Notable People
Actress Kirstie Alley is known for her role in the TV show Cheers, in which she played Rebecca Howe from 1987 to 1993, winning an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award as the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1991. She has been successful on television and screen in other roles. Alley was born in Wichita on January 12, 1951.
Actor Don Johnson of Miami Vice and Nash Bridges fame along with various other television and movie roles, moved to Wichita from Missouri with his family when he was six. He graduated Wichita South High School in 1967 and later attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.
Oscar winning actress and star of Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniel, was born in Wichita.
Wyatt Earp served as a lawman in several Western frontier towns, including Wichita. He is most well known for his part in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral during which three outlaw Cowboys were killed. The 30-second gunfight defined the rest of his life. Earp's modern-day reputation is that of the Old West's "toughest and deadliest gunman of his day."
Wichita has also produced many notable athletes including Pro Football Hall of Fame running backs Gale Sayers and Barry Sanders, Olympic athlete and Congressman Jim Ryun, and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Lynette Woodard.
Dennis Rader, a serial killer known as "BTK" (bind, torture kill), grew up in Wichita, and murdered ten people in and around Wichita from 1974 through 1991.
Wichita also has among its people many prominent fictional characters, including the entire setting of the Dennis the Menace comic strip.
Brian Marshall, bassist of the rock bands Creed and Alter Bridge, lives in Wichita.
Businessmen Charles and David Koch (Koch Industries), Dan and Frank Carney (Pizza Hut), Clyde Cessna (Cessna Aircraft), Walter Herschel Beech (Beech Aircraft Company), and Bill Lear (Lear Jet), were all born in or lived in Wichita
Read more about this topic: Wichita Metropolitan Area
Famous quotes containing the words notable and/or people:
“a notable prince that was called King John;
And he ruled England with main and with might,
For he did great wrong, and maintained little right.”
—Unknown. King John and the Abbot of Canterbury (l. 2–4)
“Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)