Jonathan “Jon” Cleveland is a retired competitive swimmer, who specialized in the breaststroke. He swam for Canada in three consecutive Olympics (1988 Seoul, 1992 Barcelona, 1996 Atlanta), and won a bronze medal in 1992, in the 4x100 medley relay.
Jonathan is the son of Reggie Cleveland, who had a thirteen-year career as a pitcher in Major League Baseball, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, and Milwaukee Brewers.
Grover Cleveland was, until Donald Trump in 2024, the only President of the United States elected to nonconsecutive terms. He, like Trump, was born in New York State. He, like Trump, did not serve in the military in the biggest war of his youth - the Civil War for Cleveland (he paid for a substitute to serve in his place, as permitted by law) and the Vietnam War for Trump (he was excused from military service due to alleged bone spurs).
Unlike Trump, Cleveland held elective offices prior to becoming POTUS. However, while serving as Sheriff of Erie County in the 1870s, Cleveland began courting a widow, Maria Halpin. She would later accuse him of raping her. It was never determined if their relationship was consensual, or if he’d raped her as she stated. Halpin gave birth to a son, and Cleveland accused her of being an alcoholic and had her child removed from her custody. The child was taken to the Protestant Orphan Asylum, and Cleveland paid for his stay there. Cleveland had Halpin admitted to the Providence Asylum. Halpin was only kept at the asylum for five days because she was deemed not to be insane. Cleveland later provided financial support for her. During his first Presidential campaign, Republicans smeared him by claiming that he was “immoral” and for allegedly acting cruelly by not raising the child himself.
Erie County NY, Erie County OH, and Erie County PA all lie along the shores of Lake Erie. For Pennsylvania, Erie County PA contains all of the state’s Lake Erie shoreline. The only other state that has shoreline along Lake Erie but without an Erie County is Michigan. The rest of Lake Erie’s shoreline is along its north side and belongs to Ontario.
In Michigan, Monroe County and a small part of Wayne County border Lake Erie.
Eight US states border at least one of the Great Lakes. Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania each border one of the lakes. New York and Wisconsin each border two lakes, while Michigan borders four.
In Canada, the province of Ontario contains the entire Canadian coastline of the Great Lakes.
Michigan touches all of The Great Lakes except for Lake Ontario. The only US state that touches Lake Ontario is New York. Besides Lake Ontario, only one other Great Lake touches only one state, and that is Lake Huron, which only touches Michigan.
The Port Huron Statement is a political manifesto, written by members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962, while attending a conference at a United Auto Workers (UAW) retreat outside of Port Huron, MI. The 25,700-word statement issued a non-ideological call for participatory democracy, based on non-violent civil disobedience and the idea that individual citizens could help make the social decisions which determined their quality of life.
1962 was the only full calendar year of the Kennedy Administration. The President was sworn in at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 1961, and assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Steve Dallas is one of the main characters in Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip Bloom County. Steve is a lawyer of often-questionable ethics, who is also a smoker, drinker, and womanizer, and nearly always wears a pair of dark aviator-style sunglasses.
Steve Dallas originally appeared in Breathed’s first strip, The Academia Waltz, which he published in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas at Austin while a student there; in The Academia Waltz, Steve was an obnoxious frat boy. Steve is the only one of Breathed’s characters who has appeared in all four of his comic strips, also being a semi-regular in Outland and Opus.
Dallas, a small village with a population of 150-200 in Moray, Scotland, may have given its name to the city in Texas. George Mifflin Dallas, for whom the city may have been named, was of Scots ancestry, and his family may have been named for the village.
Records from 1226 have the village listed as Dalais. It was the site of Dallas Castle, stronghold in the 14th century of the Earl of Buchan, who was also known as the Wolf of Badenoch. Only one wall of the castle is still standing.
In the movie of the same name, Forrest Gump recalls members of his company in Vietnam having geographical surnames incongruous to their place of origin. For instance: Dallas, from Phoenix; Cleveland, from Detroit; and Tex, whom Gump failed to recall where he was from.
In Forrest Gump, in the Vietnam ambush scene, the enemy is never shown. Many Vietnam combat veterans praised this as a highly accurate movie scene — the ambush occurs suddenly, you don’t see the enemy, and it all happens very quickly.
The beloved film Forrest Gump takes drastic liberties with the book on which it’s based, portraying the title character as a loveable dimwit, whereas in the book he was a misunderstood genius (possibly on the autism spectrum) who excelled at chess and mathematics. Also, he smoked weed and had a huge johnson.
“Big Johnson” is a brand of comedy t-shirts, featuring sexually-suggestive cartoons with a skinny guy (“E. Normus Johnson”), typically accompanied by scantily-clad women.
Among the US Presidents, five surnames can be found that are each shared by two different men:
Adams: John Adams (the 2nd president); John Quncy Adams (6th)
Harrison: William Henry Harrison (9th); Benjamin Harrison (23rd)
Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt (26th); Franklin D. Roosevelt (32nd)
Bush: George H. W. Bush (41st); George W. Bush (43rd)
Johnson: Andrew Johnson (17th); Lyndon B. Johnson (36th)
John Adams was the father of John Quincy Adams.
William Henry Harrison was the grandfather of Benjamin Harrison.
Theodore Roosevelt and FDR were fifth cousins; FDR married Eleanor Roosevelt, TR’s niece.
George H. W. Bush was the father of George W. Bush.
Andrew Johnson and LBJ were not related.
Theodore Roosevelt was very interested in naval affairs from an early age. His 1882 history The Naval War of 1812, written when he was just 23 (almost twenty years before he became President of the United States), is still considered an important work on the subject.
In 1940, while an upperclassman at Harvard, John F Kennedy completed his thesis, “Appeasement in Munich”, about British negotiations during the Munich Agreement. It was later published as “Why England Slept”, inspired by Winston Churchill’s earlier non-fiction work, “Arms and the Covenant” (later titled “While England Slept; a Survey of World Affairs, 1932–1938”). Churchill was opposed to Neville Chamberlain’s policy of Appeasement towards Mussolini and Hitler.
Oktoberfest, hosted in Munich, is the world’s largest beer festival. The city’s name, “München” is derived from the Old German word for “monks” (Mönche). It references the monastic settlement founded in the 12th century.
Des Moines, Iowa has, for centuries, assumed its name came from the river which was named, in French, Riviere des Moines, or River of the Monks. However, a more colorful and fun (and maybe apocryphal) origin story is that it has something to do with a French corruption of the Miami-Illinois word mooyiinkweena. That word is how a tribe downriver described the tribe who occupied the area that is now the city. That word is an insult which means something akin to “shit-faces.”
Also, it was in Des Moines where Ozzy Osbourne unknowingly bit the head off of a live bat. So there’s that.