Gerald, Missouri lies along US-50 some 70 miles west of St. Louis. Its old schoolhouse, built in 1910, is on the National Register of Historic Places. From 1910 when it was built to replace a one-room schoolhouse, to 1951 when another school was built to replace it, it was the only school in the area to offer eight grades plus two years of high school. It is the only example of Georgian Revival influenced architecture in Gerald MO.
Gerald R. Ford, Republican of Michigan, was the only person to have been Vice President of the United States without being elected to the post; the only President to take the office without being elected to it, either; and the only President to have risen to the rank of Eagle Scout in his youth.
NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, was founded by President Woodrow Wilson in 1915. Its Ames Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in Sunnyvale, California, was built in 1955. Its transonic test section spanned 11 by 11 feet, while the two supersonic sections were smaller: nine by seven feet and eight by seven feet. Over the years it has tested the FB-111 Aardvark, the B-1 Lancer, and the Space Shuttle.
Newfoundland became Canada’s tenth province on April 1, 1949.
Unlike James Polk and William McKinley, both of whom carefully studied the art of shaking hands, Woodrow Wilson’s dead fish handshake was described in Paul Boller’s Book of Presidential Anecdotes as “a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper.”
ETA: This may or may not refer to a Newfoundland mackerel; these fish are plentiful in the St. Lawrence gulf.
In 1896 a gold prospector renamed Denali to Mount McKinley after U.S. President William McKinley.
In 2015 President Obama approved a federal change of its name back to Denali.
The discovery of gold on the Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Yukon River, in 1896 triggered the Yukon gold rush of 1896-1899. The Canadian government created a new federal territory, Yukon, to ensure that Canadian law and sovereignty were respected.
Not in play:
[cough] Rockie! [cough]
Good catch. Coming from Upstate New York, close to Albany, I should have caught that too.
The Bonanza TV show ran from 1959 to 1973. Filming locations included Bourne’s Meadow at Lake Tahoe CA, Gooseneck Meadow in Martis Valley at Lake Tahoe CA, and the Superstition Mountains and Superstition Wilderness near Phoenix AZ. Filming locations of the opening sequence included Nevada Beach at Lake Tahoe NV and at Round Hill Pines Beach at Lake Tahoe CA.
NM, wrong thread.
Phoenix, Arizona was named for its symbolism as representing the revival of the ruined Hohokam civilization, whose construction of irrigation canals made the arid desert Salt and Gila River Valleys arable. Paths of these canals would later become used for the modern Arizona Canal, Central Arizona Project Canal, and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct. The Hohokam also carried out extensive trade with the nearby Anasazi, Mogollon and Sinagua, as well as with the more distant Mesoamerican civilizations.
In an effort to increase water flow into the Imperial Valley area for farming, irrigation canals were dug from the Colorado River. In 1905 the river flow overwhelmed one canal, and for about two years, while engineers tried to correct the mistake, the entire volume of the Colorado River became diverted and flowed uncontrollably into the lowlands. The small town of Salton CA was flooded, as well as Torres-Martinez Native American lands and a Southern Pacific Railroad siding.
The Salton Sea, created by an engineering mistake in 1905, is now the largest lake in California, and it is home to the most diverse number of birds anywhere in the continental US besides Big Bend in Texas.
Continuing intermittent flooding of the Imperial Valley from the Colorado River led to the idea of the need for a dam on the Colorado River for flood control. Hoover Dam, dedicated in 1935, became the main solution.
The Salton Sea and surrounding basin sits over the San Andreas Fault, San Jacinto Fault, Imperial Fault Zone, and a “stepover fault” shear zone system. Geologists have determined that previous flooding episodes from the Colorado River have been linked to earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault.
:smack: Of course. Thanks.
In play:
There have been two movies called The Salton Sea, released in 2002 and 2016. They are not (as far as I can see) related.
Slab City, California, on the east side of the Salton Sea, lies within The California Badlands which are a mountain range also known as The San Timoteo Badlands. Slab City took its name from concrete slabs that remained from the abandoned World War II Marine Corps barracks of Camp Dunlap.
British actor David Niven was a guest of President John F. Kennedy at Camp David, the Presidential retreat near Thurmont, Maryland. They went skeet shooting.
The 1978 Nobel Peace Prize was shared by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for “the Camp David Agreement, which brought about a negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel”.
Camp David is officially called Naval Support Facility Thurmont, as it is technically a military facility. It was originally called Hi-Catoctin, for the mountains in which it is situated, and was built by the WPA for federal agents and their families. FDR converted it to a presidential retreat and called it Shangri-La. Eisenhower changed the name to Camp David in honor of his father and his son.
Camp David staffing is primarily provided by the US Navy and Marine Corps. The name of Thurmont, Maryland is derived from thur, the German word for entrance to a mountain, and mons, the Latin word for mountain.
Olympus Mons is a very large shield volcano on the planet Mars. It has a height of nearly 22 km, about two and a half times as tall as Mount Everest’s height above sea level (it is considerably broader, as well). It is the tallest mountain in the Solar System.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/France_OlympusMons_Size.svg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Olympus_Mons_Side_View.svg
The first launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, consisting essentially of 3 Falcon 9 rockets fastened together, is tentatively expected next month. It will carry Elon Musk’s cherry-red Tesla coupe, sound system playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, into a heliocentric orbit reaching the distance of the orbit of Mars. Although the Red Planet will be elsewhere, the flight will confirm the system’s ability to get there with a significant payload, one day including a manned Red Dragon spacecraft.
Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (great name!) is an infrastructure and tunnel construction company founded in late 2016. It is intended to explore means of relieving urban motor vehicle traffic by tunneling.