Fritz Lang was an Austrian film-maker who created “Metropolis”, considered the first full-length sci-fi picture. It brought attention to German films, which also led to “M”, a murder thriller introducing the Hungarian Peter Lorre to American audiences.
Actor Ted Lange was born in Oakland CA in 1948. He attended City College of San Francisco, the same college as actors Bill Bixby and Danny Glover. He also attended Oakland Technical High School, the same high school as baseball’s Rickey Henderson and the NFL’s John Brodie.
Actor Ted Lange played bartender Isaac Washington on TV’s The Love Boat.
The University of San Francisco was a dominant sports powerhouse in the 1950s; The 1951 football team was undefeated, led by threee NFL HOFers, and the were the NCAA basketball champs in '55 and '56 wheen Bill Russell was there. But by the 80s, they had dropped all major sports.
Those 3 NFL Hall of Famers from USF were Gino Marchetti, Ollie Matson, and Bob St. Clair. There was a fourth, too: Dick Stanfel.
There were 17 members of the first ‘class’ enshrined into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1963. This group included such legends as Red Grange, George Halas, Curly Lambeau, and Jim Thorpe.
That 1963 class of inductees was the largest ever for any given year (see here, Players | Pro Football Hall of Fame Official Site). This year, 2020, is the second largest class with 15. This group includes Harold Carmichael, Jim Covert, Bill Cowher, Cliff Harris, Steve Sabol, Donnie Shell, Alex Karras, Paul Tagliabue, and Jimmy Johnson.
John Nance Garner, Democrat of Texas, was FDR’s Vice President for his first two terms. He was still alive on his 95th birthday on Nov. 22, 1963, and received a happy-birthday call from President John F. Kennedy just a few hours before the President’s fateful motorcade through Dallas.
Texas has no natural lakes. In the entire state.
My cite is my sister and her husband, both of whom are (were) university professors in geography in Texas, at University of Texas at Austin, and at Texas State University San Marcos.
According to this website, that’s not true. While natural lakes are scarce, there are a number of oxbow lakes.
Partial quote:
Fair enough. But I’ll stand by what my geography professor family members say. And Texas State University at San Marcos had the largest undergraduate geography department in the country, when they started teaching there.
San Marcos is the Spanish name for Saint Mark. According to Wiki, there are two cities named San Marcos in the United States. One is located in Texas and the other in California.
Interestingly, both of these cities are home to a state university: Texas State University and California State University San Marcos.
California Highway 154, between Santa Barbara and the small lovely vineyard village of Los Olivos, runs through the San Marcos Pass in the Santa Ynez Mountains. Officially named the Chumash Highway, it is unofficially known as the San Marcos Pass Road. Before US-101 was completed through the Gaviota Pass (a tunnel on US-101 was featured in the movie, The Graduate, when Dustin Hoffman’s character was driving his little red Alfa Romeo trying to chase down his girl Elaine played by Katherine Ross), the San Marcos Pass Road was the only way through the Santa Ynez Mountains.
I got into a debate on the whole there-are-no-natural-lakes-in-Texas issue with a Texas friend recently, who took it as an article of faith from his childhood, and was able to point him to several reputable websites which said otherwise. It’s something of an urban, er, rural legend in the Lone Star State, I gather.
In play:
John Nance Garner and Lyndon Johnson were both Democrats from Texas who served as Vice President in the 20th century to popular Presidents from the north - Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy of New York and Massachusetts, respectively. FDR dumped Garner after two terms, while Johnson became President upon Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
ETA: Kennedy was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President in Los Angeles, California.
According to Internet nutjob Steve Lightfoot, who believes Johnson & Nixon hired Stephen Kinf ro kill John Lennon, Bill and Hillary Clinton knowingly met in the White House with Lennon’s killer, Stephen King and were up to no good, then, in 1995. Direct quote: In fact, ten days later the Murrough Building In Oklahoma City was bombed and they never found Stephen King look-alike “John Doe Two” You do know how King blew up Las Vegas in “The Stand”, right?
(ninja’d by Annie but my play still works!)
Elendil’s Heir, I’ll have to discuss that with my sister!
Actor James Garner was born James Bumgarner, like the former SF Giants pitcher now with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He was born in Oklahoma, in a town called Denver. Denver OK is now part of Norman OK.
James Garner was, initially, the sole star of the television western series Maverick, playing gambler Bret Maverick. However, several episodes into production of the show’s initial season, Warner Brothers realized that each episode was taking longer than seven days to film, which threatened to leave the studio (and the network) without any fully-completed episodes before the end of the season’s run.
Thus, partway through the first season, the studio decided to add a second lead actor, Jack Kelly, as Bret’s brother Bart. Each of the two leads were featured in separate episodes, which were shot by separate production teams, and episodes were alternated weekly (i.e., a Bret episode would air one week, then a Bart episode the next week, followed by a Bret episode the week after, etc.), though certain episodes featured both Bret and Bart together.
The Ford Maverick began its production in 1969 as one of the American car companies’ first small, compact cars. It was introduced as a 1970 model in April 1969. In its first year nearly 579,000 Mavericks were produced. This neared the Mustang’s record sales of nearly 619,000 cars. In 1970, that first year for the Maverick, only about 200,000 Mustangs were sold.
Maverick was the nickname of Tom Cruise’s character in ‘Top Gun’. It’s also the term for cattle that carry no brand.
TOPGUN is the US Navy’s SFTI program, where SFTI is Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor. Established in 1969 as the Navy’s Fighter Weapons School at Miramar NAS, it is now at 540 miles to the north at Fallon NAS (gMap, https://goo.gl/maps/m9ifhLabLJWdxWX38). Beginning in 1965 over North Vietnam, Operation Rolling Thunder saw almost 1,000 fighter aircraft losses in about 1 million sorties. TOPGUN sought to improve tactics and reduce those losses.
Max Brand was the pen name of Frederick Faust, one of the most prolific of early 20th century writers of western novels. He also created Dr. Kildare, later a hit TV series. Brand lived only until age 52, when he was killed as a WW2 correspondent.