SDMB-level - nitpick:
your 2nd sentence seems to contradict the phrase in question.
And no, I am not going to investigate this any deeper.
Paul Revere Williams was an African-American architect active in Los Angeles from the 1920s through the 1960s, during which time he designed over 2,000 buildings, including homes for Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lon Chaney, Barbara Stanwyck, and many other celebrities. He was the first certified black architect west of the Mississippi.
Williams designed a couple of buildings for UCLA, the Shrine Auditorium in L. A., and in 1940 he redesigned the Beverly Hills Hotel, adding many of the features that are now considered iconic, including the distinctive style of its name on the side of the building.
Here is the interesting (but sad) fact I wanted to pass along, from the Wikipedia entry:
Known as an outstanding draftsman, he perfected the skill of sketching “upside down.” This skill was developed because in the 1920s many of his white clients felt uncomfortable sitting directly next to a Black man. He learned to sketch upside down so that he could sit across the desk from his clients who would see his sketches right-side-up.
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, a nondescript man calling himself Dan Cooper approached the counter of Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland, Oregon.
He used cash to buy a one-way ticket on Flight #305, bound for Seattle, Washington. He bailed out with the money, never to be seen again.
Inspired by Cooper’s story, Martin McNally, an unemployed service-station attendant, used a submachine gun to commandeer an American Airlines 727 en route from St. Louis, Missouri, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 23, 1972, then diverted it eastward to Indiana and bailed out with $500,000 in ransom.
He spent a week on the run but was eventually captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence. While in prison he hooked up with Garrett Brock Trapnell. Trapnell was a conman, bank robber, and aircraft hijacker of the 60’s and 70’s. He masterminded a jewelry store heist in the Bahamas, he robbed a string of banks in Canada, and he frequently impersonated a CIA agent.
Together they devised an escape plan. On May 24, 1978 Trapnell’s friend, 43-year-old Barbara Ann Oswald, hijacked a St. Louis based charter helicopter and tried to force the pilot to land in the yard at USP Marion, where Trapnell and McNally were serving their sentences. While landing the aircraft the pilot, Allen Barklage, who was a Vietnam veteran, struggled with Oswald and managed to wrestle the gun away from her. Barklage then shot and killed Oswald, thwarting the escape.
While still in prison, Trapnell befriended Oswalds daughter, Robin, promising her all the beautiful things she didn’t have. She later would refer to him as a father figure. He convinced her to take up where her mother left off.
On December 21, 1978 Robin Oswald, the 17-year-old daughter of Barbara Ann Oswald, hijacked TWA Flight 541 and demanded that Trapnell be freed or she would detonate dynamite that was strapped to her body. Robin Oswald was remembered by the hostages aboard the flight as a “beautiful girl” with a serious demeanor, who never exhibited any signs of nervousness. FBI negotiators were able to free the passengers and induce her to surrender with no injuries or deaths
While serving a life sentence for armed robbery, kidnapping, and hijacking, Trapnell died in a prison in Springfield, Missouri in 1993 at the age of 55. McNally was later paroled.
Doing geneological research has been a pain for me, because my surname (my dad’s) is very common. My mother’s maiden surname is very rare.
I knew about this and also found it very sad. He was well known for his beautiful swooping staircases, though his houses weren’t overdone mcmansions. They were comfortable, livable homes. I’d love to live in a Williams house.
Today I learned the eagle is not the national bird for the United States.
That’s because the United States doesn’t have a national bird. But that could soon change.
In the movie The Englishmen who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, it’s pointed out that, since “Jones” is an extremely common name in Wales, people are often known by their occupation. Thus you have Morgan the Goat, Johnny Shellshocked, William the Petroleum, and Davies the School.
And the undertaker might be Dai the Death.
When Welsh-speakers adopted fixed surnames, many were adapted versions of their father’s given name as in the patronymic system, which were relatively few. So in any one small community people were distinguished by their trade as well as their personal names, so “Jones the Milk” or (in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood) “Dai Bread”.
For years I’ve wondered what the hell “Jones” meant. Smith was obviously a metalworker, but what the hell was a “Jones”.
Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, I have learned that it’s a very worn-down form of “son of John”, and thus means the same as “Johnson”.
Like this?
12 years ago I bought a 2005 Toyota Highlander for about $6,500.
I’m looking to sell it now, and checking prices on one of those car selling websites, some of them are still selling for $5,000+!
Not mine, of course, mine is beat to all hell, but how does a car depreciate $100 a year?
There is a point when old cars turn into vintage cars and start appreciating in value. With only two data points you can’t tell the form of a curve. It may be a V.
Well, if you had been a 99er, you would have seen the answer.
My last name is not especially common, but neither is it especially rare. There are several people with my exact First Name Last Name combo in the US (at least 4 prominent enough to have several hits on Google, and probably a few others).
Even so, I have never met anyone with my last name who is not a close relative. Because of marriages and deaths, that list now includes me, my wife, and my mother. I have no idea where all the other Verwirrts are hanging out.
Used car prices surged due to COVID. They were still abnormally high at least thru May of this year. The prices have finally started to fall but not in all cases to pre-COVID levels.
My last name, which I’m told has Ukrainian origins, is spelled one letter different on the West Coast versus the East Coast. At some point someone either made the one letter change and moved out West, or perhaps someone who came through Ellis Island got the altered spelling by mistake and ended up on the West Coast.
I always felt that my father had something to do with the alternate spelling of my last name, but he denied changing it. After he died, I found an old report card from his childhood that had the East Coast spelling which is different from my family name. He was an only child, and we had no contact with my paternal grandparents, it’s a long story, so I can’t be sure what really happened.
You should be able to check old census records
My last name comes from a town in Ukraine. It’s now spelled differently since Ukraine’s independence. They changed one letter from an ‘I’ to a ‘Y’ to conform to spelling in the Ukrainian language instead of the Russian form.
I’ve tried, but I can’t find either my father or his parents, using either spelling, in the 1950 census anywhere in San Francisco.
Okay, scratch all that. I found an app that makes it much easier to search through census records and other ancestral documents and found my paternal grandparents and indeed it shows they had the traditional spelling. It turns out my father slightly changed the spelling of his last name to distinguish himself from his parents, or for some other reason that we were never told. I remember asking him why it was spelled differently than everyone else I’ve ever heard of with that last name and he said it was always his last name, which was clearly not true, as proven by census documentation. While it doesn’t matter why he changed it at least I can now tell someone why it’s spelled different than 99% of the people that have the same last name. Case closed.