In play: Ronald Goldman, murdered by OJ Simpson, attended Adlai Stevenson High School in Chicago.
During the 1952 Presidential campaign, a photograph revealed a hole in the sole of Adlai Stevenson’s right shoe. This became a symbol of Stevenson’s frugality and earthiness. Photographer William M. Gallagher of the Flint Journal won the 1953 Pulitzer prize on the strength of the image.
Leo Anthony Gallagher, Jr., using the stage name Gallagher, is an American comedian known for smashing watermelons as part of his act. Gallagher developed a disdain for watermelons, when, at age 10, dropped one on his foot and broke two toes.
Gene Anthony Ray, best known for his portrayal of dancer Leroy Johnson in both the 1980 film Fame and the 1982–1987 Fame television series based upon the film, was described thusly in his Telegraph:
"Ray remained a ‘frantic partygoer’ with a self-confessed weakness for drink and drugs. As his life fell apart, he slept on park benches, and during a failed attempt to launch a Fame-style dance school in Milan, shared a flat there with a porn actress. In 1996 he was diagnosed HIV positive. He suffered a stroke in 2003.
“Flamboyantly camp, he brushed aside questions about his sexuality. He never married.”
Fame (1980) followed students through the High School of Performing Arts in New York City. In San Francisco the equivalent school is SOTA (pronounced just like the first two syllables of the last name of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor). SOTA is San Francisco’s School of the Arts.
Thank you, and may he rest in peace.
In play:
Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, and confirmed the next year. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and, after some delays by the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, was eventually confirmed in 1998. On the Second Circuit, Sotomayor heard appeals in more than 3,000 cases and wrote about 380 opinions. Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School. She was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Obama in 2009.
From
The footnote leads to Richard J. Guadagno.
Still in play:
Sonia Sotomayor was born in the South Bronx, New York City, in 1954. Parents Juan and Celina Baez Sotomayor, who were of Puerto Rican descent, moved to New York City to raise their children. Sotomayor’s family functioned on a very modest income; her mother was a nurse at a methadone clinic, and her father was a tool-and-die worker. When Juan died in 1963, Celina worked hard to raise her children as a single parent. She placed what Sotomayor would later call an “almost fanatical emphasis” on a higher education, pushing the children to become fluent in English and making huge sacrifices to purchase a set of encyclopedias that would give them proper research materials for school.
Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx in 1972 and entered the Ivy League, attending Princeton University on a scholarship.
Sotomayor gives details of her early life in her memoir My Beloved World.
(A close family member has met her in person and says she is very impressive)
One of the earliest encyclopedic works to have survived to modern times is the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman living in the 1st century AD. He compiled a work of 37 chapters covering natural history, architecture, medicine, geography, geology, and all aspects of the world around him. He stated in the preface that he had compiled 20,000 facts from 2000 works by over 200 authors, and added many others from his own experience. The work was published around AD 77-79, although he probably never finished proofing the work before his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.
Pliny the Younger wrote two famous letters describing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 25 years after the event, and both were sent in response to the request of his friend, the historian Tacitus, who wanted to know more about the death in the eruption of Pliny the Elder, uncle and adoptive father of Pliny the Younger.
The two letters have great historical value due to their accurate description of Vesuvius’ eruption; Pliny’s attention to detail in the letters about Vesuvius is so keen that modern volcanologists describe those types of eruptions as “Plinian eruptions”
NFL running back and linebacker Paul “Tank” Younger played in the 1940s and 1950s. He was the first Black player from a predominantly black university (Grambling) to play in the NFL. He earned the nickname “Tank” when, as a running back, he consistently bowled over would-be tacklers.
Tank Younger was a member of the LA Rams’ famed “Bull Elephant” backfield with “Deacon” Dan Towler and Dick Hoerner. With 3,296 yards, Younger is the Rams’ sixth leading rusher in team history.
Grambling State University emerged from the desire of African-American farmers in rural north Louisiana who wanted to educate other African Americans in the northern part of the state. In 1896, the North Louisiana Colored Agriculture Relief Association was formed to organize and operate a school. After opening a small school west of what is now the town of Grambling, the Association requested assistance from Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Charles P. Adams, sent to aid the group in organizing an industrial school, became its founder and first president.
Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is known as the “Crawfish Capital of the World”.
“Seven Bridges Road” is a song written by American musician Steve Young. The best-known version being a five-part harmony arrangement by English musician Iain Matthews recorded by the American rock band Eagles in 1980. Young was inspired to eventually write “Seven Bridges Road” during a sojourn in Montgomery, Alabama, in the early 1960s.
Metairie, Louisiana is home to the longest bridge over water in the world, the Lake Pontchartrain causeway. The causeway connects Metairie with St. Tammany Parish on the North Shore. The causeway is 24 miles long.
Felix Baumgartner was the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall when he leapt from 24 miles above the Earth’s surface.
nm
Chuck Yeager was the first person to break the sound barrier. He did so on October 14, 1947 in a Bell X-1 experimental plane that he named Glamorous Glennis.
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and other devices, was active in the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. In 1921, he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, which advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be, as Bell called them, a “defective variety of the human race”.
In Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the 8-1 majority decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, holding that a Virginia statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the “unfit,” including the intellectually disabled, “for the protection and health of the state,” did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Holmes notoriously closed his opinion with the declaration, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”