The Runners Up Club

Graham Parker: The Original Angry Young Man

Passion is no ordinary word when it comes to this famously acerbic and literate rocker, the first - and most soulful - of the triad at the vanguard of the British New Wave.

Alfred Russel Wallace: The Spiritual Evolutionist

The naturalist whose contemporaneous insights into “the transmutation of species” may have shared top billing with Darwin had he not gone off - script, refusing to boot god entirely from his theory of evolution.

Howard K. Smith: An Anchorman For Our Time

The post-war era found most Americans turning to the famously well-trusted "Uncle" Walter Cronkite on CBS for their eyes on the world, while the gloriously opinionated Howard K. Smith, his ratings rival, was Edward R. Murrow's truer heir, and progenitor of today's primetime news anchors.

Greg Norman: Prophecies Fulfilled

The likable Australian golfer's frequent appearances in the runner-up slot raises questions about the perils of catastrophic thinking and self fulfilling prophecies in sports. But also lessons in flipping the script in life.

Catherine Littlefield Greene: The Heart of the Gin

A Rhode Island aristocrat who became a widowed plantation owner in the Reconstruction Era South may have been more instrumental to the invention of the cotton gin than Eli Whitney.