The Irish writer James Joyce published Finnegan’s Wake in 1939.
Finnegan’s Wake is a traditional Celtic Irish folk song.
The Boston Celtics take their name from the Original Celtics, a New York based barnstorming basketball team of the 1920s.
Barnstorming was a popular form of entertainment in the 1920s in which stunt pilots would perform tricks with airplanes, either individually or in groups called a flying circus. Barnstorming was the first major form of civil aviation in the history of flight.
Movies about barnstorming include “Ace Eli and Rodger of the Skies”, with Cliff Robertson, and most famously, “The Great Waldo Pepper” with Robert Redford.
Robert Heinlein’s story “Waldo” is the source of “waldo” – a term for a remote manipulator. The story featured such devices, operated by the title character.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull author (and world class douche) Richard Bach made his living as a barnstormer for a while; his books Nothing by Chance, Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, and Biplane (among others) all draw on this experience.
Richard Bach had previously been an F-84 fighter pilot with the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. His unit was deployed to France during the Berlin crisis, and the experience was the subject of his first (and by far most readable) book, Stranger to the Ground.
Most recently, after decades of douchedom, he’s been writing fiction about anthropomorphized ferrets.
He also claims, unverifiably, to be the great etc. grandson of Johann Sebastian Bach.
The last song by composer Israel Bailin (better known as Irving Berlin) to reach the Billboard Top Ten in the U.S. was Dutch singer Taco’s 1983 rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
Incidentally, Taco wasn’t a stage name. His real name is Taco Ockerse.
Puttin’ On the Ritz was previously used in the movie and decades later became the showstopper number in the musical version of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.
Shuler Hensley, who played Frankenstein’s Monster in the Broadway cast of Young Frankenstein, played the same role in the Hugh Jackman film Van Helsing.
North Carolina Senator Heath Shuler was a star quarterback at the University of Tennessee, but a complete bust as a pro quarterback for the Washington Redskins.
The Washington Redskins moved from Boston after the 1936 season, and picked TCU quarterback/defensive back/punter Sammy Baugh in the 1937 NFL draft.
Jay Berwanger, a halfback from the University of Chicago and Heisman Trophy winner (before it was named the Heisman Trophy) was the first player chosen in the first NFL draft in 1936. He chose not to play pro football.
“Chicago Pile-1”, the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor, was built in a racquets court under the abandoned west stands at the University of Chicago’s football field.
The University of Chicago’s football field was named for Amos Alonzo Stagg, their former coach. In addition to being an All-American football player and successful coach, Stagg also participated in the first public basketball game, at Springfield, Mass. in 1892.
Because German universities were said to have the finest research libraries, when John D. Rockefeller endowed the University of Chicago he had the entire catalogs of the libraries at the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg duplicated (sometimes requiring translation of the books into English) to form the basis of their library collection.
The University of Chicago, once a college football powerhouse and a member of what is now the Big Ten Conference, dropped the sport entirely in 1929 because of concerns over academic priorities.
Composer Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” was regularly used in Warner Brothers cartoons, especially during scenes set inside factories.
The metal trio Rush included a snippet of “Powerhouse” in their instrumental piece “La Villa Stranglato.”
Comic artist Basil Wolverton made his reputation by creating bizarre one-off characters like Lena the Hyena, but his best-known regular comic, Powerhouse Pepper, a boxer who spoke in rhyme.