When John Madden resigned as head coach of the Raiders, he had the best winning percentage of any head coach in NFL history.
The fighter ships used by the Cylons in both versions of “Battlestar Galactica” were called Raiders. In the remade series, the Raiders had organic, quasi-intelligent components that made them near living beings.
John Colicos, who played the traitorous Count Baltar in the original Battlestar Galactica series, played Klingon Commander Kor in an episode of the original Star Trek, a role he reprised on three episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
There has only been one King John of England, the son of Henry II and the brother of Richard the Lionheart. He signed the Magna Carta very unwillingly, and otherwise did so poorly as king (although recent scholarship is a bit more favorable to him) that no one has taken his regnal name since.
Shortly before signing the Magna Charta King John of England raised revenue for the crown by auctioning off the hands in marriage of unmarried heiresses, one of who was his ex-wife Avisa (or Isabella) of Gloucester.
John ‘Toom Tabard’ de Baliol was the King of Scots during whose reign William Wallace rebelled. This King John was also so despised that when King Robert II’s son John assumed the throne of Scotland in 1390, he changed his name and reigned as Robert III.
Balliol College is the oldest of the colleges of Oxford University, dating to 1263.
Despite its name, Boston College is a full university, complete with a business school, a nursing school and a law school. The only reason they haven’t chnaged their name to reflect that is… there’s already a Boston Unversity.
On The White Shadow, the title character (a high school basketball coach) and the school’s principal had been roommates at Boston College.
White Shadow star Ken Howard played Thomas Jefferson in 1776 on Broadway and in the film, while William Daniels co-starred with him in both as obnoxious and disliked Bostonian John Adams.
John Adams (a different man than the U.S. President) was one of the Bounty mutineers who settled Pitcairn Island.
Brooke Adams, an actress who is married to Tony Shalhoub and who has guest starred on Monk, is a descendant of John and John Quincy Adams.
Cartoonist Charles Addams was also a distant relative of John and John Quincy Adams (despite the different spellings) and also a relative of social reformer Jane Addams.
John and John Quincy Adams are part of the John and Priscilla Alden lineage… which also includes Frank Nelson Doubleday, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Martha Graham amongst many others (including the CircleofWillis children)
While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a professor at Harvard, he lived in Cambridge at the Craigie House, which had served as George Washington’s headquarters during the Siege of Boston in 1775 (the year in which Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride was set).
Wadsworth’s bushy white beard was not due to the fashion of the day. When his wife’s dress caught on fire (1861) he tried to smother the flames with his body and burned his face bad enough to leave scars and make shaving very painful. His wife died of her burns; she was his second, his first wife, Mary Potter, having died a few years after their marriage.
The Great Chicago fire was not the worst fire in US history (in terms of lives lost and amount of damage). That “honor” goes to the Great Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin, which took place at the same day and about the same time.
The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history (not in world history) was the unnamed hurricane that hit Galveston on September 8, 1900. The number of fatalities is not known for certain but definitely more than 6,000 and possibly as many twice that were killed; most accounts give an estimate of 8,000.
Glen Campbell’s hit song, “Galveston”, was written by Jimmy Webb, and was widely regarded as a protest song against the Vietnam War (though Webb indicated that this was not his intent).
Bill Clinton was, in December 2000, the first U.S. President to visit Vietnam since Lyndon Johnson. The visit got relatively little attention back home because of the Bush v. Gore lawsuit then making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.