Benjamin Franklin Grauer (June 2, 1908 – May 31, 1977) was an US radio and TV personality, following a career during the 1920s as a child actor in films and on Broadway. He began his career as a child in David Warfield's production of The Return of Peter Grimm. Among his early credits were roles in films directed by D.W. Griffith.

Grauer was born in Staten Island, New York. After graduating from Townsend Harris High School, he received his B.A. from the City College of New York in 1930. Grauer started in radio as an actor but soon became part of the broadcasting staff at the National Broadcasting Company. He was one of the four narrators, along with Burgess Meredith, of NBC's public affairs series The Big Story, which focused on courageous journalists.

In 1954, he married interior designer Melanie Kahane.

Grauer's greatest fame lies in his legendary 40-year career in radio. In 1930, the 22-year-old Benjamin Franklin Grauer joined the staff at NBC. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a senior commentator and reporter. He was the designated announcer for the popular 1940s Walter Winchell's Jergens Journal. Perhaps, most importantly, he was selected by Arturo Toscanini to become the voice of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Grauer took over as announcer in 1940 and remained until the orchestra was disbanded in June 1954. Toscanini said he was his favorite announcer.

Guido Cantelli (27 April 1920 – 24 November 1956) was an Italian orchestral conductor.

Born in Novara, Italy, Cantelli was named Musical Director of La Scala, Milan on 16 November 1956 but his promising career was cut short only one week later by his death at the age of 36 in an aircraft crash in Paris, France.

Cantelli studied at the Milan Conservatory in Italy and began a promising conducting career, which was interrupted by World War II, during which he was forced to serve in the Italian army, then placed in a German labor camp because of his outspoken opposition to the Nazis. He became ill and managed to successfully escape the camp. He resumed his musical career after the Allies liberated Italy. Toscanini saw Cantelli conduct at La Scala and was so impressed that he invited him to guest conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1949.

In the course of his brief career, he had conducted not only in many of the most famous concert halls of Europe but also in the United States and South Africa. The famous conductor Arturo Toscanini was particularly impressed by him, and, in a note written to Cantelli's wife Iris in 1950 after four concerts where Cantelli had been a guest conductor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, said:

Marcia Davenport (June 9, 1903 — January 16, 1996) was an American author and music critic. She was born Marcia Glick in New York City on June 9, 1903, the daughter of Bernard Glick and the opera singer Alma Gluck, and she became the stepdaughter of violinist Efrem Zimbalist when Alma Gluck remarried.

Davenport traveled extensively with her parents and was educated intermittently at the Friends School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr. She began at Wellesley College but eloped to Pittsburgh in April 1923 and married Frank D. Clarke. Eventually she earned her B.A. at the University of Grenoble. Her first child was born in 1924, but in 1925 she divorced Clarke.

She took an advertising copywriting job to support herself and her daughter. In 1928 she began her writing career on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, where she worked until 1931. On May 13, 1929, she married Russell Davenport, who soon after became editor of Fortune. Davenport's second daughter was born in 1934. That same year she began as the music critic of Stage magazine. Davenport had close ties through her mother and stepfather to the classical music world and particularly to the heady opera world of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. She was first celebrated as a writer for her first book, Mozart, the first published American biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her marriage to Russell Davenport ended in 1944.

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American writer and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of "novel" that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

Miller was born to tailor Heinrich Miller and Louise Marie Neiting, in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, New York City, of German parents. As a child he lived at 662 Driggs Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known in that time (and referred to frequently in his works) as the Fourteenth Ward. As a young man, he was active with the Socialist Party (his "quondam idol" was the Black Socialist Hubert Harrison).^{[citation needed]} He briefly—for only one semester—attended the City College of New York. Although he was an exceptional student,^{[citation needed]} he was willing neither to be anchored nor to submit to the traditional college system of education.

Antonino Rocca (born Antonino Biasetton, April 13, 1927 – March 15, 1977) was an Italian professional wrestler. Rocca was a popular face and in some cities with both Italian-American and especially Hispanic audiences, his following was exceptionally large and loyal. He also possessed Argentinian citizenship.

He had a love for opera and was apparently described as having an excellent - if untrained - singing voice. Maestro Arturo Toscanini, a wrestling fan, was good friends with Rocca.

As a soccer and rugby-player when he moved to Argentina, before World War II, and an overall athlete, Rocca was known for his unique, acrobatic, off-the-ground, flying wrestling style, which he probably invented, wowing audiences with his dazzling aerial maneuvers. He was responsible for the revival of the New York City Metropolitan-Area territory in the late 1940s, which would eventually become part of the modern day World Wrestling Entertainment. Rocca became one of the most well-known wrestlers in America during the golden age of television. He also had a successful tag team career, forming a popular tandem with Miguel Pérez. The two, along with their heel (villain) opponents, drew large crowds to Madison Square Garden on a regular basis. Rocca had an uninterrupted seven-year run of headlining or co-headlining every main-event at the Garden.