Name	Bomber
Caption	The B-17 Flying Fortress is a bomber from World War II.

A bomber is a military aircraft designed to attack ground and sea targets, by dropping bombs on them, or - in recent years - by launching cruise missiles at them.

Classifications of bombers

bomber over Olenegorsk, Murmansk Oblast.]] Strategic bombers are primarily designed for long-range strike missions with bombs against strategic targets such as supply bases, bridges, factories, shipyards, and cities themselves, in order to damage an enemy's war effort. Examples include the: Avro Lancaster, Heinkel He-111, Junkers Ju 88, B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, B-29 Superfortress, B-36 Peacemaker, B-47 Stratojet, B-52 Stratofortress, General Dynamics F-111, Tupolev Tu-16 'Badger', Tupolev Tu-160 'Blackjack', Tupolev Tu-95 'Bear', and Gotha G.

Tactical bombers are smaller aircraft that operate at shorter range, typically along with troops on the ground. This role is filled by many designs, including those listed below. In modern terms, any combat aircraft that is not a purpose-designed strategic bomber falls into this category. Ground attack aircraft or "close air support" aircraft are designed to loiter over a battlefield and attack tactical targets, such as tanks, troop concentrations, etc. Examples: Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik, A-10 Thunderbolt II, and Sukhoi Su-25 'Frogfoot'.

Fighter-bombers (also called tactical fighters, strike fighters, and attack fighters) are multi-role combat aircraft which can (at least theoretically) be equipped for either air-to-air combat or air-to-ground combat. Many fighter bombers were also designed to engage in aerial combat immediately after attacking ground targets. Modern multi-role combat aircraft are designed to fulfill multiple roles due to budget restrictions as often as they are for versatility. Examples: Chengdu J-10, Xian JH-7, F-4 Phantom II, F-15E "Strike Eagle", F-16 Fighting Falcon, F/A-18 Hornet, Sukhoi Su-34 'Fullback', Dassault-Breguet Mirage 2000, and the Panavia Tornado.

History

heavy bomber of the World War I.]] two-engined bomber in flight over oil tanks. The outbreak of World War I led to this design of the first two-engined bomber.]]

Bombers evolved at the same time as the fighter aircraft at the start of World War I. The first use of an air-dropped bomb however, was carried out by the Italians in their 1911 war for Libya. In 1912 Bulgarian Air Force pilot Christo Toprakchiev suggested the use of airplanes to drop "bombs" (as grenades were called in the Bulgarian army at this time) on Turkish positions. Captain Simeon Petrov developed the idea and created several prototypes by adapting different types of grenades and increasing their payload. On October 16, 1912, observer Prodan Tarakchiev dropped two of those bombs on the Turkish railway station of Karaagac (near the besieged Edirne) from an Albatros F.II airplane piloted by Radul Milkov.

After a number of tests Petrov created the final design, with improved aerodynamics, an X-shaped tail and impact detonator. This version was widely used by the Bulgarian Air Force during the siege of Eirine. Later a copy of the plans was sold to Germany and the bomb, codenamed "Chathaldza" ("Чаталджа", after the strategic Turkish town of Çatalca) remained in mass production until the end of World War I.

The weight of the bomb was ; on impact it created a crater wide and about deep.

The Germans used Zeppelins as bombers since they had the range and capacity to carry a useful bomb load from Germany to England. With advances in aircraft design and equipment, they were joined by larger multi-engined biplane aircraft on both sides for long range strategic bombing especially by night. The majority of bombing was still done by one-engined biplanes with one or two crew-members flying short distances to attack the enemy lines and immediate hinterland.

The world's first four-engined bomber was the Russian Il'ya Muromets created in 1914 and successfully used in World War I.

By the end of the First World War the UK had amassed a force of heavy bombers with the sole intent of attacking Germany's industrial heart but the armistice came before it was used.

World War II

B-29 Superfortress]] dropping a torpedo.]]

During World War II bombers often looked dramatically different from other aircraft. This was due largely to the lack of power in aircraft engines, meaning that to carry any reasonable payload, the aircraft had to have multiple engines. The result was a much larger aircraft, one with a reasonable useful load fraction for the role.

With engine power as a major limitation combined with the desire for accuracy and other operational factors, bomber designs tended to be tailored to one particular role. By the start of World War II this included

dive bomber

light bomber, medium bomber and heavy bomber

torpedo bomber

specialized ground attack designs

dive bomber]]

Bombers have carried armament for defence against enemy aircraft only. They are not intended nor designed to actively engage in combat with other aircraft. The majority have been relatively large and unmaneuverable - although some smaller designs have been used as the basis for specialist fighters such as the night-fighter. Attack aircraft are smaller, faster, and more agile, but when armed for a ground attack mission, less so than a fighter. Attack aircraft may carry air-to-air armament, but typically only infrared-guided weapons (such as the AIM-9) for self-defence.

Cold War

was part of the RAF V-Bomber force]]

At the start of the Cold War, bombers were the only means to take the nuclear weapons to the enemy and had the role of deterrence. With the advent of the guided missile, bombers had to turn to different ways to avoid interception. High speed and high altitude flying became a means of evading detection and attack. Some designs such as the English Electric Canberra could fly faster or higher than contemporary fighters. Surface to air missiles threatened high flying aircraft, and bombers moved to high speed low flying to get under air defences. Since the bombs were now "stand off" designs (effectively large guided missiles themselves) they did not have to climb over the targets to drop them but would have fired and turned away to escape the blast. Nuclear strike aircraft were generally finished in bare metal or anti-flash white to avoid any residual effects.

At the same time the need to drop conventional bombs remained in conflicts with a non-nuclear power such as the Vietnam war or Malayan Emergency.

The development of large strategic bombers stagnated in the later part of the Cold War because of spiraling costs and the advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile which was felt to have equal deterrent value while being much more difficult to intercept. The United States Air Force XB-70 Valkyrie program was cancelled for that reason in the early 1960s, and the later B-1B Lancer and B-2 Spirit aircraft entered service only after protracted political and development problems. Their high cost meant that few were built and the 1950s-designed B-52s continued in use into the 21st century. Similarly, the Soviet Union used the intermediate-range Tu-22M 'Backfire'in the 1970s, but their Mach 3 bomber project came to naught. The Mach 2 Tu-160 'Blackjack' was built only in tiny numbers, leaving the earlier Tupolev Tu-16 and Tu-95 'Bear' heavy bombers of 1950s vintage to continue being used into the 21st century. Meanwhile, the British strategic bombing force largely came to an end with the phase-out of the V Bomber force (the last of which left service in 1983). The French Mirage IV bomber version was retired in the 1996, although the Mirage 2000N (and now the Rafale) have a taken this role since then. The only other nation that fields strategic bombing forces at present is the People's Republic of China, which has a number of Xian H-6s.

Modern era

(JDAM) to a lift truck for loading onto a B-1B Lancer super sonic strategic bomber March 29, 2007, in Southwest Asia in support of combat operations.]]

In modern air forces, the distinction between bombers, fighter-bombers, and attack aircraft has become blurred. Many attack aircraft, even ones that look like fighters, are optimized to drop bombs, with very little ability to engage in aerial combat. Indeed, the design qualities that make an effective low-level attack aircraft make for a distinctly inferior air superiority fighter, and vice versa. Conversely, many fighter aircraft, such as the F-16, are often used as 'bomb trucks,' despite being designed for aerial combat. Perhaps the one meaningful distinction at present is the question of range: a bomber is generally a long-range aircraft capable of striking targets deep within enemy territory, whereas fighter bombers and attack aircraft are limited to 'theater' missions in and around the immediate area of battlefield combat. Even that distinction is muddied by the availability of aerial refueling, which greatly increases the potential radius of combat operations.

Plans in the U.S. and Russia for successors to the current strategic bomber force remain only paper projects, and political and funding pressures suggest that they are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. In the U.S., current plans call for the existing USAF bomber fleet to remain in service until the mid-to-late 2020s, with the first possible replacements becoming operational in 2018. After this bomber the U.S. is also thinking of another bomber in 2037. The 2018 bomber will be made in small quantities as it will be a transition aircraft for this 2037 bomber. The 2018 bomber was, however, required to provide an answer to the fifth generation defense systems (such as SA-21 Growlers, bistatic radar and Active Electronically Scanned Array radar). Also, it was chosen to be able to stand strong against rising superpowers (China, India) and other countries with semi-advanced military capability (Iraq, Iran). Finally, a third reason was long-term air support for areas with a low threat level (Iraq, Afghanistan). The latter was referred to as close air support for the global war on terror (CAS for GWOT). The 2018 bomber would thus be able to stay for extended periods on a same location (called persistence). Also, the 2018 bomber and later bombers could be automated.

See also

Carpet bombing

Aerial bombing of cities

Aerial interdiction

Offensive counter air

Fighter

References

Category:Military aircraft

Subject name	Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
Image name	UmarFarouk.jpg
Image alt	A young, African man with dark skin, short black hair, and brown eyes, wearing a white T-shirt.
Birth date	December 22, 1986
Birth place	Lagos, Nigeria
Residence	FCI Milan federal prison in
Alias	Omar Farooq al-Nigeri
Charge	Indicted on six criminal counts, including attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder of 289 people, attempted destruction of a civilian aircraft, placing a destructive device on an aircraft, and 2 explosive possession charges
Name	Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab
Short description	Flight 253 bomber
Date of birth	December 22, 1986
Place of birth	Lagos, Nigeria

Category:1986 births Category:Living people Category:Al-Qaeda members Category:Al-Qaeda bombers Category:Alumni of University College London Category:Nigerian expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:Nigerian Islamists Category:People from Lagos (city) Category:Perpetrators of religiously motivated violence in the United States Category:Failed terrorist attempts Category:People from Lomé Category:People from Kaduna Category:People from Sana'a Category:People from London Category:Nigerian prisoners and detainees Category:Prisoners and detainees of the United States federal government Category:Anwar al-Awlaki Category:Islamist terrorism in the United States

Position	Center
Shoots	Right
Height ft	6
Height in	2
Weight lb	202
League	NHL
Team	Vancouver Canucks
Ntl team	USA
Birth date	August 31, 1984
Birth place	Livonia, MI, USA
Draft	23rd overall
Draft year	2003
Draft team	Vancouver Canucks
Career start	2003

Ryan James Elwin Kesler (born August 31, 1984) is an American professional ice hockey center for the Vancouver Canucks of the National Hockey League (NHL). He serves as an alternate captain for the Canucks during home games. Drafted in the first round, 23rd overall by the Vancouver Canucks in the 2003 NHL Entry Draft, Kesler has spent his entire five-year NHL career with the Canucks. He is best known for being a two-way forward, having been named as a finalist for the Selke Trophy in 2009 and 2010, as well as for his agitating style of play.

