Famous Birthdays on November 7

John Albert "Buck" Martinez is an American former professional baseball catcher and manager, and was the television color commentator for the Toronto Blue Jays until his retirement in 2026. He played 17 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) with the Kansas City Royals, the Milwaukee Brewers, and the Toronto Blue Jays. Since the end of his playing career, he has been a broadcaster, working on the Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles radio and television broadcasts, and nationally for ESPN, TBS and MLB Network. Martinez managed the Toronto Blue Jays from 2001 to May 2002 and Team USA at the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006. He was inducted into the Blue Jays Hall of Excellence on August 29, 2026.

Jason Paul London is an American actor. Since his breakout role as Reese Witherspoon's love interest Court Foster in The Man In the Moon , he has often featured as a leading man, with notable roles as Randall "Pink" Floyd in director Richard Linklater's film Dazed and Confused (1993), Bobby Ray in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), Tom Meyer in Broken Vessels (1998), Jesse in The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Todd Boomer in My Teacher's Wife (1999), Jason in Jason and the Argonauts (2000), Rick Rambis in Out Cold (2001), skateboard professional Jimmy Wilson in Grind (2003), Mike in Killer Movie (2008), Chet in The Martini Shot (2023), and Deacon in Neglected (2026).

David Howell Petraeus is a retired United States Army general who served as the fourth director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from September 2011 until his resignation in November 2012. Prior to his assuming the directorship of the CIA, Petraeus served 37 years in the United States Army. His last assignments in the Army were as commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and commander, U.S. Forces – Afghanistan (USFOR-A) from July 2010 to July 2011. His other four-star assignments include serving as the 10th commander, U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) from October 2008 to June 2010, and as commanding general, Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) from February 2007 to September 2008. As commander of MNF-I, Petraeus oversaw all coalition forces in Iraq.

Johnny Rivers is an American retired musician. He achieved commercial success and popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s as a singer and guitarist, characterized as a versatile and influential artist. Rivers is best known for his 1960s output, having popularized the mid-1960s discotheque scene through his live rock and roll recordings at the Los Angeles nightclub Whisky a Go Go, and later shifting to a more orchestral, soul-oriented sound during the latter half of the decade. These developments were reflected by his most notable string of hit singles between 1964 and 1968, many of them covers. They include "Memphis", "Mountain of Love", "The Seventh Son", "Secret Agent Man", "Poor Side of Town", "Baby I Need Your Lovin'", and "Summer Rain". Rivers had a total of nine top-ten hits and 17 top-forty hits on the US charts from 1964 to 1977.

Sharleen Eugene Spiteri is a Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist who has a contralto vocal range, best known as the lead singer of the rock band Texas, who rose to prominence in 1989 with the release of their debut single "I Don't Want a Lover". Their debut album, Southside (1989) was a commercial success, selling over two million copies. Follow up albums were less successful; however, the release of their fourth album White on Blonde (1997) returned the band to prominence, spawning the internationally successful singles "Say What You Want", "Halo", "Black Eyed Boy" and "Put Your Arms Around Me". Their commercial success continued during the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, with singles "In Our Lifetime", "Summer Son", "In Demand" and "Inner Smile". Following the release of their seventh album Red Book (2005), the band began a hiatus. In 2013, Texas's worldwide album sales were counted at 40 million records.

Hiroshi Yamauchi was a Japanese businessman and the third president of Nintendo, serving in the role from 25 April 1949 to 24 May 2002, and principal owner of the Seattle Mariners from 1992 until his death. Before joining Nintendo, he had strong familial connections; his great-grandfather, Fusajiro Yamauchi, founded the company, and was its first president, and his grandfather, Sekiryo Kaneda, was its second president. During his tenure, Nintendo was transformed from a Japanese manufacturer of hanafuda into a global conglomerate largely focused on manufacturing video game consoles and publishing video games. On the basis of this success, and his ownership of most of Nintendo's shares, he became considerably wealthy. In 2008, he was Japan's wealthiest person, with an estimated net worth of $7.8 billion. Even in 2013, with this figure having declined to $2.1 billion, he was the 13th richest person in Japan and the 491st richest in the world.

Constans II, also called "the Bearded", was the Byzantine emperor from 641 to 668. Constans was the last attested emperor to serve as consul, in 642, although the office continued to exist until the reign of Leo VI the Wise. His religious policy saw him steering a middle line in disputes between the Orthodox and Monothelites by refusing to persecute either and prohibited discussion of the natures of Jesus Christ under the Typos of Constans in 648. His reign coincided with Arab invasions under Umar, Uthman, and Mu'awiya I in the late 640s to 660s. Constans was the first emperor to visit Rome since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and the last one to visit Rome while the Empire still held it.

George Edward Griffin is an American author, filmmaker, lecturer, and a conspiracy theorist. Griffin's writings promote a number of right-wing views and conspiracy theories regarding politics, defense and health care. In his book World Without Cancer, he argued in favor of a pseudo-scientific theory that asserted cancer to be a nutritional deficiency curable by consuming amygdalin. He is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994), which advances debunked conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve System. He is an HIV/AIDS denialist, supports the 9/11 Truth movement, and supports the specific John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory that Oswald was not the assassin. He also believes that the Biblical Noah's Ark is located at the Durupınar site in Turkey.

Alois Maxwell "Al" Hirt was an American trumpeter and bandleader. He is best remembered for his million-selling recordings of "Java" and the accompanying album Honey in the Horn (1963), and for the theme music to The Green Hornet. His nicknames included "Jumbo" and "The Round Mound of Sound". Colin Escott, an author of musician biographies, wrote that RCA Victor, for which Hirt had recorded most of his best-selling recordings and for which he had spent most of his professional recording career, had simply dubbed him "The King." Hirt was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in November 2009. He received eight Grammy nominations during his lifetime, including winning the Grammy award in 1964 for his version of "Java".

