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Paul Teal was born on 18 July 1989 in Wilmington, North Carolina, USA. He was an actor, known for Deep Water (2022), Fear Street: Part Two - 1978 (2021) and One Tree Hill (2003). He died on 15 November 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Captain Kidd Brewer Jr. was born on 27 August 1948 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. He was an actor, known for The Abyss (1989), Piranha II: The Spawning (1982) and Under Pressure: Making 'the Abyss' (1993). He died on 22 May 1990 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Tab Thacker was born on 10 March 1962 in North Carolina, USA. He was an actor, known for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987), Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach (1988) and Wildcats (1986). He was married to Sharon. He died on 28 December 2007 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Under-rated producer and director of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1960s he directed episodes of several cult TV shows including one episode of The Twilight Zone.

In the 1970s he got caught up in the disaster movie craze by putting out atleast five disaster films, four for TV and one feature (The Concorde...Airport '79).

Horror At 37,000 Feet (1973) combined a flight disaster with supernatural events and wonderful over-acting from William Shatner.

The Runaway Train (1973) may have looked too studio-bound but solid acting from stars such as Vera Miles and Martin Milner held viewers for the whole film.

Adventures Of The Queen (1975), in this film set on The Queen Mary, Rich directed it while Irwin Allen - "The Master Of Disaster" - produced it. The direction of the whole cast seemed very strong and powerful, mainly of Bradford Dillman as the villain.

SST: Death Flight (1977) saw Rich return to an airplane disaster film and the quality acting from Horror At 37,000 Feet is here as well. Also, Martin Milner from The Runaway Train was in this.

The Concorde...Airport '79 (1979) was Rich's first disaster film for theaters and it failed at the box office. In fact, it not only failed but was actually laughed off the screen by many as it was viewed as being just so bad. It ended the Airport movie series.

However, all the above films, including The Concorde...Airport '79, are fun to watch and, unlike some other films of the disaster genre, were never boring. Rich really had a talent for directing actors and getting the most out of them.

Ritch Brinkley was born on 18 March 1944 in Colorado City, Texas, USA. He was an actor, known for Breakdown (1997), Cabin Boy (1994) and The Man with One Red Shoe (1985). He died on 5 November 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Nathalie Dupree was born on 23 December 1939 in Hamilton, New Jersey, USA. She was married to Jack Bass. She died on 13 January 2025 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Theona Bryant was born Theona Irene Pearce in Salisbury, Maryland, and spent her high school years in Greensboro, North Carolina. In 1952, after a brief marriage which produced a daughter, she moved to Raleigh and began working as a receptionist for Governor William B. Umstead. While there, she had many people tell her she should try to get work on television. This furthered her already present ambition to be a model, so Bryant took a bus to New York and was able to begin a modeling career. After personally meeting with John Robert Powers, he began booking her through his modeling agency, which led to her first television work on the Jackie Gleason Show as a Portrette and Away We Go Girl. After this, she notified her grandmother in East Norwalk, Connecticut, and was able to move in with her to have a home base while she built her career. In 1954, Bryant was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to tour the country in a mobile unit to promote the Cinemascope film The Egyptian (1954). Bryant was dressed in a jeweled costume and appeared with a cheetah named Flo while clips from the film were projected inside the unit. In 1956, she had moved to Los Angeles and appeared as a Carson Cutie on The Johnny Carson Show. That same year, she was signed to a short-term contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She found herself romantically pursued by the likes of Rod Taylor and Robert Evans, among others. After several television roles and minor film appearances, she returned to Raleigh for a surgical procedure, planning to return to Hollywood afterwards. Instead, she never returned, leaving show business and marrying for a second time in 1967. She remained there until her death in February 2021, age 89. She asked that any memorial contributions be made to the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles.

She was dubbed "The Songbird of the South" and would be forever etched in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans as a true American symbol of World War II, especially after giving voice to Irving Berlin's classic song "God Bless America." Her inspiring rendition went on to sell millions of war bonds and even helped a hockey team in the 1970s win the Stanley Cup.

