1899: Dr. Clarence Hemingway stepped onto the porch of his home and blew his cornet to announce the birth of his son, Ernest. During Ernest Hemingway's boyhood, his family spent much time at their cottage near Walloon Lake in northern Michigan where his father enjoyed hunting and other sports. The love for the great outdoors and the physically active life his father instilled in him remained with Hemingway for the rest of his life. After graduating from high school, Hemingway worked briefly as a reporter for the Kansas City Star before volunteering for service in World War I. Excluded from regular military duty because of a defective eye, he worked as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was badly injured. Hemingway drew on his wartime experience of falling in love with his nurse while recuperating in a Milan hospital as background for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1961. (Source: Library of Congress)