Karl Christian Friedrich Pfizer (German: [kaʁl ˈpfɪtsɐ]; March 22, 1824 – October 19, 1906), known as Charles Pfizer, was a German-American businessman and chemist who co-founded the Pfizer pharmaceutical company with his cousin, Charles F. Erhart, in 1849, as Chas. Pfizer & Co. Inc.
Mason Lee "Red" Cashion (November 10, 1931 – February 10, 2019) was an American football official for 25 seasons in the National Football League (NFL), where he was the referee for two Super Bowls.
Robert William Shields (May 17, 1918 – October 15, 2007) was an American minister and high school English teacher best known for writing a diary of 37.5 million words, which chronicled every five minutes of his life from 1972 until a stroke disabled him in 1997. Shields's diary, which filled 91 boxes, was longer than those kept by the journalist Edward Robb Ellis (21 million words) and the poet Arthur Crew Inman (17 million words), and 30 times longer than that of Samuel Pepys (1.25 million words).
Welcome Wade Wilson Sr. (March 17, 1928 – February 16, 2024) was chairman of the Welcome Group—a privately held real estate development firm with 5 million square feet of industrial and manufacturing facilities in over 100 locations in the state of Texas. The company headquarters is located in Houston, Texas (USA). He previously served on the Board of Regents of the University of Houston System, and was a 1949 graduate of the University of Houston.
Eric Salter Balfour (born April 24, 1977) is an American actor. He made his film debut in the Lifetime movie No One Would Tell in 1996, followed by the drama Shattered Image (1998), followed by roles in What Women Want (2000) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003). His roles on television include Milo Pressman on the action-thriller TV series 24, a recurring role in the drama Six Feet Under as Gabriel Dimas, Duke Crocker in Haven, Eddie on The OC, and as Boone in Country Comfort.
Steven Douglas Paxton (January 21, 1939 – February 20, 2024) was an American experimental dancer and choreographer. His early background was in gymnastics while his later training included three years with Merce Cunningham and a year with José Limón. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater, he performed works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. He was a founding member of the experimental group Grand Union and in 1972 named and began to develop the dance form known as Contact Improvisation, a form of dance that utilizes the physical laws of friction, momentum, gravity, and inertia to explore the relationship between dancers.
Paxton believed that even an untrained dancer could contribute to the dance form, and so began his great interest in pedestrian movement. After working with Cunningham, he attempted to remain reclusive, except when performing, teaching, and choreographing internationally.
George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet and novelist. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2004. His novels include The Finished Man, Double Vision, and the Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun. He worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at Cambridge University and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R. H. W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.
Silvia Baraldini (December 12, 1947) is an Italian political activist. From the age of 12, she lived in the United States and became a student radical. She joined the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and the May 19th Communist Organization, groups which aimed to support Black Power and Puerto Rican independence movements. In 1977, Baraldini acted as spokesperson for the protestors outside the court during the trial of Assata Shakur and two years later, she helped to break Shakur out of jail, driving a getaway car. In 1982, she was arrested and imprisoned on a 43 year sentence under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for conspiring to commit armed robberies. Baraldini was held in a purpose-built High Security Unit (HSU) in the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky which also housed two other women, Susan Rosenberg and Alejandrina Torres. Conditions in the unit were criticized by Amnesty International and it was closed by judicial order.
Whilst incarcerated, she had cancer twice. After being transferred to Italy in 1999 to serve the remainder of her sentence, she was released into house arrest in 2001 and pardoned five years later by Minister of Justice Clemente Mastella. Her life has been the subject of the documentaries Ore d'aria – La vita di Silvia Baraldini (Hours outside: The life of Silvia Baraldini) in 2002 and Freeing Silvia Baraldini.
Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (May 28, 1922 – February 21, 2012) was a pioneering American book and magazine publisher. An avant-garde taste maker, he founded Grove Press in 1951 and Evergreen Review in 1957, both of which gave him platforms for curating world-class and, in several cases, Nobel prize-winning work by authors including Samuel Beckett (1969), Pablo Neruda (1971), Octavio Paz (1990), Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) and Harold Pinter (2005).
A voracious reader and a resourceful editor, Rosset was the first to publish Beat poets Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a who's who of playwrights including Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, political biographies like Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, erotic literature like the Story of O, groundbreaking gay fiction by Jean Genet, and banned classics such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.Rosset's insistence on publishing "banned" books permanently redefined American obscenity law. "To do Lady Chatterley's Lover before Tropic of Cancer would be more acceptable because D.H. Lawrence was a famous writer and revered at many levels," Rosset said in 2009, explaining his tactical reasoning after the fact. "Lady Chatterley would be more feasible to make a battle plan for, and we did exactly that," starting with an uncensored version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, thirty years after its initial U.K. publication. After his first victory, Rosset moved on to the second, waging another legal battle to publish Miller's Tropic of Cancer. In 1964, the Supreme Court affirmed Rosset's right to publish Miller's book. France later inducted him as a Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres to honor his contributions to American and world literature; the Norman Mailer Prize was given to him for his work as a "Distinguished Publisher" and the National Coalition Against Censorship recognized him for his contributions to free speech.
John Francisco Rechy (born March 10, 1931) is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist. His novels are written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Mexican-American literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano studies courses throughout the United States. But, even after the success of his first novel, he still worked as a prostitute, teaching during the day, and hustling at night. He worked as a prostitute into his forties while also teaching at UCLA. Through the 1970's and 1980's he dealt with personal drug use, as well as the AIDS crisis, which killed many of his friends.