Kesler played junior hockey with the U.S. National Team Development Program from which he then accepted a scholarship to play college hockey with the Ohio State Buckeyes of the Central Collegiate Hockey Association (CCHA). In one season with the Buckeyes, he was an honourable mention for the CCHA All-Rookie Team and was named CCHA Rookie of the Week three times and CCHA Rookie of the Month once. In addition to the U.S. National Team Development Program and the Ohio State Buckeyes, Kesler has also suited up for the Manitoba Moose of the American Hockey League (AHL), where he was named to an AHL All-Star Game.

Kesler has represented the United States at five International Ice Hockey Federation-sanctioned events, winning one World U18 Championship gold medal, one World Junior Championships gold medal, and the 2010 Winter Olympics silver medal. He also participated in the 2001 World U-17 Hockey Challenge where he won a gold medal.

Early life

Kesler was born on August 31, 1984, in Livonia, Michigan, to Linda and Mike Kesler. He is the youngest of three children, after brother Todd and sister Jenny. His father, Mike, played college hockey at Colorado College and was a supervisor with the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association for 37 years. He introduced his children to the ice at a very young age. Ryan recalls skating at around the age of 4. Mike also coaches a Junior B hockey team and runs a hockey school in Livonia, which Kesler attended as a child every summer from the age of six to seventeen. In April 2007, Mike was diagnosed with carcinoid cancer and had seven inches of his small intestine removed to rid the cancer. At the age of around thirteen, however, Kesler was cut from every AAA team he tried out for. As a result, he played for his dad's Livonia Hockey Association bantam team, which he coached. Kesler credits his brother, who is nine years older than him, for getting him into hockey. As a young hockey player, Kesler looked up to NHL star and fellow Livonia native Mike Modano as a role model. Kesler's best friend is Chris Conner with whom he played minor hockey.

Playing career

U.S. National Team Development Program

In June 2000, Kesler was drafted in the fifth round, 89th overall by the Brampton Battalion in the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) Priority Selection. Despite being drafted by a Canadian OHL team, Kesler chose to play in the U.S. National Team Development Program (USNTDP) because of its close proximity to his Livonia home. This allowed Kesler to continue his high school education without leaving Winston Churchill High School. As a freshman, Kesler scored eleven goals and twenty assists to finish fourth in team scoring behind junior and Hobey Baker Award finalist R. J. Umberger. Over the course of his freshman year, Kesler helped the Buckeyes to a third place finish in the CCHA's regular season standings. At the 2003 CCHA Tournament, Kesler scored two goals as the Buckeye's finished in fourth place, losing to Northern Michigan 4–1 in the third place game.

Kesler's play as a freshman earned him an honourable mention for the CCHA All-Rookie Team. On June 21, 2003, he was drafted 23rd overall by the Vancouver Canucks.

Manitoba Moose

.]] Upon being drafted, Kesler considered returning to Ohio State for his sophomore season or joining the Brampton Battalion, who still held his OHL rights. After attending Canucks training camp and playing in five preseason games, Kesler was cut by the Canucks and sent to their American Hockey League (AHL) affiliate, the Manitoba Moose. Kesler began his first professional season with the Moose, but was recalled by the Canucks in November and made his NHL debut on November 24, 2003 in a 2–1 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, recording one shot on goal and 12:12 of ice time. He scored his first career NHL goal on November 29 against Calgary Flames goaltender Jamie McLennan in a 4–4 tie. For the remainder of the season, Kesler split time between the Canucks and the Moose, finishing his season with five points in 28 Canucks games and eleven points in 33 Moose games.

The 2004–05 NHL lockout, which cancelled the full 2004–05 NHL season, forced Kesler to spend the entire season with the Moose. With Manitoba, Kesler emerged as one of the Canucks' top prospects. Mid-way through the season, Kesler was named to the PlanetUSA All-Star team for the 2005 AHL All-Star Game where he helped PlanetUSA defeat Team Canada for the first time in five years. Kesler finished third in team scoring with thirty goals and 57 points to be named the Moose's Most Valuable Player. Kesler added an additional nine points in fourteen playoff games as the Moose advanced to the Western Conference finals before being swept by the Chicago Wolves.

Vancouver Canucks

When the NHL lockout ended and play resumed for the 2005–06 NHL season, Kesler joined the Canucks for his first full season with the team, playing in all 82 games and finishing the season with 23 points. Following the 2005–06 NHL season, Kesler became a restricted free agent and was qualified by the Canucks at $564,000; however, on September 12, 2006, Kesler signed a one-year, $1.9-million offer sheet with the Philadelphia Flyers. The offer sheet was the first in the NHL since the Tampa Bay Lightning extended one to Brett Hauer in July 1999.

captain Jonathan Toews in 2009.]] After playing 48 games in the 2006–07 NHL season, Kesler suffered a torn acetabular labrum and missed the remainder of the regular season, finishing the season with sixteen points. Kesler returned to the Canucks lineup for the first game of their quarterfinal playoff series versus the Dallas Stars. Despite finishing the game, Kesler was forced to undergo surgery to repair the damage and missed the remainder of the playoffs.

Early into his fourth season with the Canucks, Kesler was cross-checked in the face by Philadelphia Flyers forward Jesse Boulerice. The cross-check was an immediate response to Kesler hitting Flyers defenceman Randy Jones and resulted in Kesler leaving the game with a sore jaw. Later in the season, Kesler was involved in another violent on-ice incident when Anaheim Ducks defenceman Chris Pronger used his skate blade to stomp on Kesler's calf. Although the NHL originally announced that Pronger would not receive a suspension on the play, he later received an eight-game suspension when new video emerged of the incident. Over the course of the season, Kesler established himself as a solid two-way centre, scoring a career high 21 goals and 37 points and playing a regular shutdown role against opposing teams' top players and on the penalty kill with linemate Alexandre Burrows.

With the departures of Markus Näslund, Brendan Morrison, and Trevor Linden following the 2007–08 season, the Canucks were left without any captains for the 2008–09 NHL season. On September 30, 2008, Kesler was announced as a Canucks alternate captain with Willie Mitchell and Mattias Öhlund, while Canucks goaltender Roberto Luongo was named captain. While he, at first, continued to play on the third line in a largely defensive role with Burrows, head coach Alain Vigneault eventually split the duo in the midst of a poor January for the team. As a result, Kesler was placed on the second line with free agent acquisitions Pavol Demitra and Mats Sundin. Playing in a more offensive role, he set personal statistical bests for the 2008–09 season, with 26 goals, 33 assists and 59 points. As a result, he was awarded the Cyclone Taylor Award as team MVP. Kesler gained more league-wide recognition as a Selke Trophy finalist along with Pavel Datsyuk of the Detroit Red Wings and Mike Richards of the Philadelphia Flyers, finishing as the second runner-up with one first-place vote.

in December 2009.]] In the midst of another career year, Kesler signed a six-year, $30 million contact extension with the Canucks on March 19, 2010. The deal will pay Kesler $5 million per season. The Canucks were reportedly looking to sign him at $4.5 million per year, while Kesler was asking for $5.5 million. Kesler had made remarks the previous season in March 2009, after Burrows had recently signed a four-year, $2 million per season extension, that more players need to sign contracts below market value in order to develop a winning team. His comments later prompted his agent to refute the idea Kesler would not negotiate a new contract with the Canucks at full market value. Kesler was also contacted by NHL Players Association director of affiars Glenn Healy, discouraging him to make similar remarks in the future. His 26 power play points ranked second on the team to Henrik Sedin. Playing on the second power play unit, he earned many of his points controlling the puck along the half-boards. He also averaged a career-high 19:37 minutes of ice time per game, which ranked second among team forwards to Henrik Sedin. An MRI did not reveal any serious injury. He admitted following the defeat to not having playing his best during the playoffs. He ranked second in the league to Datsyuk in takeaways with 83, while blocking 73 shots and recording 95 hits.

Also in the off-season, Luongo resigned his team captaincy. As Canucks management waited until the beginning of the 2010–11 season to announce his replacement, Kesler was seen by media and fans as a strong candidate, alongside Henrik Sedin. Henrik was eventually named captain prior to the season-opener and Kesler retained his alternate captaincy.

Kesler began the season playing on the power play with the Sedins, as part of an effort by the Canucks coaching staff to "load up" their first power play unit. He later earned his first NHL career hat-trick, scoring all three of the Canucks' goals in a 3–2 overtime win over the Columbus Blue Jackets on December 15. Nearly a month later, he recorded a second hat trick against the Edmonton Oilers in a 6–1 win. On January 11, 2011, Kesler was named to his first NHL All-Star Game; he was one of three Canucks along with Daniel and Henrik Sedin.

International play

}}

Throughout his career, Kesler has represented the United States at various international ice hockey tournaments. He first competed internationally at the 2001 World U-17 Hockey Challenge in New Glasgow and Truro, Nova Scotia where he helped the American team to a gold medal victory over Team Canada Pacific, finishing the tournament with one goal and five assists in six games.

Kesler participated in his first International Ice Hockey Federation-sanctioned event at the 2002 IIHF World U18 Championships in Piešťany and Trnava, Slovakia. He finished the tournament with seven points in eight games, including two goals in a 10–3 defeat over Canada in the final round. The Americans won their first U18 title, with Kesler being awarded the Best Player Award for the tournament. During the tournament, Kesler was twice named the United States' player of the game—in their quarterfinal game versus the Czech Republic and in the bronze medal game versus Finland.

