Year 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar.
May 21st
James Douglas Muir "Jay" Leno /ˈlɛnoʊ/ (born April 28, 1950) is an American stand-up comedian and television host.
From 1992 to 2009, Leno was the host of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Beginning in September 2009, Leno started a primetime talk show, titled The Jay Leno Show, which aired weeknights at 10:00 p.m. (Eastern Time, UTC-5), also on NBC. After The Jay Leno Show was canceled in January 2010 amid a host controversy, Leno returned to host The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on March 1, 2010.
James "Jay" Leno was born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1950. His mother, Catherine (née Muir; 1911–1993), a homemaker, was born in Greenock, Scotland, and came to the United States at age 11. Leno's father, Angelo (1910–1994), who worked as an insurance salesman, was born in New York to immigrants from Flumeri, Italy. Leno grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, and although his high school guidance counselor recommended that he drop out of school, he later obtained a Bachelor's degree in speech therapy from Emerson College, where he started a comedy club in 1973. Leno's siblings include his late older brother, Patrick, who was a Vietnam veteran and a lawyer.
Stephen L. Reeves (January 21, 1926 – May 1, 2000) was an American bodybuilder and actor. At the peak of his career, he was the highest-paid actor in Europe.
Born in Glasgow, Montana, Steve Reeves moved to California at age 10 with his mother Goldie Reeves, after his father Lester Dell Reeves died in a farming accident. Reeves developed an interest in bodybuilding in high school and trained at Ed Yarick's gym in Oakland. By the time he was 17, he had developed a Herculean physique, long before the general interest in bodybuilding. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Army during World War II, and served in the Pacific.
After his military service, Reeves invested in an acting career. In 1954 he had a small role in his first major motion picture, the musical Athena playing the boyfriend of Jane Powell's character. The same year Reeves had a small role as a cop in the Ed Wood film Jail Bait. These two films are the only ones Reeves made where his own voice was used — for the remainder of his career, Reeves acted in Italian-made films where all dialogue and sound effects were added in post-production.
Eva Narcissus Boyd (June 29, 1943 – April 10, 2003), known by the stage name of Little Eva (after a character from Uncle Tom's Cabin), was a Puerto Rican American pop singer.
Born in Belhaven, North Carolina, she moved to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, New York at a young age. As a teenager, she worked as a maid and earned extra money as a babysitter for songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin. It is often claimed that Goffin and King were amused by Boyd's individual dancing style, so they wrote "The Loco-Motion" for her and had her record it as a demo (the record was intended for Dee Dee Sharp).
However, as King said in an interview with NPR and in her "One to One" concert video, they knew she could sing when they met her, and it would be just a matter of time before they would have her record songs they wrote, the most successful being "The Loco-Motion".
Music producer Don Kirshner of Dimension Records was impressed by the song and Boyd's voice and had it released. The song reached #1 in the United States in 1962. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. After the success of "The Loco-Motion", Boyd was stereotyped as a dance-craze singer and was given limited material.