John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and her sister were killed in the crash of his Piper Saratoga on 7/16/99, in poor visibility nighttime conditions off Martha’s Vineyard. They had made a late departure from Essex County Airport in New Jersey. The crash is one of the best-known and most-studied in aviation history.
The Essex-class carriers were mainstays of U.S. naval aviation during the Pacific campaigns of World War II. Although several were badly damaged, especially by kamikaze attack, none were sunk. Several were modernized and served for decades longer.
The UK equivalent of “Jersey Girl” is “Essex Girl”, from the “home county” near London that is notoriously suburbanized. An “Essex Man” is working class with upward aspirations. Essex Girl jokes are US blonde jokes with only minimal changes.
*Essex Boys *was a British crime film directed by Terry Winsor. It starred Sean Bean, Alex Kingston, Tom Wilkinson, Charlie Creed-Miles and Holly Davidson and was based loosely on the real-life murder of three Essex drug dealers.
In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Sean Bean’s character, Boromir, cuts his hand of the broken shards of the sword, Narsil. He says, “Still sharp,” a reference to a series of commercials done as Bean’s famous and long-running TV character, Richard Sharpe.
“The Look Sharp / Be Sharp March” by Mahlon Merrick was written specifically for Gillette razor commercials, and was played to introduce the “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” boxing events beginning in 1960.
(C’mon, I know you’re humming along right now, I can hear you)
William Gillette was one of America’s top actors and playwrights, best known for playing Sherlock Holmes and coming up with the phrase “Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow” in one of his scripts (written with Arthur Conan Doyle’s consent). He later retired and built a castle on the Connecticut river.
The Connecticut River separates New Hampshire and Vermont.
Vermont was admitted to the U.S. in 1791. It was the first state to be admitted after the original 13 colonies.
[del]Commercials for the Playtex Living Bra used the tagline “It lifts and separates”.[/del]
Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, is the only state capital without a McDonald’s.
Chester Alan Arthur, one of two U.S. Presidents born in Vermont* (Calvin Coolidge was the other), was the answer to a crucial riddle in the movie Die Hard With a Vengeance.
- A few contrarians insist, to this day, that Arthur was actually born in Canada.
Did he refuse to provide his Certificate of Live Birth?
In A Hard Day’s Night, when John Lennon was asked what he called his hairstyle, he answered “Arthur”.
(“How did you find America?” “We turned left at Greenland”)
Christopher Cross won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1981 for “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)”, from the Dudley Moore / Liza Minnelli film Arthur.
Christopher Cross’s song All Right was used as the backdrop for the highlights package aired as the closing of CBS’s coverage of the 1983 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which was won by Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State Wolfpack in an upset over Guy Lewis’s “Phi Slamma Jamma” Houston Cougars.
In Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, the title character, Lestat de Lioncourt (who had been a supporting character in Interview with the Vampire) is the youngest son of a penniless French nobleman and his wife Gabrielle who live in a remote village on the eve of the French Revolution. While a mortal, Lestat’s main achievement is when he kills a wolfpack that has been terrorizing the villagers for which he is rewarded with a cape lined with their fur.
George R.R. Martin’s acclaimed Fevre Dream is a vampire novel set along the Mississippi River before the Civil War. It has been described as the kind of book that Bram Stoker and Mark Twain might have written together.
Madelaine Allbright, who also served as Clinton’s Secretary of State, was ineligible to become President because she had been born in Czecos. . . Czecha. . . Czechosl. . . Europe.
Actually, that was George Harrison.
My Little Margie, a successful radio and TV comedy starring Gale Storm, portrayed the adventures of Margie Albright, who made her life difficult for her father Vern, an executive at the firm of Honeywell and Todd.
Film producer Michael Todd, best known as the second husband of Elizabeth Taylor, died in a plane crash in 1958. Nineteen years later his grave was opened and his body stolen by thieves who heard he was buried wearing a very expensive ring Taylor had given him. His remains were found years later after a confession from one of the thieves- they had been buried elsewhere in the cemetery in a shallow grave. The ring they were looking for had been returned to Taylor and was not buried on him; the only item of any value was a gold beltbuckle the thieves fenced for a few dollars.
Many in her family thought that Mary Todd married beneath her station when she took Abraham Lincoln as her husband; she had also been courted by Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s later rival for both the U.S. Senate and the Presidency, who was thought a much more suitable match. Years later, Lincoln joked that “One ‘d’ is sufficient for God, but the Todds need two.”