In December 2003, Kesler was released by the Vancouver Canucks to play in the 2004 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, Kesler's second World Junior tournament. Kesler scored two goals as the Americans went a perfect 4–0 to win Pool A and advance to the semifinals. There they defeated Finland 2–1, the team that had defeated them in the previous year's bronze medal game, to advance to the gold medal game versus Canada. In the gold medal game, Kesler scored the game-tying goal 6:58 into the third period to even the score at 3–3. After Canadian goaltender Marc-André Fleury cleared the puck off of teammate Braydon Coburn and into his own net, the Americans took the lead 4–3 and went on to win their first IIHF World U20 Championship in the tournament's history.

Although having never played for the American national men's team, Kesler was named to the orientation camp for the American team at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy held from September 5–8, 2005 in Colorado Springs, Colorado at World Arena. Kesler, one of the youngest players at the camp, did not make the final roster for the Games. Kesler finished the tournament with one point in seven games, assisting on a Yan Stastny goal in the United States' 3–0 victory versus Denmark. He was named the United States' player of the game in their 6–0 quarter-final loss against Sweden.

Having developed into a top defensive forward in recent seasons, Kesler was an early candidate to be selected to the American team for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the city in which he plays his NHL hockey. The United States played Canada in the final game of the preliminary round to determine top spot in the pool. With United States up by a goal in the final minute, Kesler dove past opposing forward Corey Perry to score an empty-netter and secure the 5–3 win. In a rematch between the two teams in the gold medal game, Kesler scored in the second period on a deflection from Patrick Kane, ultimately losing by a score of 3-2 in overtime on Sidney Crosby's game-winning goal.

Personal life

During the hockey season, Kesler and his wife Andrea live with their three dogs in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano. In the offseason, they return to Livonia. Kesler and his wife have two children, a daughter named Makayla Rylan and a son named Ryker, born on December 19, 2010.

Kesler keeps a Ford Mustang at his parents' home in Livonia, which he enjoys racing. He is also an avid gamer. In March 2010, he was announced to be the cover athlete for the 2K Sports video game NHL 2K11. Kesler had previously worked with 2K Sports, doing motion capture for NHL 2K10.

Career statistics

Regular season and playoffs

{| BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="0" width="75%" style="text-align:center" |- bgcolor="#e0e0e0" ! colspan="3" bgcolor="#ffffff" |   ! rowspan="99" bgcolor="#ffffff" |   ! colspan="5" | Regular season ! rowspan="99" bgcolor="#ffffff" |   ! colspan="5" | Playoffs |- bgcolor="#e0e0e0" ! Season ! Team ! League ! GP !! G !! A !! Pts !! PIM ! GP !! G !! A !! Pts !! PIM |- | 1999–00 | Detroit Honeybaked | MWEHL | 72 || 44 || 73 || 117 || — | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2000–01 | U.S. National Team Development Program | U-18 | 26 || 8 || 20 || 28 || 24 | — || — || — || — || — |- | 2000–01 | U.S. National Team Development Program | NAHL | 56 || 7 || 21 || 28 || 40 | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2001–02 | U.S. National Team Development Program | U-18 | 46 || 11 || 33 || 44 || 23 | — || — || — || — || — |- | 2001–02 | U.S. National Team Development Program | USHL | 13 || 5 || 5 || 10 || 10 | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2001–02 | U.S. National Team Development Program | NAHL | 10 || 5 || 6 || 11 || 4 | — || — || — || — || — |- | 2002–03 | Ohio State University | CCHA | 40 || 11 || 20 || 31 || 44 | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2003–04 | Manitoba Moose | AHL | 33 || 3 || 8 || 11 || 29 | — || — || — || — || — |- | 2003–04 | Vancouver Canucks | NHL | 28 || 2 || 3 || 5 || 16 | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2004–05 | Manitoba Moose | AHL | 78 || 30 || 27 || 57 || 105 | 14 || 4 || 5 || 9 || 8 |- | 2005–06 | Vancouver Canucks | NHL | 82 || 10 || 13 || 23 || 79 | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2006–07 | Vancouver Canucks | NHL | 48 || 6 || 10 || 16 || 40 | 1 || 0 || 0 || 0 || 0 |- | 2007–08 | Vancouver Canucks | NHL | 80 || 21 || 16 || 37 || 79 | — || — || — || — || — |- bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2008–09 | Vancouver Canucks | NHL | 82 || 26 || 33 || 59 || 61 | 10 || 2 || 2 || 4 || 14 |- | 2009–10 | Vancouver Canucks | NHL | 82 || 25 || 50 || 75 || 104 | 12 || 1 || 9 || 10 || 4 |- bgcolor="#e0e0e0" ! colspan="3" | NHL totals ! 402 !! 90 !! 125 !! 215 !! 379 ! 23 !! 3 !! 11 !! 14 !! 18 |}

International statistics

{| BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="3" CELLSPACING="0" |- ALIGN="center" bgcolor="#e0e0e0" ! Year ! Team ! Event ! rowspan="99" bgcolor="#ffffff" |   ! GP !! G !! A !! Pts !! PIM |- ALIGN="center" | 2002 | United States | U18 | 8 || 2 || 5 || 7 || 4 |- ALIGN="center" bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2003 | United States | WJC | 7 || 3 || 4 || 7 || 6 |- ALIGN="center" | 2004 | United States | WJC | 6 || 3 || 0 || 3 || 6 |- ALIGN="center" bgcolor="#f0f0f0" | 2006 | United States | WC | 7 || 0 || 1 || 1 || 0 |- ALIGN="center" | 2010 | United States | Oly | 6 || 2 || 0 || 2 || 2 |- ALIGN="center" bgcolor="#e0e0e0" ! colspan="3" | Junior totals ! 21 !! 8 !! 9 !! 17 !! 16 |- ALIGN="center" bgcolor="#e0e0e0" ! colspan="3" | Senior totals ! 13 !! 2 !! 1 !! 3 !! 2 |}

Awards

International

CCHA

AHL

NHL

Transactions

June 21, 2003 – Drafted in the first round, 23rd overall by the Vancouver Canucks in the 2003 NHL Entry Draft.

August 18, 2003 - Signed three-year, $2.475-million entry level contract with the Canucks; $850,000 signing bonus.

September 12, 2006 - Signed a one-year, $1.9-million offer sheet with the Philadelphia Flyers.

September 14, 2006 - Signed a one-year, $1.9-million contract with the Canucks.

May 24, 2007 - Signed a three-year, $5.25-million contract extension with the Canucks.

March 19, 2010 - Signed a six-year, $30-million contract extension with the Canucks.

References

External links

Category:1984 births Category:American ice hockey centres Category:Ice hockey players at the 2010 Winter Olympics Category:Ice hockey personnel from Michigan Category:Living people Category:Manitoba Moose players Category:National Hockey League first round draft picks Category:Ohio State Buckeyes men's ice hockey players Category:Olympic ice hockey players of the United States Category:Olympic silver medalists for the United States Category:People from Livonia, Michigan Category:Vancouver Canucks draft picks Category:Vancouver Canucks players

Subject name	George P. Metesky
Birth date	November 02, 1903
Death date	May 23, 1994
Death place	Waterbury, Connecticut
Alias	Mad Bomber
Motive	Anger and resentment about a workplace injury
Charge	47 charges: attempted murder, damaging a building by explosion, maliciously endangering life, and carrying concealed weapons in violation of New York State's Sullivan Law.
Conviction	Not tried: declared legally insane and incompetent to stand trial
Conviction penalty	Committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane
Conviction status	Transferred to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in 1973, released the same year

George P. Metesky (November 2, 1903 – May 23, 1994), better known as the Mad Bomber, terrorized New York City for 16 years in the 1940s and 1950s with explosives that he planted in theaters, terminals, libraries and offices. Bombs were left in phone booths, storage lockers and restrooms in public buildings, including Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Public Library, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the RCA Building, as well as in the New York City Subway. Perhaps most notably, Metesky bombed movie theaters, where he cut into seat upholstery and slipped his explosive devices inside.

Angry and resentful about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier, Metesky planted at least 33 bombs, of which 22 exploded, injuring 15 people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. He was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.

Industrial injury

Following World War I, Metesky joined the U.S. Marines, serving as a specialist electrician at the United States Consulate in Shanghai. Returning home, he went to work as a mechanic for a subsidiary of the Consolidated Edison utility company and lived in Waterbury, Connecticut with his two unmarried sisters. In 1931, Metesky was working as a generator wiper at the company's Hell Gate generating plant when a boiler backfire produced a blast of hot gases. The blast knocked Metesky down and the fumes filled his lungs, choking him. The accident left him disabled and, after collecting 26 weeks of sick pay, he lost his job. According to claims disputed by Consolidated Edison, the accident led to pneumonia that in turn developed into tuberculosis. A claim for workers' compensation was denied because he waited too long to file it. Three appeals of the denial were also rejected, the last in 1936. He developed a hatred for the company's attorneys and for the three co-workers whose testimony in his compensation case he believed was perjured in favor of the company.

He planted his first bomb on November 16, 1940, leaving it on a window sill at the Consolidated Edison power plant at 170 West 64th Street in Manhattan. with an ignition mechanism made of sugar and flashlight batteries. Enclosed in a wooden toolbox and left on a Consolidated Edison power plant window sill, it was found before it could go off. It was wrapped in a note written in distinctive block letters and signed "F.P.", stating Some investigators wondered if the bomb was an intentional dud, since if it had exploded the note would have been obliterated.

In September 1941, a bomb with a similar ignition mechanism was found lying in the street about five blocks away from the Consolidated Edison headquarters building at 4 Irving Place. This one had no note, and was also a dud. Police theorized that the bomber might have spotted a police officer and dropped the bomb without setting its fuse.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II in December 1941, the police received a letter in block capital letters: In April, Metesky's next bomb exploded without injury in a telephone booth in the New York Public Library; in August a phone-booth bomb exploded without injury at Grand Central.

