Robert Penn Warren also wrote the 1955 novel Band of Angels which became a movie in 1957. In the film version*, protagonist Amantha Starr (Yvonne DeCarlo), does not know she is part black until her father dies and she is sold as a slave to Hamish Bond (Clark Gable), a mysterious Louisiana planter and sailor whose right hand man is a brilliant former slave named Rau-Ru (Sidney Poitier) who is as enigmatic as Hamish.
*I assume this is the plot of the novel as well but I haven’t read it; I’ve only seen the movie.
An oft-repeated legend holds that Clark Gable’s revelation of his bare chest after doffing his shirt during a scene in the film It Happened One Night was responsible for a decline in the sale of men’s undershirts throughout the USA.
Clark Gable’s only legitimate child, John Clark Gable, was born 4 months after his death. Decades after his death it was revealed that Loretta Young’s adopted daughter, Judy, was actually her biological daughter with Gable born secretly and out-of-wedlock when Gable was married to his second wife and Loretta was single.
Kent State University in Ohio was the scene of a 1970 antiwar protest in which four students were killed and nine others injured when National Guard troops opened fire on demonstrators.
The Japanese overran Guam and Wake Island on the same day they bombed Pearl Harbor, though on a different date (December 8, 1941) due to being on the opposite side of the International Date Line.
Lewis Carroll wrote letters to many government officials asking the puzzle “Where Does the Day Begin?” which paraphrased went “A man who travels westward around the earth at the same speed as the sun will find that though he started on a Tuesday, when he returns to his starting point the day is now called Wednesday. Where and when did the date change?”
Carroll (using his real name of Charles Dodgson) first asked the question in in 1860. No one could answer it until the International Date Line was established in 1884.
(If Tuesday Weld married Fredric March’s grandson, she’d be Tuesday March the Third).
William Weld resigned as governor, ostensibly to focus on his Senate hearing as nominee for Ambassador to Mexico, but in reality out of boredom. The nomination failed due to opposition by Jesse Helms.
Country music legend Willie Nelson played Uncle Jesse in the movie version of ***The ***Dukes of Hazzard. Denver Pyle had played the role on the TV series.
Denver Pyle’s uncle, Ernie Pyle, was a famous war correspondent who was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945.
Warren Moon has the distinction of being one of only two people to be enshrined in both the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Canadian Football Hall of Fame.
The jazz standard, “How High the Moon”, has been recorded many times, most famously by Les Paul and Mary Ford, whose recording spent nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard chart in 1951.
The original “Typhoid Mary” was an Irish immigrant named Mary Mallon, who may have infected more than 50 people with typhoid fever, while working as a cook and housekeeper in New York City.