Singing patriot Kate Smith was born Kathryn Elizabeth Smith on May 1, 1907. As a child she showed a devoted interest toward singing and dancing, initially appearing in jazz nightclubs before opting for a standard music career. Discovered by the famed singer/dancer Eddie Dowling, Kate made her Broadway debut in his musical comedy "Honeymoon Lane" in 1926. Double-chinned and exceedingly heavyset, she served as the plump, singing slapstick foil to the star, and continued in that same predictable vein with the subsequent tour of "Hit the Deck" and in "Flying High" the 1930 Broadway show headlining Bert Lahr.

Unhappy at being made fun of in burlesque comedy and preferring to focus on her natural singing ability, Kate quickly joined forces with Columbia Records vice president Ted Collins who subsequently became her partner, protector and manager. Pointing her in the direction of radio, Kate made her debut in 1931 and her stardom was secured by year's end. She went on to break the record for longevity at the renown Palace Theatre. Her radio celebrity prompted a guest cameo role in the Paramount musical film The Big Broadcast (1932) singing what would become her signature piece "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain" (she had co-written the lyrics).

This, in turn, led to her first and only film vehicle. In Hello, Everybody! (1933), Kate Smith literally played Kate Smith, a meek, plus-sized radio singer who unabashedly tends to her farm in between jobs while losing the man of her dreams (Randolph Scott) to her svelte-looking sister, played by Sally Blane. As expected, Kate's character finds true happiness not in the arms of a man but in the helping and caring of others. True to form, Kate never married. Realizing she was not at all film material, Kate wisely stuck with radio and recordings, appearing in a film only one other time--as a guest singing "God Bless America" in the Warner Bros. star-studded variety show This Is the Army (1943).

She began making records in 1926 and over the years her best-selling hits would include "River, Stay 'Way From My Door" (1931), "The Woodpecker Song" (1940), "The White Cliffs of Dover" (1941), "I Don't Want to Walk Without You" (1942), "There Goes That Song Again" (1944), "Seems Like Old Times" (1946), "Now Is the Hour" (1947) and "How Great Thou Art (1965).

Kate had one of the most popular radio variety shows with "The Kate Smith Hour", which aired weekly from 1937-1945. At the same time she fronted the top daytime radio show with the midday "Kate Smith Speaks," a news and commentary program. She made a grand and memorable entrance at Carnegie Hall in 1963 and performed for Arthur Fiedler and his Boston Pops in 1967.

Television was also a successful medium for the singing star with a Monday-Friday afternoon variety show The Kate Smith Hour (1950) which ran four years. The show proved so popular that NBC handed her the prime time The Kate Smith Evening Hour (1951) to host as well. A variety show favorite, she appeared for Ed Sullivan, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jack Paar, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Tony Orlando, and Carol Burnett.

During her last productive decade, she gave live concerts and performed in clubs all over the country. Illness would intervene in the 1970s and diabetes forced her to retire, eventually crippling her and confining her to a wheelchair. 79-year-old Kate died of major complications in Raleigh, North Carolina, on June 17, 1986.

Laura Ackerson was born on 30 April 1984 in Hastings, Michigan, USA. She was married to Grant Hayes. She died on 13 July 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

James Cole was born on 7 August 1925 in Porum, Oklahoma, USA. He was an actor, known for Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), R.O.T.O.R. (1987) and Escape to Paradise (1995). He died on 24 January 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

American novelist, writer and minister Thomas Dixon was born in Shelby, NC. His father was a Baptist minister and, by inheritance, a slave-owner. As a young boy Dixon helped out on the farms the family owned; although he would later say he detested farm labor, he admitted that it helped him to better understand the life of the working class Southerner after the Civil War. He came to despise what he saw as the collaboration among corrupt local politicians, occupying Union troops and an oppressive federal government that worked to keep down the defeated South. While still a young boy he became aware of the Ku Klux Klan when a local Confederate widow had accused a freed slave of raping her daughter. Getting no help from the authorities, the woman turned to Dixon's family--his uncle commanded the unit the widow's husband served in during the Civil War. The Klan found the accused rapist and dragged him to the town square, where they hanged and shot him. The incident made a deep impression on the young Dixon, who believed that the Klan's actions were justified since the woman--and, by extension, all Southerners--could not trust the governing authorities to protect them. Dixon's uncle and father were both Klan members, who joined because they saw the Klan as the only way to bring order to a South still embroiled in violence and outlawry after the war. However, they saw the Klan eventually turn into the kind of corrupt and brutal gang it was supposed to be protecting people against, and they soon left it.

