Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson was a landmark legal case from 1950 that extended first amendment rights to movies, allowing the Italian film The Miracle to be shown even though censors had found it blasphemous. Probably the first American film to be granted the right to be shown after this case was Pinky, about a Black woman who was passing for white and who fell in love with a white man.
In 1983, any mention of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was deleted by censors from a textbook in Texas because the school board and community members viewed Roosevelt’s administration as socialistic and disagreed with his economic decisions.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the eldest daughter of “Teddy” Roosevelt, was an American writer and socialite who was best known for some of her one-liners, such as:
I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches
If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
My father (President Theodore Roosevelt), always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.
Evelyn Waugh, the author of “Brideshead Revisited”, pronounced his name /EAVE-lin/, which was actually the first of the two middle names of Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh.
Evelyn was also the middle name of US Naval Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who claimed to be the first person to reach both the North and South Pole.
“Admiral” is believed to be derived ultimately from the Arabic word “emir”, a military commander.
About US Marines in WWII at the amphibious invasion of Iwo Jima, it was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz who said,
UNCOMMON VALOR WAS A COMMON VIRTUE
This quote of Nimitz is inscribed at the Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
Nimitz’s full quote was this:
“By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans serving on Iwo island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.”
Chester A. Arthur is one of the lesser-known US Presidents, succeeding to the job when President James Garfield was assisinated. After Garfield’s death, Arthur did not immediately move into the White House. He insisted it be redecorated and had twenty-four wagonloads of furniture hauled off and sold at public auction. The pieces included some dating back to John Adams’ term and would be considered priceless today.
Blair House, next to the White House, was called the “Truman White House” because Harry Truman lived there for most of his Presidency while the White House got long-needed major renovations. The Secret Service stopped an attempted assassination of Truman at Blair House in 1950 by two Puerto Rican pro-independence terrorists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola. Torresola and White House Police officer Leslie Coffelt killed each other outside the entrance, while Collazo was wounded and captured.
The BBC has produced three television adaptations of the Dickens novel Bleak House. The first serial, Bleak House, was broadcast in 1959 in eleven half-hour episodes.[ The second Bleak House, starring Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott, aired in 1985 as an eight-part series. In 2005, the third Bleak House was broadcast in fifteen episodes starring Anna Maxwell Martin, Gillian Anderson, Denis Lawson, Charles Dance, and Carey Mulligan, and winning a 2005 Peabody Award for creating “appointment viewing,” soap-style, for a series that greatly rewarded its many extra viewers."
Oscar Collazo was convicted and sentenced to death for his attack on Blair House, but President Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. In 1979 Collazo’s sentence was further commuted to time served by President Jimmy Carter. He was paroled and allowed to return to Puerto Rico, where he received a hero’s welcome. He died of a stroke in 1994.
In the weeks before Representative Leo Ryan was murdered in Jonestown, Guyana, he was collecting signatures for Patty Hearst’s release from prison. Actor John Wayne, speaking after the Jonestown cult deaths, said it was odd people accepted that one man had brainwashed 900 human beings into mass suicide, but would not accept that a group like the Symbionese Liberation Army could have brainwashed a kidnapped teenage girl
President Jimmy Carter’s commutation of her sentence to the 22 months served freed Hearst eight months before she would have had a parole hearing. The 1979 release was under stringent conditions. President Ronald Reagan reportedly gave serious consideration to pardoning Hearst. She recovered full rights when President Bill Clinton granted her a pardon on January 20, 2001.
Warren Zevon’s song “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” (on the album Excitable Boy, including “Werewolves of London”), about a ghostly mercenary soldier, ends with Roland killing Patty Hearst.
Sleepy Hollow, NY is along the Hudson River near Tarrytown and the Tappan Zee Bridge. Washington Irving’s fictional short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820), tells of a schoolmaster from Connecticut, Ichabod Crane, and his run-in with the Hollow’s famous ghost, the Headless Horseman.
Martin Crane, the father of “Frazier” in the TV sitcom, is a possibly unique example of a fictional character whose first and last names are both generic names of birds.
But there is a real life Robin Fox, who collaborated with Lionel Tiger, to write several wall-known books on anthropology.
Thomas Tryon’s third novel Lady, a coming-of-age story set in Depression-era Pequot Landing, Connecticut, tells the story of young Woody and his middle age friend Adelaide “Lady” Harleigh. The book’s biggest surprise is hidden in the middle, and the story cries out for a movie treatment.
Woody Woodpecker was originally voiced by Mel Blanc.
In 2001, Mel Brooks became the eighth member of the EGOT club, having won his first Emmy in 1967, Oscar in 1968, Grammy in 1998, and finally the Tony for The Producers in 2001. It only took him 34 years.
Tony the Tiger is the advertising cartoon mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes breakfast cereal, appearing on its packaging and advertising. Since his debut in 1951, the character has spanned several generations and become a breakfast cereal icon.
The Detroit Tigers played the Chicago Cubs in the 1945 World Series. This is the source of the “Curse of the Billy Goat” for the Cubs, when tavern owner Billy Sianis brought his goat to Wrigley Field for the World Series. The smell of his goat, Murphy, bothered other fans and Sianis was asked to leave the stadium. Sianis, who nicknamed himself Billy Goat Sianis, cursed the Cubs and said they would never win another World Series game.
The curse continued when the New York Mets eliminated the Cubs from the postseason last night.
Tony Blair tells in his autobiography A Journey: My Political Life (which is surprisingly good) of being taken as a child to visit a wealthy great aunt whose house stank. His mother made him promise not to mention the smell, and his family did their best to endear themselves to the old lady in hope (ultimately futile) of inheriting some of her fortune.
Ninja’d! ETA: The great aunt was not named Billy, Goat or Murphy.