John Baumann has established himself as songwriter and entertainer. He’s released several solo releases, while honing his songwriting skills and landing cuts with other artists – from Kenny Chesney to the Randy Rogers Band he is not short on innate talent and storytelling. He is also a member of the acclaimed group, The Panhandlers, along with Phi Delta Theta brother Josh Abbott, William Clark Green, and Cleto Cordero (of Flatland Cavalry). He is currently working on a new solo project, as well as a new Panhandlers album, both available in the near future.
Profession: Media & Entertainment
Jamie Murray
James “Jamie” Murray is a contestant from MTV’a reality television series The Real World: New Orleans (2000). The show focused on a group of diverse strangers living together for several months in a different city each season, as cameras followed their lives and relationships. He is the champion of the Extreme Challenge, Battle of the Sexes, and The Gauntlet 2.
John Harwood
John Harwood is Editor at Large for CNBC covering Washington and hosts the CNBC Digital original video series “Speakeasy with John Harwood.”
Harwood was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and grew up in the Maryland suburbs outside of the nation’s capital. He has been around journalism and politics all his life; his first trip on a presidential campaign press plane came when he was 11 years old and accompanied his father, then a political reporter for The Washington Post.
While still in high school, he began his journalism career as a copy boy at The Washington Star. He studied history and economics at Duke University and graduated magna cum laude in 1978. Harwood subsequently joined The St. Petersburg Times, reporting on police, investigative projects, local government and politics. Later he became state capital correspondent in Tallahassee, Washington correspondent and political editor. While covering national politics, he also traveled extensively to South Africa, where he covered deepening unrest against the apartheid regime.
In 1989, Harwood was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he spent the 1989-90 academic year. In 1991, he joined The Wall Street Journal as White House correspondent, covering the administration of George H. W. Bush. Later Harwood reported on Congress. In 1997, he became The Wall Street Journal’s political editor and chief political correspondent.
While at The Wall Street Journal, Harwood wrote the newspaper’s political column, “Washington Wire,” and oversaw the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. In March 2006, he joined CNBC as Chief Washington Correspondent.
In addition to CNBC, Harwood offers political analysis on NBC and NPR, among others. Harwood has covered each of the last nine presidential elections.
Myk Watford
Myk was raised in the Muscle Shoals, area of North Alabama. He attended the University of Utah, under the tutelage of Kenneth H. Washington, and studied at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.
You’ve probably seen Myk on just about every cop show on TV, most notably a recurring stint on “Law & Order: SVU”, as well the all the “CSI’s”, “NCIS’s”, and every other procedural using acronyms. Other notable TV work include “Breaking Bad, True Blood, Justified, Longmire, Scandal, just to name a few.
In 2019, Myk will first be seen in Season 3 of the hit HBO series, True Detective: Season 3 with Marhershala Ali (Oscar Winner for Moonlight) as well as guest starring roles on CBS’ hit show “Elementary”, and Fox’s “Lethal Weapon”. This Summer, we will see Myk as “Little Jackie” in the highly anticipated big screen adaptation of DC/Vertigo Comics “The Kitchen”, alongside Melissa McCarthy, Elisabeth Moss and Tiffany Haddish. Myk is also known for his previous feature endeavors in movies like “No Country For Old Men”, “Spider-Man”, “Trailer Park of Terror” and “NY Prison Break”.
Myk was classically trained, and has appeared in over a hundred theatrical productions, including numerous Broadway and Off Broadway hits such as “Take Me Out”, “Hank Williams; Lost Highway”, “The Good Negro” “Five By Tenn” and many, many more.
Myk is also a musician, and when he is not on set, you can often find him rocking the Hollywood scene with his popular swamp-rockabilly-revival band “Stumpwaller”.
Bruce Gray
Most Canadians would know Bruce Gray as the star of the TV series Traders (Gemini Award), but most Americans would recognize him as the Father of the groom in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Although he began his acting career on stage in the 60s, he quickly moved into daytime dramas: contracted to Somerset, High Hopes and the Edge of Night in the 70’s. A move to Hollywood in the 80s led to guest star roles on hundreds of TV shows, recurring on Murder She Wrote, Medium, Tour of Duty, Falling Skies, How I met your Mother. Bruce gained notoriety in the gay community as “Shickle The Pickle” on Queer As Folk, then for football fans by playing a team owner on Playmakers for ESPN.
