There are currently six living former Prime Ministers of Australia. The greatest number of living former Prime Ministers at any one time was eight, which occurred twice, in late 1941 and between July 1945 and July 1947.
Francis Michael Forde served the shortest term as Prime Minister of Australia, serving only from 6 to 13 July 1945.
Film director Francis Ford Coppola came from a musical background. His father was a first=chair flutist with major symphony orchestras, and his maternal grandfather a well-known composer of popular Italian music. When Francis was born, his father was playing for a radio orchestra sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, hence his middle name.
In play: of those 20,000 B-24s, over 8,000 of them were built by the Ford Motor Company. Ford also built 270,000 Jeeps for the war.
Ford Field is a multi-purpose domed stadium located in Downtown Detroit, Michigan. The naming rights were purchased by the Ford Motor Company at $40 million over 20 years. The stadium’s design incorporates a six-story former Hudson’s warehouse, which was constructed in the 1920s.
Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt, trained as a pilot on Long Island at Hazelhurst Field, an airfield renamed Roosevelt Field in his honor, after his death in action on Bastille Day, July 14, 1918. Today, a shopping mall also named Roosevelt Field sits on the site.
Another of Roosevelt’s sons was named Kermit.
Yes, Kermit. Really.
Iin 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, mostly among prep school players. Newspaper editorials called on colleges and high schools to banish football outright. Theodore Roosevelt summoned the head coaches and representatives of the premier collegiate powers—Harvard, Yale and Princeton—to the White House on October 9, 1905. Roosevelt urged them to curb excessive violence and set an example of fair play for the rest of the country. The schools released a statement condemning brutality and pledging to keep the game clean. An intercollegiate conference, which would become the forerunner of the NCAA, approved radical rule changes for the 1906 season. They legalized the forward pass, abolished the dangerous mass formations, created a neutral zone between offense and defense and doubled the first-down distance to 10 yards, to be gained in three downs.
Kermit Roosevelt was given the middle name of his mother, Edith Kermit Carow. The name Kermit is derived from the Manx surname Kermott, a variant of the Irish surname MacDermott meaning “son of Diarmid”.
Kermig Wahl was the only person named Kermit to ever play major league baseball. He was a wartime substitute player, then a couple years as a utility infielder after WWII, where he played on the last team managed by Connie Mack, the 1950 Philadelphia Athletics.
Ahh, but there’s one more. Former MLB shortstop and second baseman Gene Verble’s middle name was Kermit. And he also played in the 1950s.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and former President of the United States Bill Clinton shared a birthday, August 19 (in 1921 and 1946, respectively).
Orvon Grover “Gene” Autry was an American performer who gained fame as a singing cowboy on the radio, in movies, and on television for more than three decades beginning in the early 1930s. He appeared in 93 films and in 91 episodes of The Gene Autry Show television series. In 1960, he became owned of the American League expansion team the Los Angeles Angels, which he ran until 1996.
Gene Autry is almost single-handedly responsible for one of the most dramatic shifts in Christmas traditions. In 1949, Autry recorded the song of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, adding forever a new character to the Santa Claus story. Rudolf actually first appeared ten years earlier, in a promotional book distributed by Montgomery Ward department stores. But the popularity of Rudolf took off with the wide radio play of the Autry recording.
Popular lore has it that Santa Claus has worn a red suit ever since his use in Coca-Cola advertisements. But the company denies it, and instead takes credit for popularizing him as fat and jolly. Clement Clark Moore can claim priority on that one, though.
A Visit from St. Nicholas, the 1823 poem that begins with,
’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;…
was first published anonymously. Later, in 1837, Clement Clarke Moore claimed authorship. The poem has been called “arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American”.
How many times does A Visit from St. Nicholas mention “Santa Claus”? Zero.
The Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” was operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1940 to 1945. The A6M was usually referred to by its pilots as the “Reisen” (zero fighter), with “0” being the last digit of the imperial year 2600 (or, 1940) when it entered service with the Imperial Navy. The official Allied reporting name was “Zeke”, although the use of the name “Zero” was later adopted by the Allies as well.
The design of the Zero by Jiro Horikoshi is the entirely-fictionalized subject of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2013 animated film The Wind Rises. It was his last film before retiring, and effectively bringing the Studio Ghibli library to a close.
Pete Seeger first identified the melody of Bob Dylan’s classic song “Blowin’ in the Wind” as an adaptation of the old African-American spiritual “No More Auction Block/We Shall Overcome”. According to Alan Lomax’s The Folk Songs of North America, the song originated in Canada and was sung by former slaves who fled there after Britain abolished slavery in 1833. In 1978, Dylan acknowledged the source when he told journalist Marc Rowland: “‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song called ‘No More Auction Block’ – that’s a spiritual and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ follows the same feeling.”