Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet, is now 86. His wife of nearly 60 years passed away in 2015. Born in London, he now lives in Mount Vernon, Washington, in Skagit County and about 60 miles N of Seattle. Downtown Mount Vernon is known for its annual Tulip Festival Street Fair, which is part of the annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival occurring every April. It was inaugurated in 1984.
The town of Concrete, Washington is about 30 miles up the Skagit River from Mount Vernon, and got its name from being the site of a Portland cement company. Concrete was the site of the film “This Boy’s Life”, with Leonardo diCaprio and Robert deNiro. Skagit rhymes with “gadget”
Portland cement was developed by English cement-maker Joseph Aspdin, who received a patent for the material in 1824. It is estimated that the production of Portland cement accounts for 10% of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.
(Not in play, but I forgot to note it earlier: I got to meet Graham Kerr in the late '90s, when I worked for Quaker Oats, and we hosted him as our celebrity chef at our booth at an AARP convention. I was tremendously impressed – real charisma, but he also has a great heart for people.)
Walter Cronkite was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, but his father, a dentist, soon moved to Kansas City and then Houston. He dropped of the University of Texas, thinking radio news offered better opportunities, and became the icon of early TV journalism.
During World War II, Walter Cronkite was one of eight journalists selected by the United States Army Air Forces to fly bombing raids over Germany in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress part of group called ‘The Writing 69th’. During one of these missions, Cronkite fired a machine gun at a German fighter.
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber has been in continuous service with the U.S. Air Force since 1955. As of 2019, the USAF had 59 B-52s in active service, with an additional 18 in reserve, and approximately 12 in long-term storage. With recent upgrades to the B-52 fleet, the USAF expects to continue to fly the planes into the 2050s.
B-52s singer Kate Pierson owns a motel / B&B in Mount Tremper in the Catskills, New York. It’s called Kate’s Lazy Meadow and features individual cabins and several Airstream trailers on the banks of the Esopus Creek.
While the B-52’s nickname of “Superfortress” conjures up an aircraft loaded with bombs and bristling with machine guns and cannons, the only traditional defensive fire position on a B-52 was at the tail of the aircraft. Originally manned by a gunner, the position consisted of four radar-assisted M-3 machine guns, each capable of firing 1200 rounds per minute.
However, as anti-aircraft weapons such as air-to-air or surface-to-air missiles improved, it became possible for an enemy to launch an attack against a B-52 from well outside the range of any on-board weapon so the primary reason for the guns was eliminated. The guns, while still in place, became remotely-fired weapons and the gunner was moved from his solitary position in the tail of the plane and brought into the main compartment with the rest of the aircrew. One advantage of doing this was that the gunner also got an ejection seat and a better chance of surviving an attack on the aircraft, although several gunners did regret the loss of their panoramic view of where they had been from out the back.
American director Stanley Kubrick and his production designers were not allowed access to an actual U.S. Air Force B-52 Superfortress in preparing to shoot Dr. Strangelove, but went off photographs and documentary film clips to build a movie set of the bomber’s interior. Later, Kubrick was complimented by actual B-52 crewmembers for the accuracy of the set.
Stanley Kubrick was nominated for 13 Academy Awards during his career, including four nominees for Best Director. However, he only won one Oscar, for Best Visual Effects in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
His Best Director film nominations were for Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon.
In some early drafts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL 9000 computer was named Athena (after the Greek goddess of wisdom), and had a female voice and personality.
Douglas Trumbull and many others of the dozens of special effects staff for 2001: A Space Odyssey were annoyed that Stanley Kubrick put his own name in as the sole nominee for Best Visual Effects for the film. Although Kubrick was intimately involved in the development, direction and selection of the film’s sfx, he did not actually create them.
Francoise Sagan was born in a tiny commune in South-central France. After being expelled from two schools, she published her first novel at age 18, “Bonjour Tristesse”, which became a huge global best-selller. She remained prolific the rest of her life, but her later work attracted llittle attention.
French novelist Françoise Sagan was born Françoise Quoirez; she adopted the pseudonym “Sagan” from a character, Princesse de Sagan, in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (known in English as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past).
The Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia lies between the Ethiopian Plateau to the north and the Somalia Plateau to the south. It developed during the Miocene Period of about 5-20 million years ago, as the Nubian and Somali tectonic plates began to separate along the East African rift system.
Kubrick briefly consulted with Sagan but found him very annoying and didn’t talk with him further, according to an excellent book on the making of the movie, Space Odyssey by Michael Benson. He found no record of Sagan being involved in the aliens’ design (and there were various designs tried, before Kubrick decided not to show them at all).
In play:
There is an East Liverpool, Ohio, but no West Liverpool. An earlier Liverpool, Ohio is now defunct.
The official demonym for residents of the city of Liverpool, England is “Liverpudlian,” though they are also often referred to as “Scousers,” a name which is derived from “Scouse,” the unique accent of people from the Liverpool area.