Calvin H. Borel is an American jockey in thoroughbred horse racing and rode the victorious mount in the 2007 Kentucky Derby, the 2009 Kentucky Derby and the 2010 Kentucky Derby. His 2009 Derby win with Mine That Bird was the third biggest upset in Derby history,, and Borel's winning margin of 6+3⁄4 lengths was the greatest in Derby history since Assault won by 8 lengths in 1946. On May 1, 2009, Borel won the Kentucky Oaks aboard Rachel Alexandra, only the second time since 1993 that a jockey has won the Oaks-Derby combo, and just the seventh time overall a jockey has accomplished this feat in the same year. On May 16, 2009, Borel won the 2009 Preakness Stakes at Pimlico with thoroughbred filly Rachel Alexandra. In doing so, Borel became the first jockey to win the first two jewels of the Triple Crown on different mounts. Borel's nickname is "Bo'rail'" due to his penchant for riding close to the rail to save ground. Borel came out of retirement in September, 2025 https://www.cantonrep.com/embed/video/88904910/

D. Maria Teresa do Carmo de Noronha, was a Portuguese aristocrat and a fado singer. As a granddaughter of the Counts of Paraty and Belmonte, she belonged to a family of the most ancient Nobility in the Iberian Peninsula, tracing her roots to the Royal Houses of both Portugal and Castile from the mid-14th century. Her artistic career spanned over 30 years and hers is considered one of the most unusual and beautiful fado voices. Her status as a fidalga meant, in the context of a conservative early 20th century Portugal, that she faced severe restrictions in having a professional artistic career. As such, she did not enjoy the projection of other great fadistas of her time.

Matthew Ryan is an American musician, singer and songwriter, born in Chester, Pennsylvania and inspired by such artists as U2, The Replacements, and Leonard Cohen. He logged several years in a series of bands before signing with A&M Records as a solo artist in 1996. No Depression magazine has described him as "Equal parts Springsteen, Westerberg and Ryan Adams, Ryan is a powerhouse of a storyteller for almost two decades. A forefather of the Alt-country scene, Ryan has yet to receive as much commercial success as some of his contemporaries." Ryan is known for his "hushed rasp, with words catching like vows destined to be broken – one of modern music's most potent whispers."

Dame Gwyneth Jones is a Welsh dramatic soprano, widely regarded as one of the greatest Wagnerian sopranos of the second half of the 20th century. The possessor of a large-scaled, powerful dramatic soprano voice, joined to a vivid stage presence and finely developed acting ability, Jones enjoyed an extensive international career that took her to all the world's major opera houses. Her talent was cultivated through a long relationship with the Bayreuther Festspiele, through which she developed a more human, vulnerable, and womanly image for Richard Wagner's main female characters. She is best known for her rendition of Brünnhilde in the 1976 Jahrhundertring at Bayreuth, staged to commemorate the theater's centenary anniversary.

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K. S. Krishnan discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, the deflected light changes its wavelength. This phenomenon, a hitherto unknown type of scattering of light they called modified scattering, was subsequently termed the Raman effect or Raman scattering. In 1930, Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him" and became the first Asian and non-White person to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Roberta Joan Mitchell is a Canadian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and painter. As one of the most influential singer-songwriters to emerge from the 1960s folk music circuit, Mitchell became known for her personal lyrics and unconventional compositions, which grew to incorporate elements of pop, jazz, rock, and other genres. Among her accolades are eleven Grammy Awards, and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Rolling Stone, in 2002, named her "one of the greatest songwriters ever", and AllMusic, in a 2011 biography, stated "Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century."

Thomas Brassey was an English civil engineering contractor and manufacturer of building materials who was responsible for building much of the world's railways in the 19th century. By 1847, he had built about one-third of the railways in Britain, and by time of his death in 1870 he had built one in every twenty miles of railway in the world. This included three-quarters of the lines in France, major lines in many other European countries and in Canada, Australia, South America and India. He also built the structures associated with those railways, including docks, bridges, viaducts, stations, tunnels and drainage works.

Nestor Ivanovych Makhno, also known as Bat'ko Makhno, was a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. He established the Makhnovshchina, a mass movement by the Ukrainian peasantry to establish anarchist communism in the country between 1918 and 1921. Initially centered around Makhno's home province of Katerynoslav and hometown of Huliaipole, it came to exert a strong influence over large areas of southern Ukraine, specifically in what is now the Zaporizhzhia Oblast of Ukraine. Anarchists have cited him as an inspiration during his life and into today.

Dirk Alan Shafer was an American model, actor, screenwriter and director. Born in Carbondale, Illinois, he was most noted in the modeling world for having been Playgirl magazine's 1992 "Man of the Year". Shafer related that he did Playgirl for "validation" as a model because he never believed himself to be attractive. Shafer wrote, directed and starred in Man of the Year, a 1995 mockumentary about his time as a semi-closeted gay man in the role of a heterosexual sex symbol. Shafer's next directorial project was Circuit, a fictional look at the world of gay male circuit parties.

Edythe D. Eyde better known by her pen name Lisa Ben, was an American editor, author, active fantasy-fiction fan and fanzine contributor, and songwriter. She created the first known lesbian publication in North America, Vice Versa. Ben produced the magazine for a year and distributed it locally in Los Angeles, California, in the late 1940s. She was also active in lesbian bars as a musician in the years following her involvement with Vice Versa. Eyde has been recognized as a pioneer in the LGBT movement and the foremother of the women in print movement during second-wave feminism.