A crudely made wooden ladder was a key piece of evidence in the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in 1935. The ladder was found leaning on the wall outside the baby’s room. Tool marks on the ladder matched tools owned by accused kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann. Wood in the ladder was found to match wood used as flooring in his attic.
Miniature souvenir wooden ladders were created and sold by an enterprising Flemington, NJ. local to the trial visitors looking for a souvenir.
Although many of Natalie Wood’s films were commercially profitable, her acting was criticized at times. In 1966, she won the Harvard Lampoon Worst Actress of the Year Award. She was the first performer in the award’s history to accept it in person, and The Harvard Crimson wrote she was “quite a good sport”.
Natalie Cole was an American singer, songwriter, and actress. The daughter of Nat King Cole, she rose to musical success in the mid-1970s as an Rhythm & Blues artist with the hits “This Will Be”, “Inseparable” (1975), and “Our Love”. In the 1990s, she re-recorded standards by her father, resulting in her biggest success selling sold over seven million copies and winning Cole seven Grammy Awards. She sold over 30 million records worldwide during her career.
Natalie Cole, who died Dec. 31, 2015, wrestled with a serious drug problem and because of it for a time lost custody of her only child, a son, who went on to become a musician himself and later toured with her.
Countess Natalia Rostova (also known by her Russian nickname, Natasha, and by the French version of her name, Natalie) is the heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. She has been played on film by Audrey Hepburn, Lyudmila Savelyeva, Morag Hood, Clemence Poesy and Lily James. She is currently portrayed on stage by Denee Benton, opposite Josh Groban in the Broadway musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote The Naval War of 1812 when he was a young man, and it is still one of the standard books on the subject.
On October 14, 1912, while campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt was shot by a saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank. The bullet lodged in his chest after penetrating his steel eyeglass case and passing through a thick (50 pages) single-folded copy of the speech he was carrying in his jacket. Roosevelt, as an experienced hunter and anatomist, correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung, and he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech with blood seeping into his shirt. He spoke for 90 minutes. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” Afterwards, probes and an x-ray showed that the bullet had lodged in Roosevelt’s chest muscle, but did not penetrate the pleura, and it would be less dangerous to leave it in place. Roosevelt carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life.
Teddy Roosevelt included universal health care coverage in his 1912 Bull Moose platform, upon learning how well Bismarckcare worked in Germany.
A North Dakota town originally called Missouri Crossing and later Edwintown was renamed Bismarck by the Northern Pacific Railway, in honor of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Railroad officials hoped to attract German immigrant settlers to the area and German investment in the railroad.
US towns were often named by railroad men, after the settlement was first established as a railroad stop. One example is Cabool, Missouri. A construction engineer of the rail line had previously build the railroad in Afghanistan, and thought that part of the Ozark foothills reminded him if Afghanistan, so he called the town Cabool, which was then the conventional spelling of Kabul. Another example would be Curlew, Mallard and Plover, which are consecutive stops along a railway line in Iowa, named for common birds found by railwaymen in that part of the prairie.
From Philadelphia, the stations on the old Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Main Line” are Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr, which inspired the mnemonic “Old Maids Never Wed And Have Babies”.
“Jesus Christ made Seattle under protest” is a mnemonic for the city’s downtown east-west running streets, with two adjacent streets starting with each successive letter: Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Seneca, Spring, University, Union, Pike, Pine.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar has been produced in more languages than any other musical, including Portuguese, Hungarian, Italian, French, Spanish, Norwegian Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek, Dutch, German, Japanese, Korean, and Croatian.
On April 11, 1612, Edward Wightman became the last English person to be executed for heresy. He was burned at the stake in Lichfield, in part for having claimed that Christ was only a man. Andrew Lloyd Webber is still with us, I believe.
Prince Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, was named Duke of York when he got married in 1986.
On September 17, 1914, Andrew Fisher, whose previous term as Prime Minister of Australia oversaw a period of reform unmatched in the Commonwealth until the 1940s, became Prime Minister for the third time. His party’s name was changed from “Labour” to “Labor” in 1912.
President Chester A. Arthur’s son, Chester A. Arthur II, deviated somewhat from the usual American naming custom, as the first generation son with the same first name is usually referred as Jr (Junior), rather than II. Chester II was pretty much a layabout, artsy sycophant and womanizer, settling finally in Colorado ski country, where he fathered (at least) Chester A Arthur III, whose fame was as a San Francisco astrologer and sexologist, who went by the name of Galvin Arthur.
General Douglas MacArthur’s only child, named for illustrious generals who were his ancestors, was Arthur MacArthur IV. Unlike them, he declined to go to West Point, and eventually disappeared into the New York bohemian world under an assumed name, where he maintains his privacy.
MacArthur Park, a song written and composed by Jimmy Webb, is often referred to as “the worst song ever written” because of the flowery lyrics and weird metaphors. It was, however about a real relationship and subsequent breakup between Webb and Susie Horton. Webb claims that everything in the song were things he actually saw in MacArthur Park (where they hung out a lot), including the cake melting in the rain.
Webb Institute is a private undergraduate engineering college in Glen Cove, New York, on Long Island Sound. Each graduate of Webb Institute earns a Bachelor of Science degree in naval architecture and marine engineering. Successful candidates for admission receive full tuition for four years. It has an acceptance rate of 33%, with over 100 yearly applicants for the 30 places in its freshman class.
Webb Institute’s campus was formerly a millionaire’s estate and was used for the exterior shots of Wayne Manor in the 1995 film Batman Forever, again in the 1997 film Batman & Robin, and for both interior and exterior shots for the 2014 TV series Gotham as well as being featured in the 1998 film Great Expectations. Interior and exterior shots appeared in the 2015 TV series Limitless