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Strange Celebrities Who Are Missing Fingers
Strange Celebrities Who Are Missing Fingers
An accident with an axe, a childhood prank gone haywire, canteloupe-carving carelessness -- whatever the reason, many people end up making their mark in life while missing a finger or two. Here are some folks who've managed to get ahead with missing or damaged digits.
GARY BURGHOFF won an Emmy as Corporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly on the wartime sitcom M*A*S*H, despite having three deformed fingers on his left hand. During filming Burghoff's hand was usually "missing in action," carefully hidden under clipboards, behind radio sets or in his pocket.
DONALD K. "DEKE" SLAYTON was selected in 1959 to be one of the original seven astronauts in the U. S. "space race" with the Soviet Union. Slayton was a pilot in World War II and a test pilot and instructor during the 1950s. The astronauts were selected after a rigorous screening process and had to be in excellent health. Deke passed despite a missing left ring finger (the only finger deemed not necessary for a right-handed pilot). Slayton lost the finger to a horse-drawn hay mower when he was a young boy in Wisconsin. Although a heart murmur kept him out of the first manned spaceflights, Slayton finally made it to the launch pad in 1975. He spent 217 hours and 28 minutes in space for the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
JERRY GARCIA had half of his right middle finger lopped off when he was four -- a wood-chopping axe did the job -- but he became a scintillating guitarist anyway. Garcia led the long-running rock band The Grateful Dead until his death in 1995, and his soaring guitar solos were part of the Dead's legendary live shows. Garcia also had a respectable solo career, dabbling in bluegrass and folk music.
The first European musician to stongly influence American jazz, guitarist DJANGO REINHARDT began his career in Belgium and France in the 1920s. In 1928 he was caught in a caravan fire that left his left hand partially paralyzed. Reinhardt developed a new playing technique to overcome the problem and by the end of World War II he was an international superstar.
One might almost think an altered hand is the key to guitar greatness: Black Sabbath's TONY IOMMI joins Garcia and Reinhardt in the elite club of guitarists with finger problems. Before he was a heavy metal superstar, Iommi lost chunks of two fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident. He fashioned prosthetic tips and went on to be one of the most celebrated rock guitarists of the 1970s.
BORIS YELTSIN was a minor Communist Party official until he put himself in the right place just as the Soviet Union collapsed. As a boy his timing wasn't so good: he blew off two fingers while playing with a grenade snitched from an Army depot. It didn't keep him from juggling foreign and domestic policy from 1989-99 at a critical junction in Russian history.
DR. ALEX COMFORT's book The Joy of Sex came out in 1972, in time to capitalize on the apparent need of many Americans to hear from an expert that fornication was fun. Comfort managed his intricate researches despite having lost four fingers on his left hand while fooling with explosives as a kid. No matter: The Joy of Sex remains one of the all-time best selling books on sex.
Submitted by Gwen
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