In July 1964, Paul McCartney bought Drake’s Drum, a racehorse, for £1,200 (approx. $1,620US) and gave it as a present to his father on July 6, 1964, during the private party that followed the premiere of “A Hard Day’s Night” at the London Pavilion. Reportedly, Paul showed his father a picture of the horse, and when he thanked his son for the lovely picture Paul replied, “It’s not the picture; I bought you the bloody horse.”
On March 26, 1966, Drake’s Drum won the Hylton Place at Liverpool’s famous Aintree Racecourse. In later years, Paul retired the horse to his farm in Scotland.
In the Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason mysteries, Mason’s private detective agency was owned by Paul Drake, who did most of the work for him. In the first Perry Mason series, he was played by William Hopper.
Drake University is a small private university, located in Des Moines, Iowa. It was founded in 1881 by Francis M. Drake (a former Union general during the Civil War) and George T. Carpenter, a teacher and pastor. Drake was initially affiliated with a mainline Protestant denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), though that affiliation ended in 1907.
A Starfleet light cruiser, the USS Drake, was mentioned but not shown in the 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Arsenal of Freedom.” It was commanded by Capt. Paul Rice, a Starfleet Academy classmate of Cmdr. William T. Riker, First Officer of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D.
The NCC in NCC-1701 stands for Naval Construction Contract. NCC-1701 Enterprise was commanded by James T. Kirk, and Robert April and Christopher Pike before him.
The NC-17 rating replaced the X rating in 1990 as the X rating was not trademarked by the MPA and had been co-opted by the pornography industry. NC-17 originally stood for “No Children Under 17 Admitted” to combat the misconception that the rating indicated a film was pornographic. In 1996, the MPA reworded the NC-17 rating to “No One 17 and Under Admitted”, effectively raising the minimum age for admission from 17 to 18.
Irene Cara was an American singer-actress. Her performing career – on screen and on stage – began when she was a pre-teen; her breakthrough role, when she was 21 years old, was in the 1980 musical film Fame. Cara also sang the film’s title song, which was a top-10 hit in the U.S. and several other countries.
In 1983, Cara co-wrote and sang the song “Flashdance…What a Feeling,” the theme song for the movie Flashdance; the song was a #1 hit, and she earned both an Academy Award and a Grammy Award for it.
Cara passed away in 2022, at age 63, from heart disease.
Fame (1980) followed students attending New York City’s “PA” (informally), the High School of Performing Arts. PA was established in 1947, and closed in 1984 and is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts (informally, LaGuardia or “LaG”).
Notable alumni of PA and LaG include actors Jennifer Aniston, Ellen Barkin, Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet, Dom DeLuise, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Esai Morales, Al Pacino, Suzanne Pleshette, Ving Rhames, Wesley Snipes, Corey Stoll, Lesley Ann Warren, and Billy Dee Williams.
Billy Dee Williams was a respected painter long before he became famous for portraying Lando Calrissian. He attended the National Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship and has had his work displayed in the Smithsonian. To this day, he considers himself a painter who also acts, not the other way around.
Smithsonian Affiliations, established in 1996, is a division of the larger institution that seeks to establish long-term partnerships with non-Smithsonian organizations in order to share collections and exhibitions and to conduct joint research. There are currently over 200 Smithsonian Affiliates, located in all 50 states. Some examples are the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, the Center for Jewish History in New York City, and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.
The closest ones to me are:
✓ USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum (Alameda)
Aerospace Museum of California (McClellan Park)
✓ California State Railroad Museum (Sacramento)
✓ Hiller Aviation Museum (San Carlos)
Aquarium of the Bay (San Francisco)
Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco)
The Mexican Museum (San Francisco)
The USS Hornet (CV-12) is an Essex-class aircraft carrier, initially launched in 1943, during World War II. The Hornet saw duty in the Pacific theater during WWII, and was modernized twice during the 1950s. Among her final duties in active service was in serving as the recovery vehicle for the crews of the Apollo 11 and 12 moon missions, before her decommissioning in 1970. The Hornet now serves as a museum ship, in Alameda, California.
Many scenes in the 1972 environmentalist sf film Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern, were filmed aboard the Essex-class aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge not long before she was scrapped. The spaceship aboard which Dern’s character served was itself named Valley Forge.
The HP-35 pocket calculator was the first for Hewlett-Packard, and with functions for trig and exponents it was the world’s first-ever scientific pocket calculator. The 35 in its name came from the number of keys it had. In 1973, the HP-35 calculator was the first scientific calculator to fly in space. It was carried on the Skylab 3 and Skylab 4 flights of 1973 and 1974. The introduction of the HP-35 calculator in 1972 spelled the demise of the slide rule.
(My first scientific, programmable calculator was the HP-29C from 1977. I loved that thing! I’ve been an HP guy ever since.)
When Skylab re-entered that atmosphere in 1979, its debris spread across the Indian Ocean and parts of Western Australia. Though rumor had it that debris had killed a cow, in fact that are no confirmed death, human or animal or otherwise, associated with the event. However, the town of Esperance fined NASA $300 for littering, a fine which went unpaid until 2009, when a California radio DJ and his listeners raised the money to pay it off.
Nitpick: the fine was $400; a replica of the check, which hangs in the museum at Esperance, can be seen here.
Skylab, which remains the only space station operated exclusively by the United States, was launched on May 14, 1973. Because of damage incurred during launch and deployment, a 3-person crew was launched 11 days later, and this crew spent 28 days repairing the station. Two additional missions followed, with launch dates of July 28 and November 16, 1973. The last crew left the station on February 8, 1974.
“Sky High” is a 1975 song by British pop-rock group Jigsaw. The song, originally written and recorded for the martial-arts action movie The Man from Hong Kong, it became Jigsaw’s biggest hit, reaching the top 10 in the UK, U.S., Canada, Ireland, and Australia.