Metesky next planted a bomb that exploded without injury in a phone booth at the Consolidated Edison headquarters building at 4 Irving Place. He also mailed one bomb, which did not explode, to Consolidated Edison from White Plains, New York.

On November 28, a coin-operated locker at the IRT 14th Street subway station was bombed, without injury. Near the end of the year, the Herald Tribune received another letter, warning: An unexploded bomb was found in a rental locker at Pennsylvania Station.

1954

A bomb wedged behind a sink in a Grand Central Terminal men's room exploded in March, slightly injuring three men.

A bomb planted in a phone booth at the Port Authority Bus Terminal exploded with no injuries. Another bomb was discovered in a phone booth that was removed from Pennsylvania Station for repair.

As a capacity Radio City Music Hall audience of 6,200 watched Bing Crosby's White Christmas on November 7, a bomb stuffed into the bottom cushion of a seat in the 15th row exploded, injuring four patrons. The explosion was muffled by the heavy upholstery, and only those nearby heard it. While the film continued, the injured were escorted to the facility's first-aid room and about 50 people in the immediate area were moved to the back of the theater. After the film and the following stage show concluded an hour-and-a-half later, the police roped off 150 seats in the area of the explosion and began the search for evidence.

1955

A bomb exploded without injuries on the platform at the IRT Sutter Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. A bomb hung beneath a phone booth shelf exploded on the main floor of Macy's department store, with no injuries. Two bombs exploded without injuries at Pennsylvania Station, one in a rental locker and one in a phone booth. A bomb was found at Radio City Music Hall after a warning phone call.

At the Roxy Theater, a bomb dropped out of a slashed seat onto an upholsterer's workbench without exploding. A seat bomb exploded at the Paramount Theater; one patron was struck on the shoe by bomb fragments but disclaimed injury. Investigators discovered a small penknife pushed inside the seat, one of several found at theater seat bombings. They theorized that the bomber left his knives behind in case he was stopped and questioned. In December, a bomb exploded without injuries in a Grand Central men's-room stall.

1956

A 74-year-old men's-room attendant at Pennsylvania Station was seriously injured when a bomb in a toilet bowl exploded. A young man had reported an obstruction and the attendant tried to clear it using a plunger. Among the porcelain fragments, investigators found a watch frame and a wool sock.

A guard at the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center discovered a piece of pipe about five inches long in a telephone booth. A second guard thought it might be useful in a plumbing project and took it home on the bus to New Jersey, where it exploded on his kitchen table early the next morning. No one was injured.

A December 2 bombing at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn left six of the theater's 1,500 occupants injured, one seriously, and drew tremendous news coverage and editorial attention. The next day, Police Commissioner Stephen P. Kennedy ordered what he called the "greatest manhunt in the history of the Police Department."

On December 24, a New York Public Library clerk using a phone booth dropped a coin. Looking up after he retrieved it, he saw a maroon-colored sock held to the underside of the shelf by a magnet. The sock contained an iron pipe with a threaded cap on each end. After consulting with other employees, he threw the device out a window into Bryant Park, bringing the bomb squad and more than 60 NYPD police officers and detectives to the scene. In a letter to the New York Journal American the next month, Metesky said that the Public Library bomb, as well as one discovered later the same week inside a seat at the Times Square Paramount, had been planted months before.

The search

Throughout the investigation, the prevailing theory was that the bomber was a former Con Edison employee with a grudge against the company. Con Edison employment records were reviewed, but there were hundreds of other leads, tips and crank letters to be followed up on. Detectives ranged far and wide, checking lawsuit records, mental hospital admissions, vocational schools where bomb parts might be made. Citizens turned in neighbors who behaved oddly, and co-workers who seemed to know too much about bombs. Everything had to be checked. A new group, the Bomb Investigation Unit, was formed to work on nothing but bomber leads. A warning circular picturing a homemade pipe bomb similar to the bomber's was distributed. Police distributed samples of the bomber's distinctive printing and asked anyone who might recognize it to notify them. A review of drivers' license applications in White Plains, the city favored by the bomber for posting his mail, found similarities in 500 of them to the bomber's printing; the names were forwarded to the NYPD for investigation.

On December 27, 1956, the New York City Board of Estimate and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association posted $26,000 in rewards for the bomber's apprehension.

Distractions

Throughout the search, simulated bombs and false bomb reports wasted police resources and frightened an already nervous public. Some examples:

In 1951 Frederick Eberhardt, 56 years old and like Metesky a former Con Edison employee with a grudge, sent a simulated pipe bomb filled with sugar to the company's personnel director at 4 Irving Place. Eberhardt was charged with sending threatening material through the mails. At his arraignment in November, an assistant district attorney told the judge, "This defendant is a particular source of annoyance to the New York City police. We are firmly convinced that he is not of sound mind. He has been sending simulated bombs around the city the past few months. Hundreds of police have been called out at all hours of the day and night to investigate because of his actions." Eberhardt was sent to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric examination. Several months later the case was dismissed after Eberhardt's lawyer argued successfully that the package contained no "written threats", as the law required.

In October 1951, the main waiting room at Grand Central Terminal was emptied and 3,000 lockers were searched after a telephoned bomb warning. The search involved more than 35 NYPD personnel, and took three hours because 1,500 of the lockers were in use and only one master key was available. As each locker was opened, the head of the bomb squad palpated its contents, keeping a portable fluoroscope at the ready.

On December 29, 1956, at the height of false bomb reports from theaters, department stores, schools and offices, a note left in a phone booth at Grand Central Terminal reported that a bomb had been placed at the Empire State Building, requiring a search of all 102 floors of the landmark. A 63-year-old railroad worker picked up at Grand Central as a suspect died of a heart attack while being questioned at the East 35th Street station house. Later investigation eliminated him as a suspect.

Profile

Fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, the bomb investigation unit and other NYPD groups worked with dedication but made little progress. With traditional police methods seemingly useless against Metesky's erratic bombing campaign, police captain John Cronin approached his friend Dr. James Brussel, a criminologist, psychiatrist, and assistant commissioner of the New York State Commission for Mental Hygiene. Captain Cronin asked Brussel to meet with Inspector Howard E. Finney, head of the NYPD's Crime Laboratory.

In his office with Finney and two detectives, Brussel examined the crime-scene photos and letters and discussed the bomber's metal-working and electrical skills. As he talked with the police, Brussel developed what he called a kind of "portrait" of the bomber, what we would now call an offender profile. The bomber's belief that he had been wronged by Consolidated Edison and by others acting in concert with Consolidated Edison seemed to dominate his thoughts, leading Brussel to conclude that the bomber was suffering from paranoia, a condition he describes as "a chronic disorder of insidious development, characterized by persistent, unalterable, systematized, logically constructed delusions." Based on the evidence and his own experience dealing with psychotic criminals, Brussel put forth a number of theories beyond the obvious grudge against Consolidated Edison:

Metesky's second letter provided some details about the materials used in the bombs (he favored pistol powder, as "shotgun powder has very little power"), promised a bombing "truce" until at least March 1, and wrote "I was injured on job at Consolidated Edison plant — as a result I am adjudged — totally and permanently disabled", going on to say that he had had to pay his own medical bills and that Consolidated Edison had blocked his workers' compensation case. He also said After police editing, the newspaper published his letter on January 15 and asked the bomber for "further details and dates" about his compensation case so that a new and fair hearing could be held.

Metesky's third letter was received by the newspaper on Saturday, January 19. The letter complained of lying unnoticed for hours on "cold concrete" after his injury without any first aid being rendered, then developing pneumonia and later tuberculosis. The letter added details about his lost compensation case and the "perjury" of his co-workers, and gave the date of his injury, September 5, 1931. The letter suggested that if he did not have a family that would be "branded" by his giving himself up, he might consider doing so to get his compensation case reopened. He thanked the Journal American for publicizing his case and said "the bombings will never be resumed." This letter was published Tuesday, the day after Metesky was arrested.

Identification

Con Edison clerk Alice Kelly had read the Christmas Day profile and for days had been scouring company workers' compensation files for employees with a serious health problem. On Friday, January 18, 1957, while searching the final batch of "troublesome" worker's compensation case files – those where threats were made or implied – she found a file marked in red with the words "injustice" and "permanent disability", words that had been printed in the Journal American. The file indicated that one George Metesky, an employee from 1929 to 1931, had been injured in a plant accident on September 5, 1931. Several letters from Metesky in the file used wording similar to the letters in the Journal American, including the phrase "dastardly deeds". The police were notified shortly before 5:00 that evening. They initially treated the notification as just "one of a number" of leads they were working on, but asked Waterbury police to do a "discreet check" on George Metesky and the house at 17 Fourth Street.

After Metesky's arrest, early police statements credited the finding of his file to an NYPD detective. Later, a report developed in a reward investigation conceded that Alice Kelly had found the file, and explained the misplaced credit as due to a misunderstanding of the file being "picked up" by the detective (at the Con Edison offices on Monday morning) as meaning that the file was "picked out" (of many). Although the NYPD did officially credit Kelly with turning up the clue that led to Metesky's arrest, she declined to claim the $26,000 in rewards, saying she had merely been doing her job. Consolidated Edison's board of directors also declined to file for the reward, prompting a group of shareholders to file as representatives of Kelly and the company.

Police investigators who later reviewed the path that led them to Metesky said that Con Edison had impeded the investigation for almost two years by repeatedly telling them that the records of employees whose services were terminated prior to 1940, the group Metesky was in, had been destroyed. The investigators said that they had learned of the records' existence only on January 14, through a confidential tip, and that even in the face of police demands and formal requests Con Edison stalled, declaring that the papers were legal documents and that the company's legal department would have to be consulted before granting access. A statement by the president of Consolidated Edison said this was due to a "misunderstanding". Metesky had answered the door in pajamas; after he was ordered to get dressed for the trip to Waterbury Police Headquarters, he reappeared wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned.

