Angelo Bertelli was the first of seven Notre Dame players to win the Heisman Trophy.
In 1956, Paul Hornung was the only man ever to win the Heisman Trophy for a season in which his team had a losing record. His Notre Dame team finished that year with only two wins against eight losses.
Brett Favre became the only man to play against all 32 football franchises in American football after joining the Minnesota Vikings.
[del]Descendants of Victor Hugo sued Disney for adapting The Hunchback of Notre Dame and authors seeking to write modern adaptations of Les Miserables citing that loopholes and unclear language in French copyright law should allow them to still own the works even though Hugo died in 1882. The courts ruled that the works were in the public domain and had been for many years, a precedent that has since been used for other 19th century authors whose descendants still claimed propriety.[/del]
Brett Somers, best known as a panelist on Match Game, was married for 54 years to Jack Klugman. Though they were separated for about 35 years of that (off and on) they did celebrate their golden anniversary with a big bash in NYC to which both brought their significant others (Somers her longtime boyfriend and Klugman his girlfriend).
Jack Klugman owned and raced thoroughbred horses, includling Jacklin Klugman, California Horse of the Year which finished third in the Kentucky Derby
Kentucky was an extremely important border state during the Civil War, as well as the birthplace of both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. When he was told by a clergyman supporter that God favored the Union cause, Lincoln supposedly replied, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
Portions of the famous “11 Herbs & Spices” for Kentucky Fried Chicken are made in separate locations across the US; the original recipe is kept in a computerized vault at company headquarters.
Burger King’s “Where’s Herb?” ad campaign is still considered one of the biggest advertising flops of all time. “Herb” was supposed to be the one person who had never eaten a Whopper and the chain offered $5000 to the first person to spot him. However, Herb – who looked like a stereotypical nerd – did nothing to help sales and was quickly dropped.
Prime time TV quiz shows practically vanished in America, after former ***Twenty-One ***champion Herb Stempel testified before Congress that contestants were coached by producer Dan Enright.
The 50-star flag of the United States of America has now been in continuous use longer (50 years this summer, since the 1960 admission of Hawaii as a state) than any other national flag in U.S. history.
There are 9 rows of stars on the U.S. flag- 5 rows of 6 each, 4 of 5 each.
The motto of MGM in the 30s was “More Stars than there are in Heaven.”
Heaven was a popular disco and nightclub in the Warehouse District of Pittsburgh in the late Seventies and early Eighties. There were several drug and prostitution busts there, IIRC.
The Pittsburgh Crawfords were one of the best Negro League baseball teams in the mid-1930’s, winning back-to-back pennants in 1935 and '36. Such future Hall of Famers as Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Josh Gibson spent time on the roster.
The satchel is often associated with the classic image of the English schoolboy: “And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel” is a phrase from Shakespeare’s monologue “All the world’s a stage.”
Much like Shakespeare, Euripedes is one of the best known Greek playwrights. He has one of the largest collections of surviving Greek plays to date with seventeen plays.
According to legend Euripides was killed when an eagle dropped a turtle on his head. (Eagles drop turtles on rocks to break them open, and Euripides was bald and thus his head, per the legend, would have looked like a rock from above.)
It was actually Aeschylus who is thought to have died that way.
The first lunar module to land on the Moon was named Eagle, as is the U.S. Coast Guard’s training ship (formerly a German ship named Horst Wessel, after an early Nazi martyr).
A “double eagle” in golf is a score of 3 under par on a given hole, and is also known as an “albatross”.
The Gossamer Albatross was a pedal-powered propeller aircraft that was successfully piloted across the English Channel in 1979.