Vic Janowitz won the Heisman trophy in 1950, but passed up playing in the NFL to play baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates, possibly because MLB was more lucrative. Failing that (he only hit .214), he went back to the NFL, but only played two seasons before he suffered a brain injury in a car accident that ended his career.
The city of Pittsburgh has teams in three major North American sports leagues: the Pirates (Major League Baseball), the Steelers (National Football League), and the Penguins (National Hockey League). All three teams use black and gold/yellow as their uniform colors.
Likely due to this consistency in team colors among the city’s pro teams, several Pittsburgh teams in smaller professional leagues also wear black and yellow, including the Riverhounds (USL soccer), the Passion (Women’s Football Alliance), the Thunderbirds (American Ultimate Disc League), and the Knights (an Esports team).
The oldest NFL franchise in the AFC is not the Browns, or the Colts, or the Chiefs. The oldest NFL franchise in the AFC is the Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers were founded in 1933 and are the seventh-oldest franchise in the NFL behind the:
1920: Arizona Cardinals
1920: Chicago Bears
1921: Green Bay Packers
1925: New York Giants
1930: Detroit Lions
1932: Washington Commanders
1933: Pittsburgh Steelers
The 1925 NFL Champions were … the Pottsville Maroons?
Upon beating the Chicago (now Arizona) Cardinals in the last game of 1925, the Maroons had the best record and therefore won the championship. Based on arbitrary application of rules, politics, and Chicago contracting for games with teams already disbanded for the season to improve their record, NFL Commissioner Joseph Carr denied Pottsville the championship and instead awarded it to Chicago. This ruling has been upheld by the NFL owners in 1963 and 2003.
Two current NFL teams actually predate the founding of the American Professional Football Association (APFA, which later became the NFL) in 1920:
- The Arizona Cardinals were formed in Chicago as the Morgan Athletic Club in 1898, then became known as the Racine Normals, then the Racine Street Cardinals (as they played on Normal Field, which was located on Racine Street in Chicago). They were a founding member of the APFA as the Racine Cardinals in 1920, but renamed themselves the Chicago Cardinals in 1922, to avoid confusion with a team based in Racine, Wisconsin.
- The Green Bay Packers were formed in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1919 as the Indian Packers, and were sponsored by the Indian Packing Company, a meat-packing company for whom the team founder, Curly Lambeau, worked. They were an independent team for their first two years, before joining the APFA, and becoming the Green Bay Packers, in 1921.
The latest iteration of the United States Football League (USFL) has just concluded its regular season. The league, which currently has 8 teams, started play in mid-April, and will play the first round of a four-team playoff this weekend. The 9-1 New Jersey Generals host the 6-4 Philadelphia Stars, while the 9-1 Birmingham Stallions host the 6-4 New Orleans Breakers.
All regular season games this season were played at Birmingham. The playoff games will be played at the Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Ohio was the seventeenth state to join the Union, and its flag bears seventeen stars. Variously described as a swallowtail, pennant or burgee, it is the only non-rectangular state flag, and routinely appears on lists of the best state flags. The flag briefly appears in a courtroom scene in the 2009 Pixar movie Up, suggesting the movie’s initial setting is in the Buckeye State.
The Up series is a series of English documentary films, profiling the lives over time of ten males and four females in England. The series began in 1964, with a film entitled Seven Up! – at that time, the subjects of the film were all seven years old.
Eight additional installments of the series have since been produced, each returning to profile the same individuals in seven-year intervals; the most recent installment, 63 Up, premiered in 2019, and documented the participants as 63-year-olds. Not every participant has agreed to appear in every film – of the 14 in the original film, only eight of them have appeared in all nine in the series, and one, who had appeared in the first eight films, passed away prior to the most recent installment.
7UP was invented in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg, who unhappily worked as an advertising executive at Whistle Orange Soda before quitting to make his own orange drink dubbed Howdy. Howdy was unsuccessful because of Orange Crush, which contained real orange juice. Doctors started to stress the importance of vitamin C around this time, and Howdy only contained essential oils found in the fruit’s peel.