Interrogation

Metesky told the arresting officers that he had been "gassed" in the Con Edison accident, had contracted tuberculosis as a result, and started planting bombs because he "got a bum deal". Going over a police list of 32 bomb locations, but never using the word "bomb", he remembered the exact date where each "unit" had been placed, and its size. He then added to the police list the size, date and location of 15 early bombs the police had not known about – all left at Con Edison locations, and apparently never reported. When his Con Edison bombs were not mentioned in the newspapers, he started planting bombs in public places to gain publicity for what he termed the "injustices" done him.

In their search, police found parts for a bomb that would have been larger than any of the others. Metesky explained that it was intended for the New York Coliseum.

Commitment to Matteawan

After hearing from psychiatric experts, Judge Samuel S. Liebowitz declared the tubercular Metesky a paranoid schizophrenic, "hopeless and incurable both mentally and physically", and found him legally insane and incompetent to stand trial. On April 18, 1957, Judge Liebowitz committed Metesky to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane at Beacon, New York.

Metesky was unresponsive to psychiatric therapy, but was a model inmate and caused no trouble. He was visited regularly by his sisters and occasionally by Dr. Brussel, to whom he would point out that he had deliberately built his bombs not to kill anyone.

Doctors determined that he was harmless, and because he had already served two-thirds of the 25-year maximum sentence he would have received at trial, Metesky was released on December 13, 1973. The single condition was that he make regular visits to a Connecticut Department of Mental Hygiene clinic near his home.

Interviewed by a reporter upon his release, he said that he had forsworn violence, but reaffirmed his anger and resentment toward Consolidated Edison. He also stated that before he began planting his bombs, Metesky returned to his home in Waterbury, where he died 20 years later at the age of 90.

References

Category:1903 births Category:1994 deaths

Category:History of New York City Category:People from Waterbury, Connecticut Category:Terrorist incidents in the United States Category:Terrorist incidents in New York

Name	James Stewart
Caption	Stewart, Donna Reed and Karolyn Grimes in It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
Birth name	James Maitland Stewart
Birth date	May 20, 1908
Birth place	Indiana, Pennsylvania, United States
Death date	July 02, 1997
Death place	Los Angeles, California, United States
Other names	Jimmy Stewart
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1933–1991
Spouse	Gloria Hatrick (1949–1994) (her death) 2 children

}}

James Maitland "Jimmy" Stewart (May 20, 1908 – July 2, 1997) was an American film and stage actor. Over the course of his career, he starred in many films widely considered classics and was nominated for five Academy Awards, winning one in competition and receiving one Lifetime Achievement award. He was a major MGM contract star. He also had a noted military career and was a World War II and Vietnam War veteran, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the United States Air Force Reserve.

Throughout his seven decades in Hollywood, Stewart cultivated a versatile career and recognized screen image in such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, Harvey, It's a Wonderful Life, Rear Window, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo. He is the most represented leading actor on the AFI's 100 Years…100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) and AFI's 10 Top 10 lists. He is also the most represented leading actor on the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time list presented by Entertainment Weekly. As of 2007, ten of his films have been inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Stewart left his mark on a wide range of film genres, including westerns, suspense thrillers, family films, biographies and screwball comedies. He worked for a number of renowned directors later in his career, most notably Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, George Cukor, and Anthony Mann. He won many of the industry's highest honors and earned Lifetime Achievement awards from every major film organization. He died at age 89, leaving behind a legacy of classic performances, and is considered one of the finest actors of the "Golden Age of Hollywood". He was named the third Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.

Early life and career

James Maitland Stewart was born on May 20, 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store. Stewart's parents were of Scottish Presbyterian origin. His Jackson ancestors served in the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. The eldest of three children (he had two younger sisters, Virginia and Mary), he was expected to continue his father's business, which had been in the family for three generations.

His mother was an excellent pianist but his father discouraged Stewart's request for lessons. But when his father accepted a gift of an accordion from a guest, young Stewart quickly learned to play the instrument, which became a fixture off-stage during his acting career. As the family grew, music continued to be an important part of family life.

Stewart attended Mercersburg Academy prep school, graduating in 1928. He was active in a variety of activities. He played on the football and track teams, was art editor of the KARUX yearbook, and a member of the choir club, glee club, and John Marshall Literary Society. During his first summer break, Stewart returned to Indiana, Pennsylvania, to work as a brick loader for a local construction company and on highway and road construction jobs where he painted lines on the roads. Over the following two summers, he took a job as an assistant with a professional magician. He also made his first appearance on the stage at Mercersburg, as Buquet in the play The Wolves.

A shy child, Stewart spent much of his after-school time in the basement working on model airplanes, mechanical drawing and chemistry—all with a dream of going into aviation. But he abandoned visions of being a pilot when his father insisted that instead of the United States Naval Academy he attend Princeton University.

Stewart enrolled at Princeton in 1928 as a member of the class of 1932. He excelled at studying architecture, so impressing his professors with his thesis on an airport design that he was awarded a scholarship for graduate studies; He was a member of the Princeton Charter Club as well as a head cheerleader. In his spare time, he enjoyed going to the movies at the time when 'talkies' were just displacing silent films.

His acting and accordion talents at Princeton led him to be invited to the University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company in West Falmouth, a town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The company had been organized in 1928 and would run until 1932, with Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, and Charles Leatherbee as directors. Stewart performed in bit parts in the Players' productions in Cape Cod during the summer of 1932, after he graduated. The troupe had previously included Henry Fonda, who married Margaret Sullavan on Christmas Day 1931, while the University Players were in Baltimore, Maryland, for an 18-week winter season. Sullavan, who had rejoined the University Players in Baltimore in November 1931 at the close of the post-Broadway tour of A Modern Virgin, left the Players for good at the end of The Trial of Mary Dugan in Baltimore in March 1932. By the time Stewart joined the University Players on Cape Cod after his graduation from Princeton in 1932, Fonda and Sullavan's brief marriage had ended. Stewart and Fonda became great friends over the summer of 1932 when they shared an apartment with Joshua Logan and Myron McCormick. When Stewart came to New York at the end of the summer stock season, which had included the Broadway try-out of Goodbye Again, he shared an apartment with Fonda, who had by then finalized his divorce from Sullavan. Along with fellow University Players Alfred Dalrymple and Myron McCormick, Stewart debuted on Broadway as a chauffeur in the comedy Goodbye Again, in which he had two lines. The New Yorker noted, "Mr. James Stewart's chauffeur... comes on for three minutes and walks off to a round of spontaneous applause."

The play was a moderate success, but times were hard. Many Broadway theaters had been converted to movie houses and the Depression was reaching bottom. "From 1932 through 1934," Stewart later recalled, "I'd only worked three months. Every play I got into folded." By 1934, he had gotten more substantial stage roles, including the modest hit Page Miss Glory and his first dramatic stage role in Sidney Howard's Yellow Jack, which convinced him to continue his acting career. However, Stewart and Fonda, still roommates, were both struggling.

In the fall of 1934, Fonda's success in The Farmer Takes a Wife took him to Hollywood. Finally, Stewart attracted the interest of MGM scout Bill Grady who saw Stewart on the opening night of Divided by Three, a glittering première with many luminaries in attendance, including Irving Berlin and Moss Hart and Fonda, who had returned to New York for the show. With Fonda's encouragement, Stewart agreed to take a screen test, after which he signed a contract with MGM in April 1935, as a contract player for up to seven years at $350 a week.

Upon Stewart's arrival by train in Los Angeles, Fonda greeted him at the station and took him to Fonda's studio-supplied lodging, next door to Greta Garbo. Stewart's first job at the studio was as a participant in screen tests with newly arrived starlets. At first, he had trouble being cast in Hollywood films owing to his gangling looks and shy, humble screen presence. His first film was the poorly received Spencer Tracy vehicle The Murder Man (1935), but Rose Marie (1936), an adaptation of a popular operetta, was more successful. After mixed success in films, he received his first substantial part in 1936's After the Thin Man.

On the romantic front, he found himself dating newly divorced Ginger Rogers, whom he had revered while a student at Princeton only a few years earlier. The romance soon cooled, however, and by chance Stewart encountered Margaret Sullavan again. Stewart found his footing in Hollywood thanks largely to Sullavan, who campaigned for Stewart to be her leading man in the 1936 romantic comedy Next Time We Love. She rehearsed extensively with him, having a noticeable effect on his confidence. She encouraged Stewart to feel comfortable with his unique mannerisms and boyish charm and use them naturally as his own style. In the meantime, roommate Fonda continued to arrange parties with starlets, who found Stewart different from the other young actors and irresistible in his own way. Stewart was enjoying Hollywood life and had no regrets about giving up the stage, as he worked six days a week in the MGM factory. In 1936, he acquired big-time agent Leland Hayward, who would eventually marry Sullavan. Hayward started to chart Stewart's career, deciding the best path for him was through loan-outs to other studios.

Pre-war success

and James Stewart in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).]] In 1938, Stewart had a brief, tumultuous, and well-publicized romance with Hollywood queen Norma Shearer, whose husband, Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, had died two years earlier. Stewart began a successful partnership with director Frank Capra in 1938, when he was loaned out to Columbia Pictures to star in You Can't Take It With You. Frank Capra had been impressed by Stewart's minor role in Navy Blue and Gold (1937). The director had recently completed several popular movies, including It Happened One Night (1934), and was looking for the right actor to suit his needs—which other recent actors in his films such as Clark Gable, Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper did not quite fit. Not only was Stewart just what he was looking for, but Capra also found Stewart understood that prototype intuitively and required very little directing. Later Capra commented, "I think he's probably the best actor who's ever hit the screen."

The heart-warming Depression-era film (You Can't Take It With You), starring Capra's "favorite actress", comedienne Jean Arthur, won the 1938 Best Picture Academy Award. The following year saw Stewart work with Capra and Arthur again in the political comedy-drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Stewart replaced intended star Gary Cooper in the film, playing an idealist thrown into the political arena. Upon its October 1939 release, the film garnered critical praise and became a box-office success. Stewart was nominated for the first of five Academy Awards for Best Actor. Even after this great success, Stewart's parents were still trying to talk him into leaving Hollywood and its sinful ways and to return to his home town to lead a decent life. Instead, he took a secret trip to Europe to take a break and returned home in 1939 just as Germany invaded Poland. Made for Each Other (1939) had Stewart sharing the screen with irrepressible Carole Lombard in a melodrama that garnered good reviews for both stars, but did less well with the public. Newsweek wrote that they were "perfectly cast in the leading roles." Between movies, Stewart began a radio career and became a distinctive voice on the "Lux Radio Theater", "The Screen Guild Theater" and other shows. So well-known had his slow drawl become that comedians started to impersonate him, a form of flattery which continued for most of his life.

