One of my very few claims to fame is that my aunt used to play bridge with the mother of Merlin and Phil Olsen.
In play: William Ide was born in Massachusetts. He and his wife eventually moved to Kentucky, then Ohio, and then Illinois. It was there that he was baptized into the Mormon church and worked on founder Joseph Smith’s 1844 presidential campaign. In 1845, Ide and his family joined a wagon train in Independence, Missouri, bound for Oregon. But he and a small group of settlers decided to go to California instead, thus becoming the first Mormons to enter that territory.
The Oregon Trail was an educational video game, developed by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC). The best-known version of the game was released in 1985, for the Apple II system; this version was the first to feature graphics (earlier versions, dating back as far as 1975, were text-only).
The game places the player in charge of a wagon train in 1848, guiding settlers from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game has become a cultural icon, and in particular, one of its messages about a failed mission is often quoted: “You have died of dysentery.”
Conestoga wagons were rarely used on the Oregon Trail. They were too big, and they didn’t handle too well. The terrain was too rugged for them. Conestoga wagons were indispensable to trade and travel back east, but out west and during the move west they didn’t work very well. Pioneers instead used smaller wagons nicknamed prairie schooners.
The bed of a prairie schooner was about 10’ long x 4’ wide. Pulled by a team of oxen or mules they covered about 15 miles a day. (Think about THAT the next time you’re flying down freeways across wide open land at 75 MPH!)
Prairie schooners could also be caulked with tar and floated on deeper rivers and streams.
An ox is not a distinct species or breed of cattle; rather, an ox is a cow trained as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly castrated adult male cattle, which are known as steers. Young steers selected for draft are painstakingly trained from a young age. Their teamster makes or buys as many as a dozen yokes of different sizes for each animal as it grows. The steers are normally considered fully trained at the age of four and only then become known as oxen.
I can think of two others; one common (children), and one not-so-common (brethren). Both were formed from the original spellings of ‘childer’ and ‘brether’, to which the -en suffix was added. Over the years the ‘E’ preceding the final ‘R’ was lost, leaving us with the words as they are used today.
Most other words that end in ‘en’ (such as ‘maiden’, ‘kitten’, or ‘chicken’) are examples of the suffix being used as a diminutive rather than a plural.
Oxford, England, is named, simply for being a ford used as an oxen crossing on the Cherwell River, where it meets the Thames. That was about 900 AD. A millenium later, town fathers named Oxford, Mississippi, that in hopes of attracting the proposed state university, and sure enough, it worked.
In mathematics, Ford circles are mutually tangential circles that are also tangent to the line y=0 and whose radii form a fraction that is irreducible.
It is well known that Henry Ford was a pioneer in the mass-production of automobiles. His company was also among the first to mass-produce tractors. The first Ford experimental tractor was produced in 1907; Ford called it his ‘Automobile plow.’ In 1918, the Ford introduced a tractor to the American farmer. The machine was lightweight and much cheaper than other tractors at the time. Ford called it the ‘Fordson’, a contraction of the original name of the tractor operation, Henry Ford & Son.
In the early 1930s Ferdinand Porsche started his design work on a “people’s car” that became the Volkswagen Type 1 (Beetle). He also began his design work on a “people’s tractor” and he built the Volk-Schlepper.
The Volkswagen Type 1, or Beetle, was in production from 1938 until 2003; with over 21 million Beetles produced in that time, it is the automotive model with the longest production, and most units, under a single platform.
Throughout the years, over 44 million Toyota Corollas have been sold. The 44 million mark was reached in 2016. The Corolla was first sold in 1966 and in over 50 years there have been different platforms and generations of the Corolla.
(Personal note, in 1995 when I was going through my divorce, my wife got the only car we owned – and rightfully so because she had our 3 kids with her. I had my motorcycle, and no car at the time. We had been a low-budget, low-income 1-car, 1-motorcycle family. The first car I bought (for the weekends and days I had the kids) was a humble 1981 Toyota Corolla Tercel 2-door sedan like in the first picture here, 1981 Toyota Tercel: Prices, Reviews & Pictures - CarGurus.
I called it “The DivorceMobile”. It was unbreakable, had ‘only’ 140,000 miles, and I wish I still had that little beater of a car!)
Martin Sheen, later to play the White House chief of staff in The American President and the American President on The West Wing, voiced Toyota ads for many years.
Martin Sheen’s left arm was damaged by the doctor’s foreceps during his birth, leaving him with a condition known as Erb’s palsy – his left arm is shorter than his right arm, and he has limited mobility and use of that arm.
Sheen developed a method to put on a jacket (the “jacket flip”) in order to compensate for this loss of motion, which he used frequently during the television series The West Wing.
If he actually had anything in the jacket pockets - a wallet, cellphone, pens, etc. - they’d go flying. I guess President Josiah Bartlet, Democrat of New Hampshire, has his body man Charlie Young for that on The West Wing.
Former Super Bowl MVP Steve Young is a great-great-great grandson of Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Young went to college at the school named for his ancestor, Brigham Young University, which is located in Provo, Utah. In his senior year, Young was runner-up to the 1983 Heisman Trophy.
Joe Theismann’s last name was originally pronounced Theez-man. It was Notre Dame’s publicity team that changed the pronounciation to Thighz-man to rhyme with Heisman (as in the trophy). Joe didn’t win.
Joe Theismann didn’t win the Heisman Trophy. Jim Plunkett won the 1970 Heisman. In the 1971 NFL draft, 3 quarterbacks were consecutive first round picks, and Jim Plunkett was picked #1 overall. He was follwed by Archie Manning at #2 and Dan Pastorini at #3. In a draft year with many talented QBs, Lynn Dickey was picked at #56 and Ken Anderson at #67. Theismann was picked #99 by the Miami Dolphins.
Running back John Riggins was picked in that draft at #6 by the New York Jets.
