Jackie Gleason died on 24 June 1987, the same day that the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League folded.
Robert Budd Dwyer was an American politician in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served from 1971 to 1981 as a Republican member of the Pennsylvania State Senate representing the state’s 50th district.
On January 22, 1987 Dwyer called a news conference in the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg where he killed himself in front of the gathered reporters with a .357 caliber revolver. Dwyer’s suicide was broadcast later that day to a wide television audience across the state of Pennsylvania.
In 1986, Dwyer was convicted of receiving a bribe from a California firm trying to gain the contract. Throughout his trial and after his conviction, he maintained that he was innocent of the charge and that he had been framed. Dwyer was scheduled to be sentenced on those charges on January 23, 1987, the day after his suicide. The prosecution’s primary witness, William T. Smith, whose testimony was largely used to obtain Dwyer’s conviction, later admitted in an interview shown in Honest Man: The Life of R. Budd Dwyer that he had lied under oath about Dwyer taking the bribe in order to receive a reduced sentence.
The Jimmy Stewart film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ends with the corrupted senior Senator (played by Claude Rains) who had framed Smith confessing and shooting himself in the Senate chamber during Smith’s filibuster against his expulsion.
Jimmy Stewart was the first major American movie star to wear a military uniform in World War II. Other actors serving in WWII included, with Marines noted:
Don Adams, USMC
Gene Autry
James Arness
Martin Balsam
Ernest Borgnine
Tony Curtis
Kirk Douglas
Henry Fonda
Glenn Ford
Clark Gable
Sterling Hayden, USMC
William Holden
Bob Keeshan, USMC
Brian Keith, USMC
Burt Lancaster
Jack Lemmon
Lee Marvin, USMC
Steve McQueen, USMC (Bullitt!)
Burgess Meredith
Robert Montgomery
David Niven
Jack Palance
Tyrone Power, USMC
Jason Robards
Ronald Reagan
Carl Reiner
Don Rickles
Mickey Rooney
Eli Wallach
James Whitmore, USMC
The most famous entertainer to have been killed in the war was certainly Major Glenn Miller of the US Army Air Force Band. His Norseman aircraft disappeared over the Channel en route to Paris for a performance there - it is not known if the reason was an icing-prone carburetor, or the plane’s route under a returning Lancaster jettisoning its unused bombs.
Mitch Miller disapproved of rock ‘n’ roll– one of his contemporaries described his denunciation of it as “The Gettysburg Address of Music” – and passed not only on Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, but on the Beatles, too. In defense of his anti-rock stance, he once told NME in January 1958"Rock ‘n’ roll is musical baby food: it is the worship of mediocrity, brought about by a passion for conformity."
I prefer Frank Sinatra’s denunciation of those damn kids and their new-fangled transistor radios and their music: “My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—Naturally I refer to the bulk of rock ’n’ roll.
“It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact, dirty—lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth … this rancid-smelling aphorodisiac I deplore. But, in spite of it, the contribution of American music to the world could be said to have one of the healthiest effects of all our contributions.”
In his memoir “The Street Where I Live,” published in 1978, Alan Jay Lerner wrote “Now that the fad of rock and roll is dead…”
Hula Hoops, thought to have been “invented” in 1958, were actually a fad in 14th-century England, where doctors treated patients suffering from pain and dislocated backs due to hooping − and heart failure was even attributed to it
I don’t remember the scene, but Wiki says otherwise:
Overcome with guilt, Paine leaves the Senate chamber and attempts to commit suicide, but is stopped by other senators. When he is stopped, he bursts back into the Senate chamber, loudly confessing to the whole scheme; that he should be expelled from the Senate, and affirms Smith’s innocence.
In play:
The flag of England is a red cross on a white field, the symbol of St. George, the patron saint of the country. It is one of the components of the Union Flag.
I haven’t seen it in a while, so maybe I remember it a little wrong.
Although St. George is best known for slaying a dragon, a dragon is not found on his flag. The flag of Wales includes one, though.
The city nickname for St. George Utah is Utah’s Dixie.
Dixie Carter, who played Julia Sugarbaker on “Designing Women”, was married for many years to Hal Holbrook. best known for his Mark Twain portrayals.
Sam Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of pilot Horace Bixby, with an eye toward obtaining a pilot’s license. Bixby did indeed “learn”—a word Twain insisted on—him the river, but the young man was an apt pupil as well. The profession of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in Old Times on the Mississippi, the most congenial one he had ever followed.
This also gave Clemens his more famous pen name, for the popular call for two fathoms of water…Mark Twain.
The steamboat business largely disappeared abruptly, due to both the Civil War and the advent of the railroads, as well as, in Clemens’ telling in Life on the Mississippi, the unionization of pilots. Clemens decided to try his luck elsewhere, accompanying his brother Orion, who had been named Secretary of the Nevada Territory, on his trip west, making and losing several fortunes in silver prospecting. Seriously, you have to read Roughing It too; it’s all there.
There are still river pilots on the Mississippi, and no ship is permitted to enter the Mississippi River without a registered pilot at the helm. Most of the pilots live (with their fmilies) in the town of Pilottown, Louisiana, which is not accessible by road. There are three associations of pilots, one for the river below Pilottown, one for the sectiln Pilottown to New Orleans, and one for the river bertween New Orleand and Baton Rouge. Even US Naval vessels are not exempt from the requirement to use an association pilot.
Update on the above: Since Hurricane Katrina, there are no longer any permanent residents in Pilotown, but pilots still use it as the headquarters at which they board passing vessels, and their presence is still mandatory on all ships.
Former San Francisco Giants center fielder Darryl Hamilton hails from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Darryl Christine Hannah is an American film actress. She is best known for her performances in the films Blade Runner (1982), Splash (1984), Roxanne (1987), Wall Street (1987), Steel Magnolias (1989) and Kill Bill (2003). She is also an environmental campaigner who has been arrested for protests against developments that are believed by some groups to threaten sustainability.
Uma Thurman’s unique dancing in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill series inspired Fallout Boy’s song “(She Wants to Dance Like) Uma Thurman”, which includes part of the theme tune to the TV show “The Munsters”.