(1940)]] In 1940, Stewart and Margaret Sullavan reunited for two films. The first, the Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedy, The Shop Around the Corner, starred Stewart and Sullavan as co-workers unknowingly involved in a pen-pal romance who cannot stand each other in real life (this was later remade into the musical, In the Good Old Summertime with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, and later as the romantic comedy You've Got Mail with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). It was Stewart's fifth film of the year and that rare film shot in sequence; it was completed in only 27 days. The Mortal Storm, directed by Frank Borzage, was one of the first blatantly anti-Nazi films to be produced in Hollywood and featured the pair as friends and then lovers caught in turmoil upon Hitler's rise to power.

Stewart also starred with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in George Cukor's classic The Philadelphia Story (1940). His performance as an intrusive, fast-talking reporter earned him his only Academy Award in a competitive category (Best Actor, 1941), and he beat out his good friend Henry Fonda (The Grapes of Wrath). Stewart thought his performance "entertaining and slick and smooth" but lacking the "guts" of "Mr. Smith." Stewart gave the Oscar statuette to his father, who displayed it for many years in a case inside the front door of his hardware store, alongside other family awards and military medals.

During the months before he began military service, Stewart appeared in a series of screwball comedies with varying levels of success. He followed the mediocre No Time for Comedy (1940) and Come Live with Me (1941) with the Judy Garland musical Ziegfeld Girl and the George Marshall romantic comedy Pot o' Gold. Stewart was drafted in late 1940, a situation that coincided with the lapse in his MGM contract, marking a turning point in Stewart's career, with 28 movies to his credit at that point.

Military service

The Stewart family had deep military roots as both grandfathers had fought in the Civil War, and his father had served during both the Spanish-American War and World War I. Since Stewart considered his father to be the biggest influence on his life, it was not surprising that when another war eventually came, he too was eager to serve. Although members of his family had previously been in the infantry, Stewart chose to become a military flyer.

An early interest in flying led Stewart to gain his Private Pilot certificate in 1935 and Commercial Pilot certificate in 1938. He often flew cross-country to visit his parents in Pennsylvania, navigating by the railroad tracks.

Considered a highly proficient pilot, he even entered a cross-country race as a co-pilot in 1939. Along with musician/composer Hoagy Carmichael, Stewart saw the need for trained war pilots and joined with other Hollywood celebrities to invest in Thunderbird Field, a pilot-training school built and operated by Southwest Airways in Glendale, Arizona. This airfield became part of the United States Army Air Forces training establishment and trained more than 10,000 pilots during WWII, and is now the home of Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Later in 1940, Stewart was drafted into the United States Army but was rejected for failing to meet height and weight requirements for new recruits—Stewart was five pounds (2.3 kg) under the standard. To get up to 148 pounds he sought out the help Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's muscle man and trainer Don Loomis, who was noted for his ability to add or subtract pounds in his studio gymnasium. Stewart subsequently attempted to enlist in the Army Air Corps, but still came in under the weight requirement, although he persuaded the AAC enlistment officer to run new tests, this time passing the weigh-in, with the result that Stewart enlisted in the Army in March 1941. He became the first major American movie star to wear a military uniform in World War II.

Stewart enlisted as a private

Public appearances by Stewart were limited engagements scheduled by the Army Air Forces. "Stewart appeared several times on network radio with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he performed with Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Walter Huston and Lionel Barrymore in an all-network radio program called We Hold These Truths, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights." In early 1942, Stewart was asked to appear in a propaganda film to help recruit the anticipated 100,000 airmen the USAAF would need to win the war. The USAAC's First Motion Picture Unit shot scenes of Lieutenant Stewart in his pilot's flight suit and recorded his voice for narration. The short film, Winning Your Wings, appeared nationwide beginning in late May and was very successful, resulting in 150,000 new recruits.

Stewart was concerned that his expertise and celebrity status would relegate him to instructor duties "behind the lines." His fears were confirmed when he was stationed for six months at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to train bombardiers. He was transferred to Hobbs AAF to become an instructor pilot for the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress, where he trained B-17 pilots for nine months at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho. Stewart appealed to his commander, a pre-war aviator, who understood the situation and reassigned him to a unit going overseas.

with palm by Lt. Gen. Henri Valin, Chief of Staff of the French Air Force, for his role in the liberation of France. USAF photo.]] In August 1943, Stewart was finally assigned to the 445th Bombardment Group at Sioux City AAB, Iowa, first as operations officer of the 703rd Bombardment Squadron and then as its commander, at the rank of captain. In December, the 445th Bombardment Group flew its B-24 Liberator bombers to RAF Tibenham, Norfolk, England and immediately began combat operations. While flying missions over Germany, Stewart was promoted to major. In March 1944, he was transferred as group operations officer to the 453rd Bombardment Group, a new B-24 unit that had been experiencing difficulties. As a means to inspire his new group, Stewart flew as command pilot in the lead B-24 on numerous missions deep into Nazi-occupied Europe. These missions went uncounted at Stewart's orders. His "official" total is listed as 20 and is limited to those with the 445th. In 1944, he twice received the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions in combat and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He also received the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. In July 1944, after flying 20 combat missions, Stewart was made Chief of Staff of the 2nd Combat Bombardment Wing of the Eighth Air Force, and though he was no longer required or expected to fly missions, he continued to do so. Before the war ended, he was promoted to colonel, one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years.

Stewart continued to play a role in the United States Air Force Reserve after the war, achieving the rank of Brigadier General on July 23, 1959. Stewart did not often talk of his wartime service, perhaps due to his desire to be seen as a regular soldier doing his duty instead of as a celebrity. He did appear on the TV series The World At War to discuss the October 14, 1943, bombing mission to Schweinfurt, which was the center of the German ball-bearing industry. This mission is known in USAF history as Black Thursday due to the high casualties it sustained; 60 aircraft were lost out of 291 B-17s dispatched unescorted to Schweinfurt. The available escort aircraft lacked the range to accompany them. Upon his request, he was identified only as "James Stewart, Squadron Commander" in the documentary.

After the war, Stewart served as Air Force Reserve commander of Dobbins Air Reserve Base in the early 1950s. In 1966, Brigadier General James Stewart flew as a non-duty observer in a B-52 on a bombing mission during the Vietnam War. At the time of his B-52 flight, he refused the release of any publicity regarding his participation, as he did not want it treated as a stunt, but as part of his job as an officer in the Air Force Reserve. After 27 years of service, Stewart retired from the Air Force on May 31, 1968. After his retirement, he was promoted to Major General by President Ronald Reagan.

Post-war success

, 1953.]] After the war, Stewart took time off to reassess his career, and he spent much time with his friend Fonda. He was an early investor in Southwest Airways, founded by Leland Hayward, and considered going into the aviation industry if his re-started film career did not prosper. Upon Stewart's return to Hollywood in fall 1945, he decided not to renew his MGM contract. He signed with an MCA talent agency. His former agent Leland Hayward got out of the talent business in 1944 after selling his A-list of stars, including Stewart, to MCA. The move made Stewart one of the first independently contracted actors, and gave him more freedom to choose roles. Stewart was able to work without limits on director and studio availability for the remainder of his career.

For his first film in five years, Stewart appeared in his third and final Frank Capra production, It's a Wonderful Life. Capra paid RKO for the rights to the story and formed his own production company, Liberty Films. The female lead went to Donna Reed, after Capra's perennial first choice, Jean Arthur, was unavailable, and after turn-downs from Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Ann Dvorak and Martha Scott. Stewart appeared as George Bailey, an upstanding small-town man who becomes increasingly frustrated by his ordinary existence and financial troubles. Driven to suicide on Christmas Eve, he is led to reassess his life by Clarence Odbody AS2, an "angel, second class", played by Henry Travers.

After viewing It's a Wonderful Life, President Harry S Truman concluded, "If Bess and I had a son we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart." However, in the decades since the film's release, it grew to define Stewart's film persona and is widely considered as a sentimental Christmas film classic and, according to the American Film Institute, one of the best movies ever made.

In the aftermath of the film, Capra's production company went into bankruptcy, while Stewart started to have doubts about his ability to act after his military hiatus. His father kept insisting he come home and marry a local girl. Meanwhile in Hollywood, his generation of actors were fading and a new wave of actors would soon remake the town, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean.

(1950)]] After a poorly received Magic Town (1947) and the completion of Rope (1948) and Call Northside 777 (1948), Stewart had two flops On Our Merry Way (1948) and You Gotta Stay Happy (1949). In the documentary film James Stewart: A Wonderful Life (1987), hosted by Johnny Carson, Stewart said that he went back to Westerns in 1950 in part because a string of films that were flops.

Stewart decided to return to the stage for the Mary Chase-penned comedy, Harvey, which had opened to nearly universal praise in November 1944. Elwood P. Dowd, the protagonist and Stewart's character, is a wealthy eccentric living with his sister and his niece, and whose best friend is an invisible rabbit as large as a man. Dowd's eccentricity, especially the friendship with the rabbit, is ruining the niece's hopes of finding a husband. While trying to have Dowd committed to a sanatorium, his sister is committed herself while the play follows Dowd on an ordinary day in his not-so-ordinary life. Stewart took over the role from Frank Fay and gained an increased Broadway following in the unconventional play. Stewart received his fourth Best Actor nomination for his performance in the film.

After Harvey, the comedic adventure film Malaya (1949) with Spencer Tracy and the conventional but highly successful biographical film The Stratton Story in 1949, Stewart's first pairing with "on-screen wife" June Allyson, his career took another turn. During the 1950s, he expanded into the western and suspense genres, thanks largely to collaborations with directors Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock.