Doctors to appear in the various incarnations of Star Trek include Dr. Leonard H. McCoy (Star Trek: The Original Series), Dr. Beverly Crusher (Star Trek: The Next Generation), Dr. Julian Bashir (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), the Emergency Medical Hologram (Star Trek: Voyager) and Dr. Phlox (Star Trek: Enterprise), among many others. The first three are human; the fourth is an artificial intelligence and the last is a Denobulan.
Gates McFadden, who portrayed Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, is a dancer as well as an actress. She served a role as choreographer on several Jim Henson productions, most notably the film Labyrinth, and her dance experience came into play on one episode of ST:TNG, “Data’s Day,” in which Dr. Crusher taught the android Data how to dance.
One symbol of Knossos was the double-headed axe that in Minoan was called the labrys. It is from this that we get the word labyrinth.
Labyrinth is a 1986 fantasy movie directed by Jim Henson and produced by George Lucas. The film, which starred Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie, featured many characters played by puppets created by Henson. The movie was a box-office failure during its initial release, but has since gained a large cult following.
George Washington loved to see plays, but was sometimes delayed by his duties and late in arriving at the theater. When a New York City theater owner offered to delay the start of a play until he could arrive, the President declined, saying that others in the audience should not be kept waiting just because he could not make curtain.
George Washington’s inauguration was held on 30 April 1789, almost two months after he took office and over one week after Vice President John Adams was inaugurated.
Congress passed the following resolution:
Resolved, That after the oath shall have been administered to the President, he, attended by the Vice President and members of the Senate and House of Representatives, shall proceed to St. Paul’s Chapel, to hear divine service.
This remains the only scheduled inauguration to take place on a day that was neither January or March.
The spot on Wall Street in New York City where George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States at Federal Hall in 1789 was, in 1883, marked by a statue which still stands. It can be briefly seen in the 1976 remake of King Kong, when the giant ape walks past it after breaking free of his captors.
George Washington’s statue is 2.7 miles from Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan. Fraunces Tavern is where he gave his farewell address to his troops on 04 December 1783. Washington then took a ship to Annapolis MD, where he resigned his commission.
Fraunces Tavern is still there and is open. I had a meal there a few years back.
Annapolis, Maryland was known by several earlier names after its founding in the 17th Century, including “Town at Procter’s,” “Town at the Severn,” and “Anne Arundel’s Towne” (the last named after the wife of Cecilus Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore).
In 1694, when the capital of the Province of Maryland was moved to the town, it was renamed Annapolis, this time being named after Princess Anne of Denmark and Norway, who later became Queen Anne of Great Britain.
Annapolis, Maryland (where a young Skunkdog spent much of his youth) is home to the United States Naval Academy. Beneath the Naval Academy Chapel, there lies a sarcophagus that looks like “something dredged up from Davy Jones’ Locker,” according to Atlas Obscura. It’s a gaudy 21-ton marble sarcophagus supported by bronze dolphins, and it’s the final resting place of John Paul Jones, the father of the American Navy. His body was originally buried in a Paris cemetery that was ultimately sold and forgotten. It took another century before someone decided that the famed Revolutionary figure should be buried in America, and so launched an expedition that featured weeks of underground tunneling while hunting for the body. In 1905, he was returned to Annapolis.
I’ve been to that sarcophagus, on a tour of the USNA. It’s quite the shrine.
In play: Annapolis, California is located in the far northwest corner of Sonoma County. It is about a 100 mile drive to where the CA-37 highway crosses Sonoma Creek in the far southeast corner of the county. The small town is named after Annapolis Orchards which was formed there in the early 1880s. The orchards were named after Annapolis Gallery, Nova Scotia, the homeland of the orchards’ founders.
Today, Annapolis, California has about 400 residents.