Robert Todd Lincoln’s last public appearance was for the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, honoring his father, in Washington, D.C. on May 30, 1922, just over a hundred years ago.
Cool. If I did my maths correctly he was 78 at that time.
Robert Todd Lincoln was coincidentally either present or nearby when three presidential assassinations occurred.
Lincoln was not present at Ford’s Theatre when his father was assassinated but he was at the White House nearby, and rushed to be with his parents. The president was moved to the Petersen House after the shooting, where Robert attended his father’s deathbed.
At President James A. Garfield’s invitation, Robert Todd Lincoln was at the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington, D.C., when the president was shot by Charles J. Guiteau on July 2, 1881, and was an eyewitness to the event. Lincoln was serving as Garfield’s Secretary of War at the time.
At President William McKinley’s invitation, Robert Todd Lincoln was at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where the president was shot by Leon Czolgosz on September 6, 1901, though he was not an eyewitness to the event; he was just outside the building where the shooting occurred.
Robert Todd Lincoln himself recognized these coincidences. He is said to have refused a later presidential invitation with the comment, “No, I’m not going, and they’d better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”
(unashamedly and fully copied from wiki)
Robert Todd Lincoln’s Vermont mansion Hildene, built in 1905, has been beautifully restored and is open for tours. My new bride and I visited it on our honeymoon (we’re both history geeks) in 1990.
Sidebar: Mrs Piper and I visited it 10 years later, en route to a class reunion.
Sidebar #2 — Mrs. Bullitt and I have never visited it. Yet. I’ve marked my map and it’s on our list.
From wiki, Hildene, the Lincoln Family Home is the former summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln and his wife Mary Harlan Lincoln, located at 1005 Hildene Road in Manchester Center.
Not a play. Comment only.
Theater and film producer Mike Todd (birth name Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen) was an American theater and film producer; his 1956 film Around the World in 80 Days won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Todd was Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband. Their marriage was the only one of Taylor’s eight marriages which did not end in divorce – Taylor was widowed when Todd died in the crash of his private plane (which he had named The Liz) in 1958.
Mike Todd invited his across-the-street neighbor on that plane flight. The neighbor’s pregnant wife had a bad feeling about the flight and told her husband not to get on the plane but fly commercial and meet Todd in New York. After an argument the neighbor decided not to go at all. That neighbor was Kirk Douglas.
Kirk Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in 1916 to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. The only son in a family of six children, he worked odd jobs throughout his childhood to help keep food on the table. His father spent what little money they had on booze; as a result, Douglas, his sisters, and his mother endured abject poverty during his youth. Douglas later estimated that he held over forty jobs before becoming an actor.
Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady Of the Lake, which he summarized as a romance of love, magic and war in the Scottish Highlands, was very popular for a century after its publication in 1809.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Bailey, changed his surname when he made his way to freedom, naming himself after two Douglas protagonists in the poem.
Tennyson’s poem, The Lady of Shalott, is about a lady cursed not to look at the outside world, except by the reflection in her mirror. Then Sir Lancelot rides by, she sees him in the mirror, and she can’t stop hersefl from looking at him directly from the window.
So she gets in a boat and floats down to Camelot, singing her own dirge and dies. When the boat comes to shore at Camelot, there is a great to-do, as people try to figure out who she is and why she died.
And Lancelot, whose manly beauty inadvertently caused her death, ends the poem:
The shallot (technically, the French red shallot) is a cultivar of the onion plant. Until 2010, the shallot was classified as its own species, Allium ascalonicum; at that point, it was synonymized with the common onion (Allium cepa), as it was determined that the difference between shallots and onions was too small to justify a separate species.
The onion was worshiped by ancient Egyptians. They believed that its spherical shape and concentric rings symbolized eternity. They used to cover the tombs of their rulers with onion pictures and onions played a vital role in burial rituals. They believed that onions would help the dead succeed in the afterlife.
A Vidalia onion is one of several varieties of sweet onion grown in a specified area of Georgia. This area, defined by state law in 1986, consists of all or part of 20 counties in the state. The unusual sweetness of these onions is due to the low amount of sulfur in the soil in the area in which the onions are grown.
The first bacteria on Earth used sulfur for photosynthesis, a process known as anoxygenic photosynthesis.
Historically, sulphur was also known as brimstone, because it is flammable in the elemental state.
Kurt Wagner (a.k.a. Nightcrawler) is a member of the Marvel Comics superhero team known as the X-Men.
Wagner is a mutant, with several superpowers; one of his primary powers is the ability to teleport. When he teleports, he leaves behind a smoke cloud, which smells of burning brimstone; his teleportation also causes a loud noise, sounding like “bamf!”
Aha! Someday we hope to go back.
In play:
Scottish actor Brian Cox, in his recent autobiography Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, describes the punishingly long shoots for the second Bryan Singer-directed X-Men movie, X2 (2003), and the near-mutiny that then resulted among the cast.
Scottish actor Brian Cox should not be confused with English physicist, television presenter, and rock keyboardist Brian Cox, nor with former NFL linebacker Brian Cox.
Brown Cox, the physicist from England, is 54 years old. He is a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester. He is best known to the public as the presenter of science programs, especially the Wonders of… series and for popular science books, such as Why Does E=mc²? and The Quantum Universe.
The first time the atom was split happened at Manchester University and was realised by Ernest Rutherford.
Born in New Zealand, he took a position as Chair of Physics in 1907 at the University, won a Nobel prize for Chemistry in 1908 and first split the atom in 1917.
This major breakthrough has changed the world in many ways as it enabled the development of nuclear power and cancer-fighting radiotherapy.