Other notable performances by Stewart during this time include the critically acclaimed 1950 Delmer Daves western Broken Arrow, which featured Stewart as an ex-soldier and Indian agent making peace with the Apache; a troubled clown in the 1952 Best Picture The Greatest Show on Earth; and Stewart's role as Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's 1957 film The Spirit of St. Louis. He also starred in the western radio show The Six Shooter for its one-season run from 1953-1954. During this time Stewart wore the same cowboy hat and rode the same horse, named "Pie", in most of his Westerns.

Collaborations with Hitchcock and Mann

(1950)]] James Stewart's collaborations with director Anthony Mann increased Stewart's popularity and sent his career into the realm of the western. Stewart's first appearance in a film directed by Mann came with the 1950 western, Winchester '73. In choosing Mann (after first choice Fritz Lang declined), Stewart cemented a powerful partnership. The film, which became a massive box office hit upon its release, set the pattern for their future collaborations. In it, Stewart is a tough, revengeful sharpshooter, the winner of a prized rifle which is stolen and then passes through many hands, until the showdown between Stewart and his brother (Stephen McNally).

Stewart and Mann also collaborated on other films outside the western genre. 1953's The Glenn Miller Story was critically acclaimed, garnering Stewart a BAFTA Award nomination, and (together with The Spirit of St. Louis) cemented the popularity of Stewart's portrayals of 'American heroes'. Thunder Bay, released the same year, transplanted the plot arc of their western collaborations to a more contemporary setting, with Stewart as a Louisiana oil driller facing corruption. Strategic Air Command, released in 1955, allowed Stewart to use his experiences in the United States Air Force on film.

(1948)]] Stewart's starring role in Winchester '73 was also a turning point in Hollywood. Universal Studios, who wanted Stewart to appear in both that film and Harvey, balked at his $200,000 asking price. Stewart's agent, Lew Wasserman, brokered an alternate deal, in which Stewart would appear in both films for no pay, in exchange for a percentage of the profits and cast and director approval.

This wasn't the first such deal at Universal; Abbott and Costello also had a profit participation contract, but they were no longer top-flight moneymakers by 1950. Stewart ended up earning about $600,000 for Winchester '73 alone.

The second collaboration to define Stewart's career in the 1950s was with acclaimed mystery and suspense director Alfred Hitchcock. Like Mann, Hitchcock uncovered new depths to Stewart's acting, showing a protagonist confronting his fears and his repressed desires. Stewart's first movie with Hitchcock was the technologically innovative 1948 film Rope, shot in long "real time" takes.

The two collaborated for the second of four times on the 1954 hit Rear Window, one of Hitchcock's masterpieces. Stewart portrays photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, loosely based on Life photographer Robert Capa, who projects his fantasies and fears onto the people he observes out his apartment window while on hiatus due to a broken leg. Jeffries gets into more than he can handle, however, when he believes he has witnessed a salesman (Raymond Burr) commit a murder, and when his glamorous girlfriend (Grace Kelly), at first disdainful of his voyeurism and skeptical about any crime, eventually is drawn in and tries to help solve the mystery. Limited by his wheelchair, Stewart is masterfully led by Hitchcock to react to what his character sees with mostly facial responses. It was a landmark year for Stewart, becoming the highest grossing actor of 1954 and the most popular Hollywood star in the world, displacing John Wayne.

(1958)]] After starring in Hitchcock's remake of the director's earlier production, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), with co-star Doris Day, Stewart starred in what many consider Hitchcock's most personal film, Vertigo (1958). The movie starred Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia, who develops an obsession with a woman he is shadowing. Scottie's obsession inevitably leads to the destruction of everything he once had and believed in. Though the film is widely considered a classic today, Vertigo met with negative reviews and poor box office receipts upon its release, and marked the last collaboration between Stewart and Hitchcock. Stewart was also disappointed. The director blamed the film's failure on Stewart looking too old to still attract audiences, and cast Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest (1959), a role Stewart had very much wanted (Grant was actually four years older than Stewart). Today, Vertigo is ranked second only to Citizen Kane in the 2002 Sight & Sound critics poll for the greatest films ever made.

Career in the 1960s and 1970s

In 1960, James Stewart was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and received his fifth and final Academy Award for Best Actor nomination, for his role in the 1959 Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder. The early courtroom drama starred Stewart as Paul Biegler, the lawyer of a hot-tempered soldier (played by Ben Gazzara) who claims temporary insanity after murdering a tavern owner who raped his wife. The film featured a career-making performance by George C. Scott as the prosecutor. The film was sexually frank for its time (some thought it sordid), and its provocative promotional campaign helped gain it box office success, though Ben-Hur outgrossed all movies by a huge margin and swept the Academy Awards that year. Stewart's nomination was one of seven for the film (Charlton Heston was the winner), and saw his transition into the final decades of his career.

On January 1, 1960 Stewart received the devastating news that Margaret Sullavan had committed suicide, most likely over despondency from her loss of hearing and its effect on her stage career. As a friend, mentor, and focus of his early romantic urges, she had a unique influence on Stewart's life.

(1962)]] In the early 1960s Stewart took leading roles in three John Ford films, his first work with the acclaimed director. The first, Two Rode Together, paired him with Richard Widmark in a Western with thematic echoes of Ford's The Searchers. The next, 1962's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (with John Wayne), is a classic "psychological" western, with Stewart featured as an Eastern attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (played by Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town. At story's end, Stewart's character—now a rising political figure—faces a difficult ethical choice as he attempts to reconcile his actions with his personal integrity. The film's billing is unusual in that Stewart was given top billing over Wayne in the trailers and on the posters but Wayne had top billing in the film itself, a system later repeated by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men. The film garnered so-so reviews and fared poorly at the box office, but is now considered a late Ford classic.

How the West Was Won (which Ford co-directed, though without directing Stewart's scenes) and Cheyenne Autumn were western epics released in 1962 and 1964 respectively. While the Cinerama production How the West Was Won went on to win three Oscars and reaped massive box office figures, Cheyenne Autumn, in which a white-suited Stewart played Wyatt Earp in a long sequence in the middle of the movie, failed domestically and was quickly forgotten. It was Ford's final Western and Stewart's last feature film with Ford.

Having played his last romantic lead in 1958's Bell, Book and Candle, and silver-haired (although not all was his—he wore a partial hairpiece starting with "It's a Wonderful Life" and in every film thereafter), Stewart transitioned into more family-related films in the 1960s when he signed a multi-movie deal with 20th Century Fox. These included the successful Henry Koster outing Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and the less memorable films Take Her, She's Mine (1963) and Dear Brigitte (1965), which featured French model Brigitte Bardot as the object of Stewart's son's mash notes. The Civil War period film Shenandoah (1965) and the western family film The Rare Breed fared better at the box office; the Civil War movie with strong antiwar and humanitarian themes was a smash hit in the South.

As an aviator, Stewart was particularly interested in aviation films and had pushed to appear in several in the 1950s; most notably Strategic Air Command and The Spirit of St. Louis. He continued in this vein in the 1960s, most notably in a role as a hard-bitten pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Subbing for Stewart, famed stunt pilot and air racer Paul Mantz was killed when he crashed the "Tallmantz Phoenix P-1", the specially-made, single-engine movie model, in an abortive "touch-and-go". Stewart also narrated the film X-15 in 1961. In 1964, he and several other military aviators, including Curtis LeMay, Paul Tibbets, and Bruce Sundlun were founding directors of the board of Tibbets' Executive Jet Aviation Corporation.

After a progression of lesser western films in the late '60s and early '70s, James Stewart transitioned from cinema to television. In the 1950s he had made guest appearances on the Jack Benny Program (Benny was his real life neighbor and good friend). Stewart first starred in the NBC comedy The Jimmy Stewart Show, on which he played a college professor. He followed it with the CBS mystery Hawkins, in which he played a small town lawyer investigating his cases. The series garnered Stewart a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic TV Series, but failed to gain a wide audience and was cancelled after one season. (Andy Griffith fared much better later in Matlock, based on a similar formula.) During this time, Stewart periodically appeared on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, sharing poems he had written at different times in his life. His poems were later compiled into a short collection titled Jimmy Stewart and His Poems (1989).

Stewart returned to films after an absence of five years with a major role in John Wayne's final film, The Shootist (1976) where Stewart played a doctor giving Wayne's gunfighter a terminal cancer diagnosis. At one point, both Wayne and Stewart were flubbing their lines repeatedly and Stewart turned to director Don Siegel and said, "You'd better get two better actors". Stewart also appeared in supporting roles in Airport '77, the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum and The Magic of Lassie (1978). The latter film received poor reviews and flopped at the box office. Some critics expressed their dismay at seeing the 70-year-old veteran singing as the grandfather. Stewart responded it was the only script he had been offered without any sex, profanity or graphic violence.

Later career and death

Following the failure of The Magic of Lassie, Stewart went into semi-retirement from acting. He donated his papers, films, and other records to Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library in 1983. Stewart had diversified investments including real estate, oil wells, a charter-plane company and membership on major corporate boards. He became a multimillionaire. In the 1980s and 1990s, he did voiceovers for commercials for Campbell's Soups. He made frequent visits to the Reagan White House and traveled on the lecture circuit. The re-release of his Hitchcock films gained Stewart renewed recognition. Rear Window and Vertigo were particularly praised by film critics, which helped bring these films to the attention of younger movie-goers. He was presented an Academy Honorary Award by his friend Cary Grant in 1985, "for his 50 years of memorable performances, for his high ideals both on and off the screen, with respect and affection of his colleagues."

Stewart became a real life "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" in 1988, when he made an impassioned plea in Congressional hearings, along with colleagues Burt Lancaster, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and film director Martin Scorsese, against Ted Turner's decision to 'colorize' classic black and white films, including It's a Wonderful Life. Stewart stated, "the coloring of black-and-white films is wrong. It's morally and artistically wrong and these profiteers should leave our film industry alone".

