***The Education of Little Tree ***was long thought to be the work of an American Indian named Forest Carter. It was actually written by a white supremacist and Confederate apologist named Asa Earl Carter, who also wrote The Outlaw Josey Wales.
Chief Dan George (who appeared in the movie version of The Outlaw Josey Wales) was chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation from 1951 to 1963. He didn’t begin acting until he was 60 years old.
The hapless kidnappers must pay their young hostage’s family to take him back, in O. Henry’s story The Ransom of Red Chief.
oDanny DeVito (“The Spandex King”) refuses to pay the kidnappers of his hated wife, Bette Midler, who he is trying to divorce without giving her anything, instead daring them to follow through on their threat to kill her, in “Ruthless People”.
Liberty DeVito, who formerly played with Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, has been Billy Joel’s drummer since the mid-Seventies.
He HATED “Just the Way You Are” and almost persuaded Billy not to include it on the popular ***The Stranger ***album.
Sour Billy Tipton, a bully and fixer, is a key bad guy in the George R.R. Martin vampires-along-the-antebellum-Mississippi novel Fevre Dream.
Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer is a Kafkaesque tale of a humble Jewish fix-it man who is imprisoned for a long period awaiting a trial in tsarist Russia. The story was based on the 1913 antisemitic Beilis affair, which created a worldwide outcry.
Richard Nixon was defeated when he ran for President in 1960, and again when he ran for governor of California in 1962. He aggressively campaigned for Republican candidates at all levels in the 1966 midterm elections, building support for his own presidential campaign two years later, which he narrowly won over Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Richard Nixon was an major character in Robert Coover’s novel The Public Burning, an alternate world book (though not marketed as such) about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Nixon was one of the few major characters still alive when the book was published and is actually portrayed quite sympathetically and is the only character who doubts the Rosenbergs’ guilt.
“Burning Love” was the last single by Elvis Presley to crack the Billboard Top Ten.
Nominated 14 times, Elvis Presley won his only Grammy awards (3) for his Gospel music work. At the time, the categories were called “Sacred,” then “Inspirational.”
Jason Lee, formerly of My Name is Earl, plays a police detective who moonlights as an Elvis impersonator in the forthcoming TNT cop comedy Memphis Beat.
Nic Cage temporarily joins the Utah chapter of the Flying Elvises in “Honeymoon in Vegas”. The club members all join him at his wedding to Sarah Jessica Parker.
Shylock’s daughter Jessica marries Lorenzo and becomes a Christian, in The Merchant of Venice.
Insult comic Don Rickles’ nicknames were “Mr. Warmth” and “The Merchant of Venom”.
Marc Blitzstein’s musical The Cradle Will Rock was an anti-big-business play and was considered so controversial that its first performance was cancelled and the theater padlocked by the government (the group was financed by the Federal Theater Project). It was moved to another theater and performed with Blitzstein playing piano. The story involves Larry Foreman, a worker in Steeltown who ran afoul of the scheming businessman Mr. Mister. Other names in the play were also reflected the character’s occuption, including Harry Druggist, Doctor Specialist, Reverend Salvation, Editor Daily, and (college) President Prexy. Howard da Silva played Larry, and Will Geer played Mr. Mister.
A Howard DGA-6 (DGA stood for “Damned Good Airplane”) named “Mr. Mulligan” won the Bendix Trophy for fastest Burbank - Cleveland flight in 1935, flown by Benny Howard, its designer, and Gordon Israel. The plane’s crash in the 1936 race let Louise Thaden become the first woman to win a major air-racing championship.
The 12 tribes of Israel were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Napthali, Issachar, Asher, Dan, Zebulon, Gad, Benjamin, Judah and Joseph (which I remembered by humming the opening song from “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”)…
A Reuben sandwich, made of pastrami or corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing, was most reliably reported to have been the invention of Omaha grocer Reuben Kulakofsky. If made with cole slaw instead of sauerkraut, it is called a Rachel.
Captain James Cook stockpiled sauerkraut, which is high in Vitamin C, on his ships to ward off scurvy well before the British Navy started using limes.