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In the early 1920s, Henry Ford sponsored a weekly newspaper (the Dearborn Independent) that published strongly antisemitic views. At the same time, Ford had a reputation as one of the few major corporations actively hiring black workers and also hired women and handicapped men at a time when doing so was uncommon.
During the Roaring Twenties, just before the Great Depression, the US’s overall wealth more than doubled. roaring Twenties symbols include flappers, women who were more sexually free, smoke, drank, wore shorter skirts, smoked, and spoke more freely with then-considered ‘unladylike’ things. On and they could vote!
And there was dance! People were doing the Charleston, the flea hop, and the cake walk.
Prohibition cramped many peoples’ styles. At midnight on 15 January 1920 (early morning on 16 Jan), the Volstead Act closed every single saloon, tavern and bar in the USA. Americans got creative in response.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original title for The Great Gatsby, one of the most memorable novels of the"Roaring Twenties", was Trimalchio in West Egg
One of the iconic flappers of the 20’s was Olive Oyl, skinny and shapeless. Popeye The Sailor Man was not created in the comic strips until ten years after Olive Oyl was a regular. Olive Oyl was in E C Segar’s “Thimble Theater” in 1919, and Popeye did not show up as her boyfriend until 1929.
The long-running comic strip character Blondie, drawn by Chic Young until his 1973 death, was originally Blondie Boopadoop—a carefree flapper girl who spent her days in dance halls along with her boyfriend Dagwood Bumstead, heir to a railroad fortune. The name “Boopadoop” derives from the scat singing lyric that was popularized by Helen Kane’s 1928 song “I Wanna Be Loved by You.” On February 17, 1933, after much fanfare and build-up, Blondie and Dagwood were married after a month-and-a-half-long hunger strike by Dagwood to get his parents’ blessing, but they strongly disapproved of his marrying beneath his class, and disinherited him. Left only with a check to pay their honeymoon, the Bumsteads were forced to become a middle-class suburban family, including his working for what is now 83 years doing something office-y for Mr. Dithers.
In 1981, Debbie Harry and her band, Blondie, had the first rap song ever to hit #1 on the Billboard Singles Chart, ‘Rapture.’
Harry Anderson, best known for his role as Judge Harry Stone on Night Court, began his career as a magician. His first exposure to magic began when the Anderson family moved to Chicago. Anderson’s father, who was a salesman, would occasionally take him to The Pump Room, the famous restaurant downstairs in the Ambassador East Hotel. There, Anderson discovered 'wise guys" playing card games, hustling and occasionally performing magic tricks. Young Anderson became highly intrigued by the art of conjuring and wanted to learn more about the subject.
When she was first launched in 1514, His Majesty’s Ship Henry Grace à Dieu (nicknamed The Great Harry) was the largest warship in Europe, and the first that had the capability to fire a broadside.
The record for the standing broad jump is held by Byron Jones at just under 12 ft 3 in.
Byron Jones set that record, and it is a world record, at the NFL scouting combine. It wasn’t even at a track and field event. The combine was in Indianapolis and Jones, a cornerback, was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys that year (2015).
This year, Byron Jones fulfilled a promise to his mother by graduating college. He is a UCONN Husky.
Lord Byron had a short and torrid affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, wife of the future Prime Minister. After the affair ended, Lady Caroline and Lord Byron spent several years and much energy hating each other, expressed in true Regency fashion in poems and novels.
Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter was Ada, Countess of Lovelace, whose work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine is considered a founding document in the field of computer science.
The Royalist poet, Richard Lovelace, wrote the poem “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars”, which contains the famous lines:
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
The sentiment died at the latest in the trenches of WWI.
Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline is often played at sporting events. Every Red Sox game at Fenway plays the song after the top of the 8th.
The University of Pittsburgh sings the song with some changes. Instead of the usual chorus lines,
♫ Sweet Caroline (ba-ba-ba),
♫ Good times never seemed so good (So good! So good! So good!)
Pitt instead yells these cheers,
♫ Sweet Caroline (Let’s go Pitt!),
♫ Good times never seemed so good (Go Pitt! Go Pitt! Go Pitt!)
Pitt has held that long tradition. However, Pitt rival West Virginia has gotten into the act also with their own changes:
♫ Sweet Caroline (Eat shit Pitt!),
♫ Good times never seemed so good (Eat shit! Eat shit! Eat shit!)
Pitt and WVU only occasionally play the once-strong, once-annual Backyard Brawl football game, now that they are in different conferences. The former Pitt-Penn State rivalry is no longer what it was, either, for the same reason.
Pitt plays their conference games now in Miami, Penn State’s in Nebraska, and West Virginia’s in Lubbock, Texas. Which is fitting, fr the Mountaineers to go nearly the Mountain Time Zone.
The unincorporated community of Kenton, Oklahoma, located in the extreme western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle, unofficially observes Mountain Time (as the nearest sizable towns are located in Colorado and New Mexico, both of which are in the Mountain Time Zone). However, the entire state of Oklahoma is officially in the Central Time Zone.
The Oklahoma City bombing is always thought as taking place only at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, where it killed 168 people,and injured more than 680 other people and destroyed one-third of the building, the blast also destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, and destroyed or burned 86 cars, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage
Fort Sill, Oklahoma is this country’s main artillery fort. All the main artillery training for the US Army and Marine Corps takes place there. Fort Sill was founded by Phillip H. Sheridan, George A. Custer and William T. Sherman. They named the fort after Army Brigadier General Joshua Woodrow Sill. Sill died during the Civil War at the Battle of Stones River, also called the Second Battle of Murfreesboro in Tennessee.