In 1989, Stewart joined Peter F. Paul in founding the American Spirit Foundation to apply entertainment industry resources to developing innovative approaches to public education and to assist the emerging democracy movements in the former Iron Curtain countries. Paul arranged for Stewart, through the offices of President Boris Yeltsin, to send a special print of It's a Wonderful Life, translated by Lomonosov Moscow State University, to Russia as the first American program ever to be broadcast on Russian television. On January 5, 1992, coinciding with the first day of the existence of the democratic Commonwealth of Independent States and Russia, and the first free Russian Orthodox Christmas Day, Russian TV Channel 2 broadcast It's a Wonderful Life to 200 million Russians who celebrated an American holiday tradition with the American people for the first time in Russian history.

In association with politicians and celebrities such as President Ronald Reagan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, California Governor George Deukmejian, Bob Hope and Charlton Heston, Stewart worked from 1987 to 1993 on projects that enhanced the public appreciation and understanding of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

In 1991, James Stewart voiced the character of Sheriff Wylie Burp in the movie , which was his last film role.

Shortly before his 80th birthday, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered. "As someone who 'believed in hard work and love of country, love of family and love of community.'"

Stewart died from a blood clot on a lung on July 2, 1997, at his home in Beverly Hills. His death came one day after fellow screen legend and The Big Sleep co-star Robert Mitchum had died. Stewart is interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

"America lost a national treasure today," President Bill Clinton said on the day Stewart died. "Jimmy Stewart was a great actor, a gentleman and a patriot."

Joan Crawford, Stewart's co-star in the early period, praised him as an "endearing perfectionist" with "a droll sense of humor and a shy way of watching you to see if you react to that humor." and the two gained a reputation as playboys. Once married, both men's children noted that their favorite activity when not working seemed to be quietly sharing time together while building and painting model airplanes, a hobby they had taken up in New York, years earlier.

After World War II, Stewart settled down, at age 41, marrying former model Gloria Hatrick McLean (1918–1994) on August 9, 1949. As Stewart loved to recount in self-mockery, "I, I, I pitched the big question to her last night and to my surprise she, she, she said yes!".

Stewart adopted her two sons, Michael and Ronald, and with Gloria he had twin daughters, Judy and Kelly, on May 7, 1951. The couple remained married until her death from lung cancer on February 16, 1994. Ronald McLean was killed in action on June 8, 1969, at the age of 24, while serving as a Marine Corps Lieutenant in Vietnam. Kelly Stewart is an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis.

, Los Angeles.]] While visiting India in 1959, Stewart reportedly smuggled the remains of a supposed yeti, the so-called Pangboche Hand, by hiding them in his luggage (specifically, in his wife's underwear) when he flew from India to London, as a favor to Tom Slick.

James Stewart was active in philanthropic affairs over the years. His signature charity event, "The Jimmy Stewart Relay Marathon Race", held each year since 1982, has raised millions of dollars for the Child and Family Development Center at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California. (Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was also the leader of the "Boy Rangers", a fictional organization patterned after cub scouts.) An award for Boy Scouts, "The James M. Stewart Good Citizenship Award" has been presented since May 17, 2003.

One of Stewart's lesser-known talents was his homespun poetry. He once read a poem that he had written about his dog, entitled "Beau," while on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. By the end of this reading, Carson's eyes were welling with tears. This was later parodied on a late 1980s episode of the NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live, with Dana Carvey as Stewart reciting the poem on Weekend Update and bringing anchor Dennis Miller to tears.

In addition to poetry, Stewart would talk during Tonight Show appearances about his avid gardening. Stewart purchased the house next door to his own home at 918 North Roxbury Drive, razed the house, and installed his garden in the lot.

Politics

Stewart was a staunch supporter of the Republican Party and actively campaigned for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He was a "hawk" on the Vietnam War. Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck issued a statement calling for support of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968.

One of his best friends was fellow actor Henry Fonda, despite the fact that the two men had very different political ideologies. A political argument in 1947 resulted in a fist fight between them, but the two apparently maintained their friendship by never discussing politics again. There is a brief reference to their political differences in character in their movie The Cheyenne Social Club. In the last years of his life, he donated to the campaign of Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election and to Democratic Florida governor Bob Graham in his successful run for the Senate.

Filmography

From the beginning of James Stewart's career in 1935 through his final theatrical project in 1991, he appeared in 92 films, television programs and shorts. Through the course of this illustrious career, he appeared in many landmark and critically acclaimed films, including such classics as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Rear Window, The Spirit of St. Louis and Vertigo. His roles in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey, and Anatomy of a Murder earned him Academy Award nominations (he won for Philadelphia Story). Stewart's career defied the boundaries of genre and trend, and he made his mark in screwball comedies, suspense thrillers, westerns, biographies and family films.

Broadway stage performances

Carry Nation (October–November 1932)

Goodbye Again (December 1932 – July 1933)

Spring in Autumn (October–November 1933)

All Good Americans (December 1933 – January 1934)

Yellow Jack (May 1934)

Divided By Three (October 1934)

Page Miss Glory (November 1934 – March 1935)

A Journey By Night (April 1935)

Harvey (July–August 1947, July–August 1948, replacing vacationing Frank Fay)

Harvey (revival, February–May 1970)

. It was once stolen but was subsequently replaced.]]

Honors and tributes

James Stewart was presented various kinds of film industry awards, military and civilian medals, honorary degrees, memorials and tributes over the years for his contribution to performing arts, humanitarianism, and military service.

See also

List of film collaborations

References

;Notes ;Citations ;Bibliography

Beaver, Jim. "James Stewart." Films in Review, October 1980.

Brig. Gen. James M. Stewart. "National Museum of the United States Air Force Fact Sheet." National Museum of the United States Air Force''. Retrieved: February 18, 2007.

Coe, Jonathan. James Stewart: Leading Man. London: Bloomsbury, 1994. ISBN 0-7475-1574-3.

Collins, Thomas W. Jr. "Stewart, James." American National Biography Online. "Stewart, James." Retrieved: February 18, 2007.

Cox, Stephen. It's a Wonderful Life: A Memory Book. Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House, 2003. ISBN 1-58182-337-1.

Eliot, Mark. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2006. ISBN 1-4000-5221-1.

The Jimmy Stewart Museum Home Page. The Jimmy Stewart Museum Home Page, Access date: February 18, 2007.

Fonda, Henry as told to Howard Teichmann. Fonda: My Life. New York: A Signet Book, New American Library, 1981. ISBN 0-451-11858-8.

Houghton, Norris. But Not Forgotten: The Adventure of the University Players. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951.

Jackson, Kenneth T., Karen Markoe and Arnie Markoe. The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (5). New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. ISBN 0-68480-663-0.

Jones, Ken D., Arthur F. McClure and Alfred E. Twomey. The Films of James Stewart. New York: Castle Books, 1970.

McGowan, Helene. James Stewart. London: Bison Group, 1992, ISBN 0-86124-925-9.

Pickard, Roy. Jimmy Stewart: A Life in Film. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-08828-0.

Prendergast, Tom and Sara, eds. "Stewart, James". International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, 4th edition. London: St. James Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55862-450-3.

Prendergast, Tom and Sara, eds. "Stewart, James". St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 5th edition. London: St. James Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55862-529-1.

Robbins, Jhan. Everybody's Man: A Biography of Jimmy Stewart. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985. ISBN 0-399-12973-1.

Smith, Starr. Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot. St. Paul, Minnesota: Zenith Press, 2005. ISBN 0-7603-2199-X.

Thomas, Tony. A Wonderful Life: The Films and Career of James Stewart. Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1988. ISBN 0-8065-1081-1.

Wayne, Jane Ellen.The Leading Men of MGM. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004. ISBN 0-78671-475-1.

Wright, Stuart J. An Emotional Gauntlet: From Life in Peacetime America to the War in European Skies- A History of 453rd Bomb Group Crews. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. ISBN 0-29920-520-7.

External links

Feaster, Felicia. Turner Classic Movies">James Stewart Profile Turner Classic Movies

Kronenberg, Harold. Flying with Jimmy Stewart

New York Times (July 3, 1997)">Obituary:"James Stewart, the Hesitant Hero, Dies at 89". New York Times (July 3, 1997)

CNN, (July 2, 1997)">Obituary:"Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart dead at 89". CNN, (July 2, 1997)

News: Princeton University (1997)">"Princeton to Honor Famed Alumnus Jimmy Stewart '32 With Tribute and Theater Dedication". Princeton University (1997)

Centennial Tribute to James Stewart

The Jimmy Stewart Museum

National Museum of the United States Air Force">Brig. Gen. James M. Stewart. National Museum of the United States Air Force

A Kennedy Center Honors: James Stewart

Jimmy Stewart. Presidential Medal of Freedom

Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. Entertainment Weekly

Interview at the National Film Theatre in 1972. British Film Institute

Mr. Stewart Goes to Vietnam. Article from Vietnam magazine about Stewart's B52 mission in 1966

University of Alabama">Images:Stewart Pictures. Telecommunication & Film Department, University of Alabama

Life Magazine (1945)">Images:"Col. James M. Stewart stands with his father outside of the family's hardware store.". Life Magazine (1945)

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Name	Jeff Dunham
Caption	Dunham and his character "Achmed the Dead Terrorist", February 2009
Birth date
Birth place	Dallas, Texas, U.S.
Medium	Stand-up
Nationality	American
Genre	Ventriloquism
Influences	Edgar Bergen His style has been described as "a dressed-down, more digestible version of Don Rickles with multiple personality disorder". Describing his characters, Time observes, "All of them are politically incorrect, gratuitously insulting and ill tempered." Dunham has been credited with reviving ventriloquism, and doing more to promote the art form than anyone since Edgar Bergen. and received more than 350 million hits on YouTube (his introduction of Achmed the Dead Terrorist in Spark of Insanity is the ninth most watched YouTube video). Forbes.com ranked Dunham as the third highest-paid comedian in the United States behind Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock,
Name	Dunham, Jeff
Date of birth	1962
Place of birth	Dallas, Texas, U.S.

Category:1962 births Category:American adoptees Category:American stand-up comedians Category:Baylor University alumni Category:Living people Category:People from Dallas, Texas Category:Ventriloquists