Young Dixon entered the Shelby Academy in 1877, getting his diploma two years later, at which time he enrolled in Wake Forest University. An excellent student, it took him just four years to earn his masters degree in history and political science. After graduation he received a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, where he befriended another student who went on to great success--future US President Woodrow Wilson (I).

In 1884 Dixon left Johns Hopkins for New York City, where he intended to have a career as a journalist and also act on the Broadway stage. His acting career was a bust, however, and he soon returned to North Carolina. He enrolled in Greensboro (NC) Law School, and in 1885 obtained his law degree. He then became involved in local politics, and was elected to the North Carolina legislature. However, he declined to run for re-election when his term was up, saying he was shocked and disgusted by the corruption and shady dealings he saw. He then became an advocate for the rights of Confederate veterans, and that gained him a following all through the South. After a short time practicing law, Dixon left the profession to become a minister. In 1886 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and moved to Greensboro, NC, then to Goldsboro. A year later he took over the Second Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC, then later was hired to take over a church in Boston, MA. In 1889 he took a position at a church in New York City. It was there that he ran into the "big time", associating with such well-known figures as John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt (who he helped in Roosevelt's campaign for Governor of New York). However, Dixon eventually tired of what he saw as the corruption of the church, business and politics, and in 1895 he resigned from the Baptist ministry altogether, preferring to preach at nondenominational churches. He began preaching and lecturing all over the country, gaining an even bigger following, especially in the South. At one point he attended a production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel of the pre-Civil War South, "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Infuriated at what he considered the distortions, misrepresentations and falsehoods about the South in the play, he wrote his first novel, "The Leopard's Spots" (1902), which was meant as a refutation of Stowe's novel, and actually incorporated several of that novel's characters, including Simon Legree.

If there is one thing Dixon is famous for, however, it is his novel "The Clansman", a heavily romanticized fictional accounting of life in the post-Civil War South, in the period known as Reconstruction. It portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as the protectors of Southern womanhood against the ravages of newly freed black slaves and a force for law and order, instead of the murderous terrorist gang they actually were. The book was turned into a film by famed director D.W. Griffith (I)--the controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Thomas Dixon died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Raleigh, NC, on April 3, 1946, at 82 years of age.

The American vocalist and actress Virginia Verrill is remembered chiefly for her singing "That Old Feeling" in the musical Vogues of 1938 (1937). From a musical family, Virginia entered the stage in her mother's vaudeville act as a toddler. By the age of three, she performed with the orchestra of Paul Whiteman, warbling "I Never Knew I Could Love Anybody". As a seasoned fifteen-year old big band vocalist, she won an audition (over 300 fellow applicants) for an off-screen rendition of the title song in Barbara Stanwyck's Ten Cents a Dance (1931). From then on, her strong contralto voice and precise phrasing guaranteed her steady employment as a dubbing voice for Hollywood stars like Jean Harlow (who could neither sing nor dance) or Andrea Leeds. The up-and-coming Leeds ended up replacing Virginia as the nominal lead in The Goldwyn Follies (1938), even though she had already completed recording the entire soundtrack (including "Love Walked In", which later became one of her biggest hit recordings). In the final analysis, Virginia's perceived facial resemblance to established MGM star Myrna Loy prevented her from attaining any form of stardom in her own right.

Hollywood's 'unsung heroine' continued to have more success performing in such radio sitcoms as "Uncle Walter's Doghouse" and in swank Broadway night clubs. She also recorded for some time with the orchestra of Isham Jones in the mid-1930's. In 1942, she left the entertainment industry altogether, married a doctor and concentrated on raising a family.