Grantland Rice
Phi Delta Theta Sports Hall of Fame Inductee
Grantland Rice was a sports writer and poet whose columns became nationally syndicated beginning in 1930. Rice is known as the Dean of American Sports Writers and the most famous sports writer in America during the first half of the 20th century. His poetry included Alumni Football, which ends with the lines: “For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.”
To honor his 50 years in journalism, the Grantland Rice Fellowship in Journalism was established with the New York Community Trust in 1951. In 1954, the Football Writers Association established the Grantland Rice Memorial Award given to an outstanding college player chosen by the association. The Grantland Rice Bowl, a college bowl game named in his honor, was played from 1964 to 1977. He received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award posthumously in 1966 from the Baseball Writers Association of America for meritorious contributions to baseball writing.
Today, the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sports Writing Scholarship provides a partial tuition scholarship to an entering Vanderbilt student interested in the field of sports journalism.
Bob Prince
Robert Ferris Prince was an American radio and television sportscaster and commentator best known for his 28-year stint as the voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates Major League Baseball club, with whom he earned the nickname “The Gunner” and became a cultural icon in Pittsburgh.
Prince was one of the most distinct and popular voices in sports broadcast history, known for his gravel voice, unabashed style and clever nicknames and phrases, which came to be known as “Gunnerisms.” His unique manner influenced a number of broadcasters after him, including Pittsburgh Penguins voice Mike Lange and Pittsburgh Steelers color analyst Myron Cope.
Prince called Pirates games from 1948 to 1975, including the World Series championship years of 1960 and 1971. Nationally, Prince broadcast the 1960, 1966, and 1971 World Series and the 1965 All-Star Game for NBC, as well as the first year (1976) of ABC’s Monday Night Baseball. He also broadcast at different times for other Pittsburgh-area sports teams, including Steelers football and Penguins hockey.
Harry Kalas
Harry Norbert Kalas was an American sportscaster, best known for his Ford C. Frick Award-winning role as lead play-by-play announcer for Major League Baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies, a position he held from 1971 until his death in 2009.
Kalas was also closely identified with the National Football League, serving as a voice-over narrator for NFL Films productions (a regular feature on Inside the NFL) and calling football games nationally for Westwood One radio.
Kalas collapsed in the Washington Nationals’ broadcast booth on April 13, 2009, about an hour before a Phillies game was scheduled to begin against the Nationals, and died soon afterward.
Sonny Shroyer
Shroyer is an American actor who has appeared in various television and movie roles. He is known for his role as Deputy Sheriff Enos Strate in the television series The Dukes of Hazzard. He also starred in a spin-off called Enos based on his Dukes of Hazzard character. Shroyer is married and has two sons, Chris and Mark.
Zachary Scott
Born in Austin, Texas, Zachary Scott was a distant cousin of George Washington, and his grandfather had been a very successful cattle rancher. Scott intended to be a doctor like his father, Zachary Scott Sr., but after attending the University of Texas at Austin for a while, he decided to switch to acting. He signed on as a cabin boy on a freighter which took him to England, where he acted in repertory theatre for a while, before he returned to Austin, and began acting in local theater.
Alfred Lunt discovered Scott in Texas and convinced him to move to New York City, where he appeared on Broadway. Scott made his debut on Broadway in a revival of Ah, Wilderness! in 1941 with a small role as a bartender. Three years later, Jack L. Warner saw him in a performance of Those Endearing Young Charms and signed him to appear in The Mask of Dimitrios.
He appeared the next year in Mildred Pierce to much acclaim. In the film, Scott was Joan Crawford’s somewhat sleazy love interest, whose mysterious murder formed the basis of the plot. In 1946 exhibitors voted him the third most promising “star of tomorrow.”
Zachary Scott enjoyed playing scoundrels and the public enjoyed those portrayals, too. Scott went on to star in such movies as The Southerner, The Unfaithful, Cass Timberlane, Flamingo Road, Flaxy Martin, Guilty Bystander, Wings of Danger, and Shadow on the Wall, opposite Nancy Davis Reagan and Ann Sothern. He later starred in Luis Buñuel’s The Young One, Buñuel’s second English language movie.
In 1961, he portrayed the part of White Eyes, a Native American Chief, in the episode Incident Before Black Pass on Rawhide.
In 1968 the Austin Civic Theater was renamed the Zachary Scott Theatre Center to honor their native son. His family has endowed two chairs at the University of Texas’s theatre department in his name. Two streets in the Austin area are named in his honor: One street at the old airport Mueller Redevelopment; and the other in unincorporated southeast Travis County.
Scott has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.