On this day...

On this day in 1949, actor/musican Tom Waits, was born in Pomona, California. Tom's parents, who were both schoolteachers, divorced in 1960, at which point Tom's mother raised him in Whittier and later in National City, California. It was in National City that Tom began playing piano on a neighbor's instrument and worked at the Napoleone Pizza House, which he sung about on "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)" from Small Change and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)". After a stint in the Coast Guard, Tom Waits settled in Los Angeles and began performing regularly at the famous Troubadour in West Hollywood. Tom Waits is most famous for his voice which critic Daniel Durchholz described as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."