Famous People of Washington

On October 16, 2008, it was announced that Glenn Beck would join the Fox News Channel, leaving behind CNN Headline News. CNN pulled the program off the air the same day. A news hour with Jane Velez-Mitchell filled Beck's former slot, with subsequent slots filled by Lou Dobbs Tonight encores. After moving to the Fox News Channel, Beck began to host Glenn Beck airing weekdays at 5pm ET, beginning January 19 2009, as well as a weekend version. His first guests included Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the wives of Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos. He also has a regular segment every Friday on the Fox News Channel program The O'Reilly Factor titled "At Your Beck and Call." Beck's program currently draws more viewers than all three of the competing time-slot shows on CNN, MSNBC and HLN combined. • Glenn Beck Books

Cannon was born in Tacoma, Washington, the daughter of Claire (née Portnoy), a homemaker, and a father who sold life insurance. Cannon was raised in the Jewish faith of her mother, who had immigrated from Russia (Cannon's father was Baptist). She attended West Seattle High School.

Cannon made her screen debut in 1960 in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, however her small screen debut was in a late 1950s roles was as Mona Elliott, with fellow guest star Franchot Tone, in the episode "The Man Behind the Man" of the 1964 CBS drama, The Reporter, with Harry Guardino in the title role. She also made appearances on 77 Sunset Strip, the perennial western series Gunsmoke, The Untouchables and the syndicated Two Faces West in the 1960 episode entitled "Sheriff of the Town".

In 1969, Cannon starred with an ensemble cast led by Natalie Wood in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a film about sexual revolution in which she played Alice. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the film, as well as two Golden Globe nominations. Most of Cannon's later roles in the 1970s were less-successful, although she did receive a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination for Such Good Friends (1971). In addition, she became the first Oscar-nominated actress to be nominated in the Best Short Film, Live Action Category for Number One (1976), a project which Cannon produced, directed, wrote and edited. It was a story about adolescent sexual curiosity. In 1978, Cannon starred in Revenge of the Pink Panther. That same year, she appeared opposite Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and James Mason in Heaven Can Wait. This performance earned her a second Oscar nomination and also won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. • Dyan Cannon Books • Dyan Cannon Movies & TV

Channing was born in Seattle, Washington, to George and Carol née Glaser, and was their only child. Her father was a journalist whose newspaper career took the family to San Francisco when Channing was only two weeks old. Her father George Channing CSB later became a very successful Christian Scientist Practitioner, Lecturer, Editor and Teacher. She attended Aptos Middle School and Lowell High School in San Francisco. At Lowell, Channing was a member of its famed Lowell Forensic Society, the nation's oldest high school debate team.

According to Channing's memoirs, when she left home to attend Bennington College in Vermont, her mother informed her that her father, a journalist who Carol had believed was born in Rhode Island, had in fact been born in Augusta, Georgia, to a German American father and an African American mother. According to Channing's account, her mother reportedly didn't want [Channing] to be surprised "if she had a black baby". Channing kept this a secret to avoid any problems on Broadway and in Hollywood, ultimately revealing it only in her autobiography, Just Lucky I Guess  • Carol Channing Books • Carol Channing Films

With the lead single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from Nirvana's second album Nevermind (1991), Nirvana entered into the mainstream, popularizing a subgenre of alternative rock called grunge. Other Seattle grunge bands such as Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden also gained wider audiences, and as a result, alternative rock became a dominant genre on radio and music television in the United States during the early-to-middle 1990s. Nirvana became considered as the "flagship band" of "Generation X", and Cobain, as its frontman, found himself anointed by the media as the generation's "spokesman." Cobain was uncomfortable with the attention and placed his focus on the band's music, believing the band's message and artistic vision to have been misinterpreted by the public, challenging the band's audience with its third studio album In Utero (1993). During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with drug addiction, illness and depression, his fame and public image, as well as the professional and lifelong personal pressures surrounding himself and his wife, musician Courtney Love. • Kurt Cobain Books • Kurt Cobain Discography

As a child, Collins studied classical piano with Antonia Brico, making her public debut at age 13, performing Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos. Dr. Brico took a dim view, both then and later, of Collins's developing interest in folk music, which led her to the difficult decision to discontinue her piano lessons. Years later, when Collins had become internationally known through her music, she invited Dr. Brico to one of her concerts in Denver. When they met after the performance, Brico took both of Judy's hands in hers, looked wistfully at her fingers and said, "Little Judy -- you really could have gone places." Still later, Collins discovered, ironically, that Brico herself had made a living when she was younger playing jazz and ragtime piano (Singing Lessons, pp. 71-72). She also had the fortune of meeting many musicians through her father, a remarkable man who, despite being blind, was a Seattle radio disc jockey. • Judy Collins Books • Judy Collins Discography

One of the first multimedia stars, from 1934 to 1954 Bing Crosby held a nearly unrivaled command of record sales, radio ratings and motion picture grosses. Widely recognized as one of the most popular musical acts in history, Crosby is also credited as being the major inspiration for most of the male singers of the era that followed him, including Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Dean Martin. Yank magazine recognized Crosby as the person who had done the most for American G.I. morale during World War II and, during his peak years, around 1948, polls declared him the "most admired man alive," ahead of Jackie Robinson and Pope Pius XII. Also during 1948, the Music Digest estimated that Crosby recordings filled more than half of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music.

Crosby exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947, he invested $50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed North America's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer to pre-record his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording. Along with Frank Sinatra, he was one of the principal backers behind the famous United Western Recorders studio complex in Los Angeles. • Bing Crosby Books • Bing Crosby Films • Bing Crosby Discography

Duff was born in Charleston, Washington, now a part of Bremerton. He graduated from Roosevelt High School in Seattle in 1932 where he began acting in school plays only after he was cut from the basketball team. His first film role was as an inmate in Brute Force. His other early movies include The Naked City (1948), All My Sons (1948), Panic in the City (1968), In Search of America (1971), A Wedding (1978) and No Way Out (1987).

He appeared in a number of films with his first wife, actress/director Ida Lupino. One of Duff's later performances was as Dustin Hoffman's attorney in the Academy Award-winning Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).

On radio, Duff played Dashiell Hammett's private eye Sam Spade from 1946-1950, starring in The Adventures of Sam Spade on three different networks - ABC, CBS and NBC. In 1951 Steve Dunne took over the role of Sam Spade. Duff also appeared in an episode of Climax! entitled Escape From Fear in 1955. • Howard Duff Books • Howard Duff Movies

Farmer was born in Seattle, Washington, to Ernest Melvin Farmer and Lillian Van Ornum Farmer. In 1931, while attending West Seattle High School, she entered and won $100 from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a writing contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine, with her controversial essay God Dies. It was a precocious attempt to reconcile her wish for, in her words, a "superfather" God, with her observations of a chaotic, seemingly godless, world. In 1935, as a student at the University of Washington, Farmer won a subscription contest for the leftist newspaper The Voice of Action. First prize was a trip to the Soviet Union, which she took despite her mother's strong objections, in order to see the pioneering Moscow Art Theater. These two incidents fostered accusations that Farmer was both an atheist and a Communist. • Frances Farmer Books •