Happy Birthday, Jonathan Kent!

September 1 is generally-recognized birthday of Jonathan "Pa" Kent, the adoptive father of Superman.

If he were alive (he isn't, with the current continuity having both the Kents dead before Clark ever became Superman), he would be...well, old. Nobody's entirely sure his age, what with all the reboots and such. But since he (or at least his post-Crisis on Infinite Earths iteration) participated in the Korean War, he would likely have had to be at least 18 in 1950 when the conflict began. That would peg him at about 83 years old this year.

It's difficult to get a definitive biography of Jonathan Kent, since he's existed (and generally died) in so many different realities, but at a fairly young age, he and Martha discovered that they couldn't have children. They ended up with one anyway when an infant from space crash-landed in a rocket during a bad snowstorm. The Kents adopted the child, buried the rocket and passed him off as their own after the winter (in Kansas a few decades ago, it was presumably somewhat more common for people to be squirreled away for months at a time in the winter).

In the current continuity, Jonathan and Martha Kent were killed in a car accident. In the pre-Flashpoint DC Universe, he died from a heart attack -- his most common cause of death in alternate earths and other media, as well.