Jesse Helms was born on 18 October 1921 in Monroe, North Carolina, USA. He was married to Dorothy Jane Coble. He died on 4 July 2008 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Pazuzu Algarad was born on 12 August 1978 in San Francisco, California, USA. He died on 28 October 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Newell Tarrant was born on 28 February 1911 in Brownwood, Texas, USA. He was an actor, known for Hawaii Five-O (1968) and Death House (1988). He was married to Jean Tarrant. He died on 27 January 2000 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Brooklyn-born Lee Hessel attended Columbia but left to serve in the army. They sent him to engineering school at the University of Michigan and Michigan State but he left to work in his father's fur business in Manhattan. In 1950, he married a fashion photographer, but it lasted only a few weeks and was annulment. The next year, he married actress Edith Fern Bell, who had been modeling for the annual Hessel Furs show for years. They had two children. At a fashion event in NYC, Lee had met the business partner of independent film maker Radley Metzger and ended up financing "I Spit on Your Grave," a French film. The film made money and in 1963, Hessel began Cambist Films, which distributed foreign films, dubbed and edited for America, which were mostly softcore sex. Soon, Cambist was distributing new films shot in NYC. Cambist also worked twice with director George Romero of "Night of the Living Dead" fame, on 1971's "There's Always Vanilla," and in 1973, on the horror film, "The Crazies," in which wife Eadie was cast in a supporting role. However, it was one of the few Cambist-financed films to lose money and by 1978, Cambria shut down. Eadie developed early-onset Alzheimer's by 1978 and she eventually died in 1981. Hessel became successful in real estate during the 1980's and in 1989, met ex-casting director Sally Dennison and they married two years later. He sold off all his properties and they moved to her cabin in Big Bear Lake, CA, which was on land leased from the Federal Government in a former campgrounds. An avid skier in New England, he loved the Big Bear area. In 1995, he had successful surgery for colon cancer. In 2003, Sally left Hessel and moved to Idaho. They were divorced in 2004 and he stayed in Big Bear. In January of 2012, Hessel either blacked out or fell while attempting to board a ski chairlift and fell 15 feet, landing on his head. Airlifted to a San Bernardino hospital, he was successfully treated for cranial edema, but he knew he could no longer live alone in a remote mountain cabin. He sold the cabin and moved to Raleigh, NC, where he passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2014. About 20 years earlier in Big Bear, he had two half-wolves and a cat. The wolves died of old age in Big Bear, but Katie the cat ended up moving to Raleigh with her master and as of his death in 2014, she was 22 years old.

Lamont Underwood died on 23 December 2018 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

William Byrd Wilkins was born on 19 January 1965 in Louisburg, North Carolina, USA. He was an actor, known for Running Scared (2006), 360 (2011) and Doctor Who (2005). He died on 31 October 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Kaye Cowher was born on 17 April 1956 in Bunn, North Carolina, USA. She was married to Bill Cowher. She died on 23 July 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Summer Halene Robinson was born on 17 August 1998. She was an actress. She died on 13 August 2018 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Paul Beahm was born on 10 April 1962 in Limestone, Maine, USA. He was an actor, known for Mortal Kombat (1995), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Batman & Robin (1997). He was married to Abbey G. Beahm. He died on 28 October 2018 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Charles Stiefel was born on 30 October 1950 in Catskills, New York, USA. Charles was a producer and executive, known for Super Troopers 2 (2018), The Orphan Dialogues and Testament. Charles was married to Daneen. Charles died on 31 July 2023 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Mia Levinson was born in Teaneck, New Jersey, USA. She was a casting director, known for Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993), George of the Jungle (1997) and Firewall (2006). She was married to Todd Wheeler. She died on 20 June 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Nick Galifianakis was born on 22 July 1928 in Durham, North Carolina, USA. He died on 27 March 2023 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Ann Preston Bridgers was born on 1 May 1891 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. She was a writer, known for Coquette (1929) and Ponds Theater (1953). She died on 3 May 1967 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.