Feb Born Quotes

A writer can be born with a deftness in the word department, but it will do him no good unless he is born with a sensitivity to people.

Cotton Mather was born Feb. 12, 1663 in Boston, Massachusetts where he would spend all of his life until his death on Feb. 13, 1728. The son of the well-known preacher and academic Increase Mather, Cotton exhibited unusual intellectual gifts. At 12 he entered Harvard, receiving his MA at the age of 18 from the hands of his father, who was president of the college at the time. He preached his first sermon in his father’s church in August 1680 and was formally ordained in 1685 becoming his father’s colleague. While believing in witchcraft, he sided with Samuel Willard on trying to bar the legality of spectral evidence.

He was born Feb. 10, 1893, in New York’s Lower East Side. At 17 he learned to play the piano, beginning his musical career in the beer gardens of old Coney Island, picking out tunes for $25 a week. In Terry Walsh’s club he played while a waiter named Eddie Cantor sang. By 1916 he had assembled a small Dixieland combo for the Club Alamo in Harlem. There he met Eddie Jackson, who was to become his partner. In 1923 he and Jackson opened the Club Durant and acquired a third partner, Lou Clayton. The club thrived, but the partners ran afoul of the law, and the business was closed by Prohibition agents. But Clayton, Jackson, and Durante arrived on Broadway in 1928.