The Love Boat! was known for its use of well-known guest stars. Jack Jones, who sang the theme song, appeared in 1980 with his father Allan Jones. The two of them sang Allan’s signature song, “The Donkey Serenade”, with Allan outdoing Jack in a display of the vocal skills that earned him his roles in A Day at the Races and Show Boat.
Western Pennsylvania, in particular the Pittsburgh area, is sometimes referred to as “The Cradle of Quarterbacks,” for the large number of successful quarterbacks, at the professional and collegiate levels, who are from the area, including Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, Joe Namath, Johnny Unitas, and George Blanda, among others.
George Blanda was the oldest quarterback to play in a championship game, taking over from an injured Darryl Lamonica. He was 43 at the time. He continued playing in the NFL as a kicker until he was 48…
When George Blanda retired, in 1975, he held the unenviable NFL record for most career interceptions thrown, with 277. Blanda held the record for over three decades, until it was broken by Brett Favre in 2007; Favre retired in 2010 with a career total of 336 interceptions.
At age 43 in Super Bowl LV, Tom Brady is the oldest player to be named Super Bowl MVP and win a Super Bowl as the starting quarterback, along with being the oldest NFL MVP.
In Super Bowl LV on February 7, 2021, Tom Brady, who was born August 3, 1977, was 43 years, 6 months, and 4 days old.
In the AFL Championship Game on January 4, 1970, George Blanda, who was born on September 17, 1927, was 42 years, 3 months, and 22 days old.
This was the last-ever AFL Championship Game.
The oldest quarterback to play in a championship game is Tom Brady. It had been George Blanda, until Super Bowl LV.
Strawberries and cream are a traditional snack at The Championships, Wimbledon, which is the official name of the tennis tournament. The snack was served to 200 people at the 1877 Championships and the tradition is still going strong more than 140 years later. More than 166,000 portions were sold during the two-week 2018 tournament.
The strawberries are picked at 4 AM on the day that they are served; a portion of at least 10 strawberries with cream costs £2.50 (around US$ 3.50).
A common snack at the Master’s golf tournament is the official pimento-cheese sandwich. The history has been controversial since the Master’s Tournament cancelled the contract for the pimento cheese vendor Nick Rangos. Since then many have tried to replicate his recipe.
The Masters Tournament is one of the four major tournaments in golf. Always held in the first week in April, it is always played at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.
The other majors are the
— in May, the PGA Championship at various US courses
— in June, the US Open at various US courses
— in July, the Open Championship at various courses in the UK
The ‘Grand Slam of Golf’ refers to victories, over the course of a career, in all four major tournaments. Only five players have achieved the slam: Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, and Gene Sarazen. Nobody has won all four titles in the same year, although Woods won four consecutive majors. He won the last three majors in 2000 and then the Masters in 2001.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower was accused by some critics of neglecting his duties to play golf, a joke made the rounds: “Ben Hogan for President: If we have to have a golfer, let’s at least have a good one.”
In 1953, golfer Ben Hogan won three of the four golf “majors” – the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open; of the six tournaments that Hogan entered that year, he won five of them.
Had Hogan also won the PGA Championship in 1953, he would have been the only golfer to win all four “Grand Slam” tournaments in the same year. However, it was impossible for him to play in both the PGA Championship and the British Open that year, as their dates overlapped.
Routine security for the Royal Family is not provided by any national British law-enforcement agency but by a special unit of the Metropolitan Police Service, the London municipal police.
The US Secret Service was part of the Department of the Treasury from 1865 to 2003. It is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The Secret Service protects the President, the Vice President, their immediate families, former presidents, their spouses and minor children under the age of 16, major presidential and vice-presidential candidates and their spouses, and visiting foreign heads of state. They also provide physical security for the White House Complex, the neighboring Treasury Department building, the vice president’s residence, and all foreign diplomatic missions in Washington DC.
By the end of the Civil War, nearly one-third of all currency in circulation was counterfeit ¹. As a result, the country’s financial stability was in jeopardy. To address this concern, the Secret Service was established in 1865, and that is why it was set up as a bureau in the Treasury Department.
It wasn’t until 1901, after the assassination of President McKinley, that the Secret Service was given the task of providing full-time protection for the President of the United States — which has gradually expanded to other parties and entities over the intervening years.
For the record, after almost 160 years since its initial creation to combat counterfeiting, the Secret Service still maintains its original mission to investigate the counterfeiting of US money by both domestic and international parties,
¹ – interestingly enough, this means that even if you have an ‘authentic’ piece of currency from the post-Civil War period, there is a one-in-three chance that it’s fake anyway…
The numbers of American military deaths in the Civil War were not equaled by the combined toll of other American conflicts until the War in Vietnam. More American soldiers became casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg than in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 combined.
After the defeat of the Rebel troops at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee withdrew and marched his decimated troops towards the Potomac River. Union General George Meade did not pursue them, a tactical error that many historians believe could have forced a surrender. Instead, the war continued for two more years.
In July, 1973, John Paul Getty III, the teenaged grandson of industrialist J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped by the 'Ndrangheta, an Italian organized crime group. The kidnappers demanded $17 million for Getty’s release, but the Getty family believed it was a ploy by the young man to extract money from his famously miserly grandfather.
In November, 1973, the kidnappers sent the Getty family one of Paul’s ears in the mail, with another demand for payment (though the demand, and the ear, were delayed in the mail by an Italian postal strike). The family finally agreed to pay the kidnappers $3 million for Paul’s release, though J. Paul Getty only directly paid $2.2. million of the ransom (as this was the maximum that could be deducted in his taxes); he loaned his son, John Paul Getty Jr., the remaining $800,000 of the ransom, at 4% interest.
After Paul was released by his kidnappers, he phoned his grandfather to thank him for paying the ransom, but J. Paul refused to come to the phone.
The Getty Oil company was founded in 1942 by J. Paul Getty who was 49 years old at the time. J. Paul Getty died in 1976.
The Getty Oil takeover in the 1980s was the largest takeover in history, and it involved major players like American financier T. Boone Pickens, as well as Ivan Boesky and Martin Siegel, who gained public notoriety in the '80s for insider trading. The takeover resulted in Texaco losing billions to Pennzoil and filing for bankruptcy. Texaco, founded in 1902, was acquired by Chevron Corporation in October 2001.
Martin Luther did much to establish Protestantism and bring about much-needed reforms in the Roman Catholic Church, but also, per Wiki, from an early age “expressed antagonistic, violent views towards Jews and called for the burning of their synagogues and their deaths.” The Lutheran Church officially apologized in 2009 for his anti-Semitism.