Theodore Roosevelt, Republican of New York, resisted calls from many to run for a full second term in 1908. He promised on Election Night 1904 that, having served most of William McKinley’s second term as President, he would not run again four years later out of respect for the two-term tradition established by George Washington. However, Roosevelt later ran again in 1912 against his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft of Ohio.
While he was POTUS, Theodore Roosevelt went skinny dipping in the Potomac River. He also participated in a boxing match that injured one of his eyes.
The Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition was an expedition to Africa led by Theodore Roosevelt and outfitted by the Smithsonian Institution. Its purpose was to collect specimens for the Smithsonian’s new Natural History museum, now known as the National Museum of Natural History. The expedition collected around 11,400 animal specimens which took Smithsonian naturalists eight years to catalog. The 11,400 specimens included about four thousand birds, two thousand reptiles and amphibians, five hundred fish, and 4,897 mammals (other sources put this figure at 5,103).
Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador to the United States, when asked to explain his friend Theodore Roosevelt’s energy, enthusiasm and interests, joked, “You must always remember that the President is about six.”
A recent United States Ambassador to Australia, Jeffrey Bleich, is a good friend of Barack Obama and also a graduate of the same high school I went to, Hall High School in West Hartford, Connecticut.
The Connecticut River is the largest river in New England. It flows 410 miles from its source at Fourth Connecticut Lake, a tiny pond in New Hampshire, 300 yards from the Canadian border, to Long Island Sound. The word “Connecticut” is the early settlers’ version of the Mohegan word quinetucket, which means “beside the long, tidal river”
Good trivia, thanks for that!
No play here, I just wanted to say that.
Thomas Cole’s 1836 Hudson River School painting View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, commonly known as The Oxbow shows a prominent feature of the Connecticut River. Today, it would show Interstate 91 cutting across the neck, and a large marina dredged out of the center.
Doctor Virginia Apgar, the anesthesiologist who developed the Apgar Score, a way to quickly determine the health of newborn babies, is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College.
There has been at least one instance in which a newborn was alrleady a reigning monarch at the time of birth. In year 309, Persian nobles placed a crown upon the belly of King Hormizd II’s widow. Inside was history’s first fetal king: Shah Shapur II, Apgar Score unrecorded… The in utero ruler was the ninth leader of the Sassanid Empire, a powerful Persian kingdom covering modern Iran. Shapur II ruled for 70 years. In the late 4th century, he successfully ousted Christianity from the Middle East.
The largest aircraft boneyard in the world is the Davis-Monthan AFB boneyard near Tucson AZ. It is officially called the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, or 309 AMARG. It is the place where all excess military and government aircraft rest. Tucson’s dry climate and alkali soil made it an ideal location for aircraft storage and preservation.
The U.S. Air Force’s A-10 Warthog aircraft (officially known as the Thunderbolt) was specifically designed to attack Soviet armor during the Cold War, but has proven itself quite useful in recent years in fighting ISIS and in other Third World conflicts, and was recently given a new lease on life by the Pentagon.
Marines love the A-10 and its close air support capabilities. It entered service in 1976, and is the only United States Air Force production-built aircraft designed solely for close air support, including attacking tanks, armored vehicles, and other ground targets. The A-10 Warthog’s official name is the Thunderbolt, a name that comes from the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt of World War II, which was a fighter that was particularly effective at close air support. That WWII fighter was one of the most, if not the most, famous and popular airplanes from Republic Aviation.
Weighing eight tons when fully loaded, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was one of the heaviest single-engine piston aircraft ever built. With a bomb load of 2,500 pounds; it could carry more than half the payload of the B-17 bomber.
The engine that powered the P-47 Thunderbolt was America’s first 18-cylinder radial engine design. It also powered the Chance Vought F4U Corsair (of USMC Pappy Boyington fame) and the Grumman
F6F Hellcat.
The Republic Thunderbolt was powered by an innovative Pratt and Whitney engine. Pratt and Whitney was organized by Frederick Renschler, whose father owned an auto plant that made Republic cars from 1910 to 1916. By pure coincidence, the the famous Thunderbolt aircraft was made by Republic, formerly Seversky, which was reorganized and rebranded Republic shortly before WWII.
The last aerial combat between piston-engined fighters was not in WWII or Korea, but in the Football War. On July 14, 1969, Capt. Fernando Soto of the Honduras Air Force, flying multiple CAP sorties over Tegucigalpa in his Corsair, shot down two Corsairs and a Mustang of an attacking Salvadoran force. Soto remains the only Central American pilot ever to score a combat kill.
In field artillery, a SEAD fire mission is a special fire mission coordinated with a close air strike where the artillery identifies and fires rounds against multiple targets. Single marking rounds, usually WP (white phosphorus), are fired against the main enemy targets to be destroyed by the close air striking aircraft, while HE rounds (High Explosive) are also fired at anti-air batteries close to the marked main targets. SEAD stands for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses, and is not intended for any of the targets to be destroyed by the field artillery. SEADs are intended for the marked targets to be destroyed by the close air supporting aircraft.
From the artillery FDC (Fire Direction Control center) point of view, all activities in a SEAD fire mission are based off of the time at which air striking pilots want to deliver their ordinance - the BOD (Bombs on Deck time). The marked targets must have the WP rounds impact at those targets exactly 30 seconds before’ BOD, to allow sufficient time for the WP smoke to build for the pilots to easily spot those targets. The anti-air capabilities must be sufficiently suppressed for the pilots to deliver their bombs. Timing and accuracy mean everything in a SEAD mission, leading to one field artillery motto: Artillery: On Time, On Target.
The Republic F-105 Thunderchief was a USAF fighter bomber often used in SEAD missions.
ETA - ninja’d by Elvis, but still works: fighter, pilot.
The Barry Manilow song “Weekend in New England” never has the title in the lyrics, but only mentions “time in New England.”
The word “weekend” did not begin to appear until the 1890s. Before that, everyone worked a six-day week, and there was no need for any other term than “Sunday” to reference the time of weekly rest.