March 6 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on March 6

• Michelangelo (1475)

  Italian Renaissance sculptor and painter known for the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the sculptures David and Pietà.

• Ed McMahon (1923)

  American broadcaster known as Johnny Carson's longtime sidekick and announcer on The Tonight Show.

• Alan Greenspan (1926)

  American economist who served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.

• Shaquille O'Neal (1972)

  American basketball Hall of Famer and four-time NBA champion center.

This Day in History

• 1836 — The Battle of the Alamo ended after a thirteen-day siege, with Mexican forces under General Santa Anna overwhelming the Texan defenders.

• 1857 — The U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruling that Black Americans, enslaved or free, could not be U.S. citizens, a decision later overturned by the 14th Amendment.

• 1899 — The German company Bayer registered aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) as a trademark, beginning its mass production as a commercial pain reliever.

• 1953 — Georgy Malenkov was named to succeed Joseph Stalin as head of the Soviet government, a day after Stalin's death was announced.

What March 6 Says About You

Scale is the theme that keeps surfacing on March 6, in both the largest and smallest possible senses. Michelangelo, born on this date in 1475, worked on a physical scale almost no other artist has matched, painting an entire chapel ceiling essentially alone and carving marble into figures meant to be seen from a hundred feet below. The Battle of the Alamo ended on this same date in 1836 after thirteen days that became, almost immediately, a symbol far larger than the small Texan garrison actually involved — a minor military defeat that got remembered as a monumental one. Bayer's 1899 aspirin trademark sits at the opposite end of the scale question entirely: one of the smallest, cheapest interventions in medical history, a compound that ended up treating more people, more often, than almost any other drug ever made. The Dred Scott decision, handed down on this date in 1857, is a reminder that scale can be moral as well as physical — a single Supreme Court ruling whose consequences rippled through the entire country and helped push it toward civil war. Shaquille O'Neal, born on this date in 1972, spent a career being literally larger than the sport around him, an athlete whose sheer physical scale reshaped how the center position was played and defended. A March 6 Pisces birthday tends to carry that same instinct for thinking big — sweeping visions, grand gestures, an appetite for projects that dwarf what a single ordinary day usually holds. The date's numerology tempers the grandeur a little: the 6th reduces to day number 6, tied to responsibility and care rather than raw ambition, a trait that shows up in Ed McMahon's decades-long, dependable second-chair role supporting someone else's spotlight rather than chasing his own. People born March 6 often combine Pisces' expansive imagination with a numerological instinct to actually take care of whatever they end up building, rather than abandoning it once the initial vision fades. Between the two stones traditionally claimed by the month, aquamarine and bloodstone, and its two flowers, daffodil and jonquil, a March 6 birthday closes out a real history that runs, again and again, toward things — for better and for worse — that turned out bigger than they first appeared. Alan Greenspan, also born March 6, spent nearly two decades as Federal Reserve chairman making decisions whose consequences rippled through the entire global economy, a career built on exactly the kind of outsized scale the date's other history keeps returning to. The Sistine Chapel ceiling itself, which Michelangelo painted lying on his back on custom-built scaffolding for roughly four years, remains one of the most physically demanding single artistic projects ever completed by one person, a scale of individual effort that still astonishes conservators who study it today. Ed McMahon's introduction, 'Heeeere's Johnny,' became one of the most recognized catchphrases in American broadcasting, proof that even a supporting role, repeated nightly for three decades, can grow into something culturally oversized in its own right.