All four of the first four soldiers buried in Arlington National Cemetery had the first name William. John F. Kennedy and William Howard Taft are the only two Presidents buried in Arlington; the only President buried within Washington, D.C. city limits is Woodrow Wilson, who is buried inside the Washington National Cathedral.
In 1862 the US Government ordered a special property tax on areas in insurrection to be paid in person. The goal was really to seize the property for non-payment. Phillip Fendall attempted to pay the tax on Arlington, the estate of Mary Lee and her husband Robert E. Lee. The tax collector refused to accept the payment and so the estate was seized for non-payment and later sold to the Federal government at auction. In 1882, SCOTUS affirmed that the sale was illegal and the Lees’ heirs got the property back. Since Arlington National Cemetery had already been created, the heirs sold it back to the Federal government.
Wow, didn’t realize that! When I visited ANC last, I can’t remember if I saw Taft’s grave.
In play: the Marine Corps War Memorial at ANC (Arlington Nat’l Cemetery) is not actually on the ANC grounds. It is outside the Ord-Weitzel Gate to ANC and it is in the Arlington Ridge Park. The Memorial was dedicated on 10 November 1954, the 179th birthday of the Marine Corps.
The black diabase (or, dolerite) granite comes from Lönsboda, in southern Sweden and 300 miles southwest of Saltsjöbaden which is near Stockholm.
Granite is a type of igneous rock, formed from magma which has high concentrations of silica and alkali metal oxides. The word “granite” comes from the Latin word granum, or “grain,” reflecting the fact that granite is a coarse-grained rock, with visible grains of various component minerals, such as quartz, feldspar, and mica.
The most common grain in the world is rice, which is grown on every continent except Antarctica. There are more than 40,000 varieties of rice. It is estimated that people in Asia consume over 300 pounds of rice each year.
As far as is publicly known, nuclear weapons have never been deployed by any nation to Antarctica.
“A Nation Once Again” is a nationalist Irish song, written in the mid-19th century.
The Great Famine (also known as the Great Hunger, and the Irish Potato Famine) was a period of starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 through 1849. It was caused primarily by a potato blight, which wiped out much of the potato harvest (potatoes being the primary staple food for the Irish farmers, many of whom were tenants to English landowners). In the years of the famine, roughly a million Irish died due to starvation or disease, and another million emigrated from the country, thus reducing the country’s population by roughly one-quarter.
The potato is native to South America, and is believed to have been introduced to Europe by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. By 1600 the potato was being grown in parts of Ireland, and it quickly became the most popular food crop in the country.
Samwise Gamgee cooked potatoes once while he, Frodo Baggins and Gollum were on their long journey into Mordor. JRR Tolkien wrote that his tales of Middle-earth took place about six thousand years ago in what is now Western Europe, so potatoes should not have then been available.
The Idaho Potato Museum is in Blackfoot ID. I’ve been there, it’s a fun little museum. The Incas in Peru were the first to farm the potato as a food. For McDonald’s French fries, they are made mainly from four types of potatoes — Russet Burbank, Russet Ranger, Umatilla Russet, and Shepody potatoes.
Horticulturist Luther Burbank developed a cultivar of the potato which would be resistant to the “late blight” disease, which had caused the Great Famine in Ireland. The cultivar, which was named after Burbank.
By the latter 20th Century, the “Russet Burbank” variety became the most popular potato in the U.S., in part due to its suitability for making French fries.
Hollywood Burbank Airport (BUR) was called Bob Hope Airport from 2003 to 2017. The name was changed to reintegrate the name of the city of Burbank because people did not what area “Bob Hope Airport” served.
Bob Hope, Don King, Halle Berry and Keir Dullea were all either born in or raised in Cleveland, Ohio.
In her career, actress Margaret Hamilton (1902-1985) costarred with Buster Keaton, WC Fields, Harold Lloyd, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Mickey Rooney, Oscar the Grouch, Don Ameche, Jean Simmons, and then of course Judy Garland and Frank Morgan and Ray Bolger and Bert Lahr and Jack Haley and Billie Burke and Charley Grapewin and The Munchkins.
Margaret Hamilton was born in Cleveland OH.
Ray Bolger, best known as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, was originally cast as the Tin Man. Bolger was unhappy with the casting, so the actors of the two characters swapped roles. The original Scarecrow, Buddy Ebsen, became seriously ill during filming due to the aluminum dust in his makeup, and he had to drop out. Ebsen was replaced by Jack Haley.
Buddy Ebsen, while probably best-known for his role as Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, started out as a dancer and ran his own dance studio. He was also an accomplished sailor whose proficiency led him to teach U.S. Navy officer candidates how to sail. While the Navy wouldn’t allow him to serve, he did serve in the Coast Guard during WWII.
Paul Henning was an American television producer; in 1962, he created the situation comedy The Beverly Hillbillies, about a family from the rural Ozarks, who become wealthy and move to Beverly Hills.
With the success of that show, Henning created two more rural-themed sitcoms: Petticoat Junction and Green Acres. The three shows were interrelated, set in the same “universe,” and occasionally sharing characters and settings.
Petticoats are often distinguished from half-slips in that petticoats add volume to the skirt or dress while slips do not. Often petticoats are decorative and are meant to show as part of the outfit and slips are not.