On May 9, 1980 in Norco CA, some 50 mi E of Los Angeles, five heavily armed bank robbers attempted to rob the Norco branch of Security Pacific Bank. County sheriffs responded and a shootout resulted. Two of the five perpetrators and one sheriff’s deputy were killed, 9 other law enforcement officers were injured, and gunfire damaged at least 30 police cars and one police helicopter. The three surviving perpetrators were arrested and convicted of 46 felonies and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The Inland Empire (I.E.) is a metropolitan area and region in Southern California. The term may be used to refer to the cities of western Riverside County and southwestern San Bernardino County. A broader definition will include eastern Los Angeles County cities in the Pomona Valley, and sometimes the desert communities of Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley; a much larger definition includes all of San Bernardino and Riverside counties. The “Inland” part of the name is derived from the region’s location, about 60 miles (97 km) inland from Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. Originally, this area was called the Orange Empire due to the acres of citrus groves that once extended from Pasadena to Redlands during the first half of the twentieth century.
Sparta is the capital of the distant-future Second Empire of Humanity in the books of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, ruled, at the time of their novel The Mote in God’s Eye, by Emperor Leonidas.
Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” begins with the narrator’s fruitless search for Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley, on behalf of a friend of a friend from the East. He meets a man named Simon Wheeler, who instead tells him about a man named Jim Smiley and his frog caper.
Sparta, Wisconsin lies along the La Crosse River, which is a tributary of the Mississippi River that passes through Fort McCoy and past Sparta, Rockland, Bangor and West Salem. The La Crosse River flows into the Mississippi River at the city of La Crosse WI.
ETA (ninja): The La Crosse River flows from the east, from its source in Monroe County, to the west where it connects with the Mississippi.
East Liverpool, Ohio, the former “Pottery Capital of the World,” is also known as the birthplace of legendary Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, and for the 1934 FBI and local police shooting of bank robber Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd nearby.
Little Jimmy Osmond (the youngest sibling in the Osmond family) had a massive hit with the song “Long Haired Lover from Liverpool”, in 1972, becoming the youngest person to ever reach number one on the UK Singles Chart aged 9 years 8 months.
The USS Osmond Ingram (DD-255) was named after Osmond Kelly Ingram a sailor in the US Navy during WWI who received the Medal of Honor posthumously. She was launched in 1919 and decommissioned in 1946. During WWII she sank her first submarine, U-172, in December 1943 and from this and similar outstanding performance of duty by her sisters brought her group a Presidential Unit Citation (“puck”). There’s a “nuck”, the NUC, Naval Unit Commendation, and a “puck”.
Singer James Ingram’s first hit was “Just Once (Can We Figure Out What We Keep Doing Wrong)”. He had two number-one singles on the Hot 100: the first, a duet with fellow R&B artist Patti Austin, 1982’s “Baby, Come to Me” topped the U.S. pop chart in 1983; “I Don’t Have the Heart”, which became his second number-one in 1990 was his only number-one as a solo artist. In between these hits he also recorded the song “Somewhere Out There” with fellow recording artist Linda Ronstadt for the animated film An American Tail.
Steve Austin is a science fiction character created by Martin Caidin for his 1972 novel, Cyborg. The name Steve Austin is also used in the TV show derived from the book, The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran on TV from 1974-1978, starring Lee Majors.
Robert E. Lee and George H. Thomas both died in 1870, just five years after the end of the Civil War. Both were Virginians who had long U.S. Army careers; Lee went with the Confederacy in 1861, but Thomas remained loyal to the United States.
“Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” is an American popular song written in 1912, with music by Lewis F. Muir and lyrics by L. Wolfe Gilbert. The “Robert E. Lee” in the title refers to the steamboat of that name.
It has been recorded by such artists as Al Jolson, Benny Goodman, Judy Garland, Louis Jordan, Dean Martin, Russ Conway, Chas and Dave, and Lizzie Miles.
John Muir, a Scottish-American naturalist, helped to establish Yosemite National Park. He is known as the “Father of the National Parks”.
The leader of the first team to ascend El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, in 1958, was a rock climber named Warren Harding. He was born in 1924, a year after the death of President Warren G. Harding, who at the time of his death was one of the most popular presidents.
When the US Senate conducted an impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, the presiding officer, Vice-President Aaron Burr, insisted that the layout of the Senate chamber match as closely as possible the layout of the House of Lords in the recently concluded impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, right down to the red velvet tablecloth on the clerks’ table.
In the original Broadway cast of Hamilton, Aaron Burr was played by jazz singer Leslie Odom Jr. In the current Chicago cast, “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” stalwart Wayne Brady is Burr.
During the American Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton raised a provincial artillery company and was appointed its captain.
The odd name of the group that performed “Don’t Pull Your Love” facilitated a running joke from radio personality Dan Ingram, while a deejay at WABC AM, involving introducing the group as “Hamilton, Joe, Frank Reynolds and the entire Eyewitness News team,” a reference to the band and a nod to ABC news anchor Frank Reynolds during his tenure as co-anchor of World News Tonight. It remains a mystery why Joe Frank Carollo’s name was not treated the same as Dan Hamilton’s and Tommy Reynolds’.
Alexander Hamilton was on George Washington’s staff and was with him when the betrayal of Benedict Arnold was discovered at West Point, N.Y. in September 1780.
There are conflicting theories for the origin of brunch staple Eggs Benedict, but the earliest mention in the literature comes from Delmonico’s in lower Manhattan. It says on its menu that “Eggs Benedict was first created in our ovens in 1860.” One of its former chefs, Charles Ranhofer, also published the recipe for Eggs à la Benedick in 1894. The dish consists of two halves of an English muffin each of which is topped with Canadian bacon, ham or sometimes bacon, a poached egg, and hollandaise sauce.