that era and the popularity of Danish modern...They remind me of pictures I saw growing up and seemed in keeping with Peggy's sensibilities and reflect her younger and somewhat more cheerful outlook." Weidman's work was used to colorfully decorate the set in Peggy Olson's office and other rooms in the fictional 1960s ad agency.The inclusion of Weidman's prints in Mad Men led to new opportunities. Urban Outfitters licensed a line of pillows emblazon with Weidman's mid-century art. In 2008, Steven Kurutz, a writer for The New York Times published a book on the artist and his work, "The Whimsical Works of David Weidman" through Gingko Press. A retrospective of his work opened on June 28, 2014, at the Weidman Gallery, now located on Melrose Avenue. Weidman attended the opening of exhibition, which ran until July 31, 2014.David Weidman died of congestive heart failure at his home in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles on August 6, 2014, at the age of 93. He had lived with his wife and family in the home since they built it in the 1950s. He was survived by his wife, Dorothy Weidman, whom he married in 1953, and three children, Lenna Weidman, Josh Weidman and Troy Weidman.

Ralph Albert Hamilton (June 10, 1921 – June 5, 1983) was an American professional basketball player. He played for the Fort Wayne Pistons and Indianapolis Jets of the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America (BAA), precursors to the modern day National Basketball Association (NBA). Hamilton was traded by the Pistons to the Jets in December 1948.Hamilton, a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, played collegiately at Indiana University in Bloomington. He played for the Hoosiers in 1941–42 and 1942–43 (his sophomore and junior years, respectively) but then served in the United States Army for three years during the end of World War II. When he came back as a 25-year-old senior in 1946–47, he served as team captain and led them in scoring, was named First Team All-Big Ten Conference and was dubbed a consensus First Team All-American. He also scored nearly 1,000 points during his staggered college career.Hamilton died in 1983 just shy of his 62nd birthday.

Richard Scott Prather (September 9, 1921 – February 14, 2007) was an American mystery novelist, best known for creating the "Shell Scott" series. He also wrote under the pseudonyms David Knight and Douglas Ring.

Charles Sheldon Whitehouse (November 5, 1921 – June 25, 2001) was an American career diplomat. He was United States Ambassador to Laos and the United States Ambassador to Thailand.

G. Thompson "Tommy" Brown (April 30, 1921 - January 21, 2014) was the Professor Emeritus of World Christianity at Columbia Theological Seminary, a missionary, author, and the Director of the Division of International Mission for the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). He spent much of his life in Korea focusing on strengthening the Presbyterian Church there. His daughter is Mary Brown Bullock, who was President of Agnes Scott College and a foundation executive in developing exchange with China.

Arthur Doak Barnett (October 8, 1921, Shanghai – March 17, 1999 Washington, D.C.), known as A. Doak Barnett, was an American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, he organized public outreach programs and lobbied the United States government to put those relations on a new basis.
Barnett taught at Columbia University from 1961–1969, then went to the Brookings Institution in 1969. In 1982, he was named the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of Chinese Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.