At the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, track and field star Jesse Owens ran himself straight into international glory by winning four gold medals. But the life of Jesse Owens is much more than a sports story. Born in rural Alabama under the oppressive Jim Crow laws, Owens’s family suffered many hardships. As a boy he worked several jobs like delivering groceries and working in a shoe repair shop to make ends meet. But Owens defied the odds to become a sensational student athlete, eventually running track for Ohio State.
Buck Owens was the top-selling country act of the 1960s, with 21 number-one hits and 35 consecutive top-ten hits, a total surpassed only by the Beatles. Inventor of the Bakersfield sound, he was hugely popular not only with country fans, but rock fans too. The Beatles covered his songs, Gram Parsons idolized him, the Grateful Dead loved him. At least five marriages, several TV shows, and a publishing and media empire followed. And a number of current country stars, ranging from Dwight Yoakam to Marty Stuart, owe their sound to him.
Practical Magic is a complex story focusing on Sally and Gillian Owens. After their parents died in a fire when they were little girls, they were sent to live with their two eccentric aunts, Frances and Jet, in a dramatic old house on Magnolia Street, which was built centuries before by their ancestor, Maria Owens, an apparent witch.
It is difficult to imagine a time when African Americans were not part of professional sports in the United States. So many admired and beloved African-American athletes are national heroes today: Michael Jordan, Venus and Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Florence Griffin-Joyner, Shaquille O'Neal, Muhammad Ali, to name a few. No such celebrity athletes appeared on magazine covers when Jesse Owens was a boy in the 1920s, no African American stars for him to hope to emulate.
