Tennis great Arthur Ashe was only 49 when he died in 1993. His childhood nicknames included “Skinny” and “Bones”.
Andrew Young, a personal friend, presided at both Ashe’s wedding, and Ashe’s funeral.
Arthur Ashe was the first person after George Washington and several leaders of the Confederacy to be honored with a large outdoor statue in Richmond, Va.
Author Tom Wolfe was born and raised in Richmond VA.
The Richmond Bridge over the Coal River is a heritage listed arch bridge located in Richmond, 25 kilometres north of Hobart, in Tasmania. It was completed in 1825 using convict labour. It is the oldest bridge still in use in Australia.
The Richmond - San Rafael Bridge is the northernmost, third oldest (and also the third newest), and at 5.5 miles long is the second longest of the five bridges of the San Francisco Bay.
► Opened 1982; length 1.8 miles: Dumbarton Bridge - newest; southernmost, and also easternmost
► Opened 1967; length 7.0 miles: San Mateo – Hayward Bridge - longest
► Opened 1956: length 5.5 miles: Richmond - San Rafael Bridge - northernmost
► Opened 1937; length 1.7 miles: Golden Gate Bridge - shortest; westernmost; arguably the most famous
► Opened 1936; length 4.5 miles: San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge - oldest; busiest, at 240,000 cars per day
The Golden Gate Bridge does not cross San Francisco Bay, while the others do. The Golden Gate Bridge crosses the “Golden Gate,” the transition between San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.
The official municipal song of the City by the Bay is not Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”, but the theme song of the Clark Gable / Jeannette McDonald film “San Francisco” - "open your Golden Gate / You let no stranger wait / Outside your door …". The film, for which Cecil B. DeMille did the special effects, ends with the 1906 earthquake refugees in Golden Gate Park linking arms and singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Julia Ward Howe penned the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early morning of 19 November 1861 in Washington, DC. The song’s lyrics links the judgment of the wicked at the end of time (New Testament, Revelation chapter 19) with the American Civil War. Howe died at the age of 91 in October, 1910. That means she almost surely saw the magnificent appearance of Halley’s comet earlier that year in the spring before she died.
The first rock ‘n’ roll song is commonly thought to be Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”. The pronunciation of the singer’s name with a long* a* is often, wrongly, used for that of the comet and the English astronomer who identified it and defined its orbit.
Long a, that’s how I was taught to pronounce it in Upstate New York grammar school.
The first commercial jet aircraft was the deHavilland Comet. After the plane was put into service in 1952, it was discovered that factors in the design (notably, the square windows) let to structural weaknesses that caused at least two of them to come apart in flight. The weaknesses were corrected and the redesigned plane stayed in service for many years. Other airplane manufacturers have said that they would have made the same mistake deHavilland did, and the knowledge learned by the crashes allowed them to build safer planes.
Comment continues: it’s appropo that RealityChuck chimed in then. He’s in Schenectady while I grew up next door in Latham.
The de Havilland Mosquito was a WWII light bomber mainly used by the RAF. Made almost entirely of wood, its nickname was “The Wooden Wonder”. It was produced from 1940 to 1950, and now there are only 30 remaining. Only two, apparently, remain airworthy but I wasn’t able to find their locations. Would be very cool to see (and hear) one flying!
ETA: found them. owner Bob Jens at Vancouver; and owned by Jerry Yagen and based at the Military Aviation Museum, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Olivia DeHavilland (related to the aircraft builders) is the sole surviving major cast member of* Gone with the Wind.*
Olivia Newton-John met Queen Elizabeth in 1978 when the Queen presented her with an OBE award, Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
British author Jeffrey Archer wrote of the abdication of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of her son to the throne as King Charles III in his 1984 political thriller First Among Equals.
Tom Clancy’s thriller The Hunt For Red October was first published in 1984.
The October Revolution occurred in November 1917 per the Gregorian calendar. Russia still used the Julian calendar at the time. Previous Russian revolutions, which had fallen short of overthrowing the monarchy but were still cataclysmic, had occurred in February 1917 (making it necessary to emphasize the Octoberness of the big one) and in 1905, with several major uprisings in the 19th century.
Tom Clancy’s Cold War action-adventure thriller The Hunt for Red October was the first work of fiction published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press, and still far and away its best-selling book ever.
In the October Crisis of 1970, two cells of the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped James Cross, a British diplomat in Canada, and Pierre LaPorte, the Minister of Labour and Deputy Premier of Quebec. Cross was eventually released unharmed, but LaPorte was killed by his kidnappers and his body found stuffed in a car trunk.