Cable television started independently and almost simultaneously in Pennsylvania, Oregon and Arkansas in 1948
In the '70s, Z Channel was one of the first pay television stations in the United States. Launched in 1974 from Southern California, it was known for its devotion to the art of cinema due to the eclectic choice of films by the programming chief at the time, Jerry Harvey. It also popularized the use of letterboxing on television, as well as showing ‘director’s cut’ versions of films (which is a term popularized after Z Channel’s showing of Heaven’s Gate). Z Channel’s devotion to cinema and choice of rare and important films had an important influence on such directors as Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Jarmusch. Following the death of Harvey, the station began sharing it’s programming with local sports teams (Angels, Clippers, Dodgers), and by the end of the '80s it was replaced with SportsChannel Los Angeles. The last movie shown was John Ford’s My Darling Clementine.
“Movie Tonight” was an episode of the television series MASH, which first aired in February, 1977.
In the episode, during a lull in the war, Father Mulcahy secures a copy of the film My Darling Clementine (Colonel Potter’s favorite film), to show to the unit’s bored and dispirited personnel. The showing of the film is punctuated by several break-downs of the film projector, and culminates with the personnel of the 4077th acting out the OK Corral shootout at the end of the film.
The production staff of MASH looked up and interviewed many veterans of US Army Korean War-era Mobile Army Surgical Hospital units, gathering story ideas to carry the show through its 11-season run.
Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) were U.S. Army field hospital units conceptualized in 1946 as replacements for the World War II-era Auxiliary Surgical Group hospital units, which had become obsolete. MASH Units were in operation from the Korean War to the Gulf War before being phased out in the early 2000s. It was designed to get experienced personnel closer to the front, so that the wounded could be treated sooner and with greater success. Casualties were first treated at the point of injury through buddy aid, then routed through Battalion Aid Stations for emergency stabilizing surgery, and finally routed to the MASH for the most extensive treatment. MASH units often took 24 hours to setup at new locations once moved with armored units, trucks and airmobile.
In 1997, the last MASH unit in South Korea was deactivated. A deactivating ceremony was held in South Korea, which was attended by several members of the cast of the MASH television series, including Larry Linville (who played Frank Burns), and David Ogden Stiers (who played Charles Winchester).
David Allen Ogden Stiers, a native of Peoria, Ill., was born on Halloween 1942. He attended the University of Oregon before transferring to, and graduating from, the Juilliard School. In addition to MASH, he had roles on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Dead Zone, Perry Mason and Lilo & Stitch. He died in 2018.
In 1846, trapper Miles Goodyear established a settlement and named it Fort Buenaventura. Its location was about a mile west of of where downtown Ogden, Utah sits today. It was the first permanent settlement by people of European descent in what is now the state of Utah.
The agreed-to signal in Salt Lake City that Utah had been admitted as a state was the Western Union manager fired a shotgun into the air twice.
What we now know as the Great Salt Lake started as Lake Bonneville, a predominantly freshwater lake that formed about 32,000 years ago, and at its greatest extent, covered about 20,000 square miles — almost a quarter of present-day Utah. Lake Bonneville reached depths of 1,000 feet, compared to about 33 feet today with a 13-foot average depth.
About 14,500 years ago, a breach in a sandstone wall in what is now Red Rock Pass, Idaho, resulted in the biggest flash flood this planet has ever known. Water poured through the breach at an estimated 159 million gallons per second, causing the lake to drop 350 feet in just a couple of weeks.
The Scablands of eastern Washington, most of the dramatic gorges, and a large part of the Columbia River gorge system were created from a series of massive flash floods from Glacial Lake Missoula when the pressure of the ice and water caused breaches in the ice dam. Many remnants are still visible in the form of dry gulches and plunge pools. A prime example of this is Palouse Falls and Palouse River canyon in Washington. The falls and river are still active and the plunge pool is enormous in relation to the size of the falls.
