His television anthology, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, was well known for its title sequence. The camera fades in on a simple line-drawing caricature of Hitchcock’s rotund profile. As the program’s theme music, Charles Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, plays, Hitchcock appears in silhouette from the right edge of the screen, and then walks to center screen to eclipse the caricature. He then almost always says “Good evening.”
The scripts for Hitchcock’s movies The Birds and Marnie were written by Evan Hunter, who had just achieved fame with his book The Blackboard Jungle. Hunter would later write the book Hitch and Me about the experience.
In The Birds, a movie that Peter O’Toole was not in :), the 150 year old Potter School behind St. Theresa’s Church five miles south of Bodega Bay was vacant at the time of the filming. After Alfred Hitchcock’s crew repaired the exterior it was used for several scenes. Today it is a private residence and is sometimes open for tours.
The term “Potter’s field” comes from Matthew 27:3-27:8 in which Jewish priests take 30 pieces of silver returned by a remorseful Judas and buy Akeldama, later renamed Haceldama, meaning the field of blood. The site was a source of potters’ clay. After the clay was removed, such a site would be left unusable for agriculture and thus might as well become a graveyard for those who could not be buried in an orthodox cemetery. This may be the origin of the name.
Potter Valley, California is located 18 miles north-northeast of Ukiah CA.
Potter, California is a former settlement in Modoc County, California. It was located 12 miles northwest of Lookout CA.
Lookout, California is a census-designated place in Modoc County, California. Formerly called Whitley’s Ford for James W. Whitley, a local hotelier, the name Lookout recalls how Native Americans used nearby hills as observation points.
Harry Morgan’s role as Colonel Sherman Potter on MAS*H was actually his second role in the show. He originally played eccentric Major General Bartford Hamilton Steele in Season 3.
The TV series Remington Steele (1982-87) is best known for having launched the career of Pierce Brosnan. Stephanie Zimbalist, who had top billing, was already an established actress at the time. Every episode title has the word “Steele” in it
Efrem Zimbalist Jr. served in the US Army during WWII and was awarded the Purple Heart for a leg wound received during the battle of Hürtgen Forest on the German-Belgian border.
A zimbalist is a person who plays the cymbals in a German oompah-oompah band.
The Avedis Zildjian Company, simply known as Zildjian, is an American-based cymbal manufacturer founded in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey) by Armenian Avedis Zildjian in the 17th century. It is now based in Norwell, Massachusetts. Being nearly 400 years old, Zildjian is one of the oldest companies in the world. Zildjian also sells drum-related accessories, such as drum sticks and cymbal carriers. It is the largest cymbal manufacturer in the world.
“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” was a 1953 song written by Irish lyricist Jimmy Kennedy, who also wrote the words to “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” and “My Prayer”, the hit by The Platters a few years later. Although the recoreding by The Four Lads never rose above Number 10 on the charts, several lines-from the lyrics have become indelible catch phrases.
They Might Be Giants is an American alternative rock band formed in 1982 by John Flansburgh and John Linnell. They have done a popular cover of the song "Istanbul (Not Constantiople). The recording was used as a music video for the Warner Brothers cartoon Tiny Toon Adventures.
Here’s the video if you’ve never seen it: THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" - YouTube
Constantinople was dedicated on 11 May 330 AD. Before that it was called Byzantium. According to Pliny the Elder, the first known name of a settlement on the site of Constantinople was Lygos, a settlement founded between the 13th and 11th century BC.
William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” begins “That is no country for old men.”
There have been three major league baseball players who had exactly the same name as a female media personality: Brett Butler, Robin Roberts and Terry Moore. A close miss for Evan/Eva Longoria. Another close miss would be Babe/Baby Ruth, the latter of whom was the daughter of President Cleveland, after whom the candy bar was named.
(The Baby Ruth story is the official one but has always been highly dubious).
In 1968, the year after Carl Yastrzemski’s Triple Crown / MVP season with the Boston Red Sox, the Arnold Bread Company of Greenwich, Connecticut introduced “Big Yaz Bread” in the New England market. The company is now owned by Bimbo Bakeries USA.
Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown in 1967, leading that American League in batting average (.336), home runs (44), and runs batted in (121), a milestone which was not accomplished again in the Major Leagues until Detroit Tiger Miguel Cabrera achieved the feat 45 years later in 2012.
Had he not been vacationing in Hawaii, Babe Ruth could have become manager of the Detroit Tigers. During the 1933-34 baseball offseason, Detroit team owner Frank Navin knew he had a talented young team, built around Charlie Gehringer and young slugger Hank Greenberg. Ruth was near the end of the line and the New York Yankees were ready to part ways with him. Navin decided to offer the Yankees some cash to acquire the rights to the great slugger, who wanted to become a manager desperately. But Ruth was in Honolulu on an extended vacation, and Navin was unable to meet with him, so the deal fell through.
On November 20, 1951, baseball scout Ed Scott signed Hank Aaron to a contract with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League where he played three months.
While with the Clowns he experienced some overt racism. His team was in Washington, D.C. and as Aaron tells it:
"We had breakfast while we were waiting for the rain to stop, and I can still envision sitting with the Clowns in a restaurant behind Griffith Stadium and hearing them break all the plates in the kitchen after we finished eating. What a horrible sound. Even as a kid, the irony of it hit me: here we were in the capital in the land of freedom and equality, and they had to destroy the plates that had touched the forks that had been in the mouths of black men. If dogs had eaten off those plates, they'd have washed them."“The Curious Case of Sidd Finch” was published in Sports Illustrated’s April 1, 1985 issue. It told of this curious baseball pitching phenom kid discovered by the NY Mets organization. Finch grew up in an orphanage in Leicester, England and was adopted by a foster parent. He never played organized baseball but he eventually learned how to pitch, and he could throw it at 168 MPH. Yes, 168 MPH.
The article was an April Fool’s Day hoax written by George Plimpton, published during the 1985 Spring Training preseason. It was written so convincingly that, from Wikipedia,
The entire short story was republished by SI in 2014 as they celebrated their 60th anniversary.
To this day I remember sitting in my college library in 1985 and reading that great story!