In 1844, John Tyler became the first President to marry while in office when he wed Julia Gardiner (1820-89), a wealthy New Yorker 30 years his junior. The couple went on to have seven children. With a total of 15 offspring from his two marriages, Tyler fathered more children than any other U.S. president in history.
Two of President John Tyler’s grandsons, Harrison Ruffin Tyler and Lyon Tyler Jr., are still alive today.
Parley Parker Pratt, known as “the Apostle Paul of Mormonism,” fathered 31 children by his 12 wives. Many thousands of his descendants are alive today, including Governors Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney.
Approximately 8 percent of the population of Asia, or one-half percent of the entire world, can trace their ancestry to Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. So can Marvel Comics supervillains the Mandarin and his son Temugin, both primarily opponents of Iron Man.
See Annie Xmas’ post 2 above yours (#36635)…/pedantic mode.
In play: In the Marvel comics, Tony Stark participated (and became Iron Man) during the Vietnam War; later this was retconned to the Gulf War. In the original Iron Man film, the character’s origin was retconned to Afghanistan, as Jon Favreau did not wish to make the film a period piece but instead give it a realistic contemporary look.
No, as I noted earlier, Kennedy is buried in Va. Wilson is buried in D.C. (the only late President who is).
In play:
By the end of French involvement in Vietnam, the U.S. government was paying more than 80% of the expenses of the French colonial government.
Shoot. My bad!
In play: According to Iron Man creator Stan Lee, Tony Stark was based on magnate Howard Hughes, who Lee described as “one of the most colorful men of our time. He was an inventor, an adventurer, a multi-billionaire, a ladies’ man and finally a nutcase.” For a significant portion of his life, Hughes displayed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and once lived in a darkened screening room for four months, never leaving its confines and relieving himself in empty containers and bottles. Fortunately, that sort of thing has never made it into the ‘Iron Man’ movies.
The work of African American poet Langston Hughes, especially his race consciousness and cultural nationalism, would influence many black writers around the world, including Jacques Roumain of Haiti, Nicolás Guillén of Cuba, Léopold Sédar Senghor (first President of Senegal) and Aimé Césaire of Martinique.
In 1924, Langston Hughes, working as a crewman on the freighter McKeesport, after a row over chicken with the freighter’s chef,left the ship and eventually settled in Paris, France for about six months. He did some of his works there, but was not charmed by the French (to be fair, if was only 5 years since the end of WWI) as he wrote to a friend back in the USA:
Harlem, the neighborhood in Manhattan, NYC, NY, is named after Haarlem in the Netherlands. Naturalist John James Audubon, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, Scott Joplin, Norman Rockwell, publisher Bennett Cerf, composers George and Ira Gershwin, Harry Houdini, Burt Lancaster, Al Pacino, and Louis Armstrong come from Harlem.
In the 1950s, a radio disc jockey, when playing a piece written by the Gershwin brothers, attributed the song to “George Gershwin and his lovely wife, Ira.” (George, aside from never marrying his brother, was in fact a bachelor his entire life.)
In 2009, singer and pianist Mark Nadler performed a cabaret show about Ira Gershwin. Its title was “…His Lovely Wife, Ira.”
In the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, the league commissioner, Ira Lowenstein (played by David Strathairn), convinces one of the team owners to keep the league operating for more than one season. In real life the AAGPBL, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, played 12 seasons, from 1943-1954, and had up to 15 teams. Those teams are:
Kenosha Comets (1943–1951)
Racine Belles (1943–1950)
Rockford Peaches (1943–1954)
South Bend Blue Sox (1943–1954)
Milwaukee Chicks (1944)
Minneapolis Millerettes (1944)
Fort Wayne Daisies (1945–1954)
Grand Rapids Chicks (1945–1954)
Muskegon Lassies (1946–1949)
Kalamazoo Lassies (1950–1954)
Peoria Redwings (1946–1951)
Chicago Colleens (1948)
Springfield Sallies (1948)
Battle Creek Belles (1951–1952)
Muskegon Belles (1953)
The first league champions, in 1943, were the Racine Belles, as was depicted in the movie.
The Rockford Peaches and the South Bend Blue Sox were the only two teams to play in every AAGPBL season.
The teams currently in the National Women’s Hockey League are the Buffalo Beauts, Boston Pride, Connecticut Whale, and Metropolitan Riveters. The league’s championship trophy is the Isobel Cup, named after Lady Isobel Gathorne-Hardy, the daughter of Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, donor of the Stanley Cup.
The future King Frederick the Great of Prussia tried to run away from home with his tutor when he was a boy to escape his violent, overbearing (and possibly mentally ill) father, King Frederick William I. After their capture, the King had the tutor beheaded in Frederick’s presence; Frederick himself was court-martialed, imprisoned and later briefly exiled, although in later years he and his father reconciled to some degree.
The Royal Canadian Air Force’s 431 Air Demonstration Squadron, aka the Snowbirds, is the only unit still flying the Canadian-built CL-41 Tutor, formerly the RCAF’s standard training aircraft. The unit, which was formed in 1967 as the Golden Centenaires, is based at CFB Moosejaw in Saskatchewan.
Moosejaw.com is a retailer specializing in outdoor recreation apparel and gear for snowboarding, rock climbing, hiking, and camping. The company was founded in 1992 by Robert Wolfe and David Jaffe, two longtime friends who chose to sell camping equipment instead of becoming wilderness guides. On February 15th, 2017, retail giant Walmart acquired Moosejaw for $51 million in cash.
A loose jaw in Moosejaw—
Residents of Moose Jaw are termed “Moosejavians”.
Maxilla and Mandible Ltd. was a store on Columbus Ave. in NYC, a few blocks from the American Museum of Natural History. The store, run by a former museum employee, was open from 1983 to 2011; its name means upper and lower jaw bone. It carried many kinds of bones, from fossils, dinosaur teeth that the store kept in a special case, to authentic New York rat skulls. On the store’s website, several large fossil skeletons are available for sale.
Ninth Avenue in Manhattan becomes Columbus Avenue between West 59th and 110th Streets. At West 110th Street the name changes again, to Morningside Drive, to West 112nd Street.