A glacial erratic is a rock, often large and about the size of a house or building (or bigger) that stands alone in a field without similar large rocks nearby. Glacial erratics differ from the type of rock native to the area in which it rests, because the erratic was deposited there by glacial action after being picked up from far away and carried sometimes hundreds of miles to where it currently rests. As the glacier ice sheet scoured the ground and advanced or receded, it picked up rocks and carried them far away. As the glacier melted the rocks were deposited in its new locale. Erratics can range in size from pebbles to large boulders such as Yeager Rock in the Waterville Plateau in Washington state and Big Rock (18,200 tons) in Alberta.
The grid coordinates for these erratics are:
47.815556, -119.553083 — Yeager Rock
50.705883, -114.076422 — Big Rock
Yeager Rock was deposited during the ice age floods that carved out the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington state.
Big Rock (which measures about 9-meters tall, 41-meters long and 18-meters wide, or about the size of a three-story apartment building) is not the largest known erratic. One large glacial erratic in Germany measures 3 by 6 km (2 by 4 mi) and is 9 m (30 ft) thick. Near Cooking Lake, Alberta, one of several large glacial erratics, which is called the Cooking Lake (Number 6) megablock, covers an area of at least 10 km2 (4 sq mi), has a length of 4.0 km (2.5 mi) and is about 10 m (33 ft) thick.
Yeager Rock:
A concretion is a mass of mineral embedded within rock layers, including limestone, sandstone, and shale. Rock City in Ottawa County, Kansas, is a five acre park which contains about 200 huge Dakota sandstone concretions, some of which are as large as 27 feet in diameter.
Montgomery County includes the greater Dayton, Ohio area. All of the Wright Brothers-related historic sites are in the county except Kitty Hawk, N.C., where the pioneering aviators made their first powered flight in December 1903.
The University of Dayton’s athletic teams are nicknamed the Flyers, in homage to aviation pioneers, and Dayton residents, Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Orville Redenbacher was an American food scientist and businessman most often associated with the brand of popcorn that bears his name. The New York Times described him as “the agricultural visionary who all but single-handedly revolutionized the American popcorn industry”. Orville began raising popcorn for the supermarket trade. By 1965, Orville and his business partner Charles Bowman perfected their popcorn hybrid—it is light and fluffy, leaves hardly any unpopped kernels, achieves a 44:1 ratio in volume of popped to unpopped corn. Today, Orville Redenbacher’s is the top brand in microwave popcorn, kernels, and oils in the U.S.
There are two general types of popcorn kernels, snowflake and mushroom. Snowflake popcorn pops up into large kernels and is the most common type used in theaters, ballparks, and for home consumption. Mushroom popcorn when popped is smaller by comparison but is less likely to crumble, and is used mostly for popcorn candies and snacks (like CrackerJack).
-“BB”-
The first lot of Cracker Jack was produced by the Chicago company F.W. Rueckheim & Bro. The product was supposedly named by a sampler who, after tasting it, exclaimed “That’s a crackerjack!” That name and the tagline “The more you eat, the more you want” were both registered in the same year of 1896.
Not only were they flyers, they named their first successful aircraft the Flyer: Wright Flyer - Wikipedia
In play:
William McKinley, Republican of Ohio, was first elected President in 1896. He was reelected in 1900, assassinated the next year and succeeded by his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt. Age 42 at the time, T.R. remains the youngest President in U.S. history, although JFK, at 43, was the youngest person elected President.
The Square Deal was Teddy Rosevelt’s domestic program that three main foci, for controlling corporations, for protecting natural resources, and for protecting consumers. They were known as the 3 Cs: corporate control, conservation, and consumer protection.
In a 1903 speech in Springfield IL he stated, “It seems to me eminently fitting that the guard around the tomb of Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers. It was my own good fortune at Santiago (Cuba) to serve beside colored troops. A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.”
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the second Republican nominee for President (after John C. Fremont four years earlier), and the first to win.