Theming "from" and "to" dates separately with historical dates

I am trying to get my template to print out a nicely formatted historical date from a CCK date field (with both from and to dates). I am using ADOdb. Everything is rather easy if I want to just use the default combination of the "from" and "to" dates; I can just use print $node->field_born[0]['view']

However, if I want to put the "from" date in a table cell that is separate from the "to" table cell, I can't seem to get things to work. So far, my most promising attempt was this:

 $formatted_date = date_format_date($node->field_born[0][value], 'custom', 'M j, Y'); 
print $formatted_date 

However, this only produces an ugly timestamp, like so: 1819-08-0100:00:00.

Any ideas how to crack this? I must be missing something here. Thanks in advance for any help!