The 1865 poem by Walt Whitman, O Captain! My Captain!, was composed after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. It is an elegy poem written in Lincoln’s honor.
The poem:
O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
The 1969-74 ABC comedy drama show Room 222 was set in Walt Whitman High School in Los Angeles. The focus was on the classroom used by Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), an idealistic African-American school teacher. Other characters featured in the show were the school’s compassionate guidance counselor, Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas), who is also Pete’s girlfriend; the dryly humorous school principal, Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine); and the petite and enthusiastic Alice Johnson (Karen Valentine), a student teacher (and later full-time teacher) learning from Pete.
Lloyd Haynes served 12 years in the Marines before launching his acting career. While he is best known for his role on Room 222, he also appeared in several movies and several other TV series, including the second pilot episode of Star Trek. He was dropped from Star Trek because producer Gene Roddenberry preferred actress Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) over him. Haynes was co-starring in the soap opera General Hospital as Mayor Ken Morgan at the time of his death in 1987 at age 52.
Gene Roddenberry is thought to have cast Nichelle Nichols on “Star Trek” in part because they were dating (apparently Haynes wouldn’t do it). The decision worked out well anyway - several female African-American astronauts have been quite public in their gratitude to her for showing them that black girls could go into space too. Their number includes Dr. Mae Jemison, who played a cameo on ST:TNG as a transporter operator.
Former NASA astronaut and Star Trek: The Next Generation cameo celebrity Mae Jemison was featured last year in a Lego minifigure collection of notable women of NASA.
Legoland Florida Resort is on the site of the former Cypress Gardens, an “Old Florida” attraction famous in travelogues and postcards for its water skiing shows.
In the Loma Prieta earthquake of 17 Oct 1989, Oakland’s Cypress Structure double-decker interstate freeway collapsed. The second deck, with multiple interstate freeway lanes heading in one direction (northbound? southbound?), was directly above the first deck which had multiple lanes of interstate traffic heading in the other direction, and during the earthquake the second deck collapsed onto the first deck.
The earthquake struck at 5:04PM on a Tuesday afternoon, during the heart of the afternoon rush hour commute. Normally the Cypress Structure is packed bumper-to-bumper with stop-and-go, slow-and-go traffic. But thankfully due to World Series Game 3 that year, where the Oakland A’s faced the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park for that game, the Cypress Structure was mostly empty. Still, 42 people died at the Cypress Structure that day.
George H.W. Bush began his single term as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 1989. In 1948, as a Yale University baseball star, he once met famous New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth.
MLB’s Silver Slugger award is given each year to the best offensive player at each position in each League. The winner is determined by a vote of players and managers, who cannot vote for players on their own team. For the outfield, three players will receive the award in each league regardless of their specific outfield position. For example, three left fielders might win the award one year.
During his career, Barry Bonds won 12 Silver Slugger awards. That is the most for any one player. Catcher Mike Piazza and 3rd Baseman Alex Rodriguez are tied for second, with 10 apiece.
Alex Rodriguez won 7 Silver Slugger awards as a shortstop for the Seattle Mariners and Texas Rangers, and 3 awards as a third baseman for the New York Yankees. Wade Boggs has the most awards as a third baseman with 8, and Barry Larkin has the most as a shortstop with 9 awards.
Stanley Kubrick’s film “Barry Lyndon” was based on the 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. It starred Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson. It was not well received when it appeared in 1975, but appreciation for it has grown in the years since, and it is now widely regarded as one of the director’s best.
Barry Bonds is only second in Career WAR — Wins Above Replacement — second only to Babe Ruth.
Wins Above Replacement is a baseball statistic developed to sum up “a player’s total contributions to his team”. A player’s WAR value is claimed to be the number of additional wins his team has achieved above the number of expected team wins if that player were substituted with a replacement-level player.
Red Berenson is the coach of the University of Michigan ice hockey team, 58 years after first appearing as a player for the Wolverines. In between, he played 16 years in the National Hockey League, mostly with the St. Louis Blues, a team that he coached for three years before taking the Michigan job .
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis MO is 630 feet high, and 630 feet wide. Many people think its shape is a parabola, but it instead is a weighted catenary, a curve whose function is given by cosh(x), the hyperbolic cosine function.
The Gateway Arch is the most famous example of a weighted catenary. Simple suspension bridges use weighted catenaries.
The Gateway Arch is the world’s tallest arch, it is the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere, and it is Missouri’s tallest accessible building.
“Across the pale parabola of joy” is one of the memorably repeated lines in Leave it to Psmith, one of P.G. Wodehouse’s finest comic novels. The line is supposedly from “Songs of Squalor”, a collection of poetry by Ralston McTodd, one of the book’s characters. However, Wodehouse is parodying deliberately difficult lines by poets of the 1920s, such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
The Brown Derby Liquor Store was the first retail location for fishing lures and other fishing accessories sold by John L. Morris, Founder of the Springfield, MO-based Bass Pro Shop
The 1973 film Tom Sawyer, starring Johnny Whitaker (now 58) and Jodie Foster (now 55) includes the song Hannibal, MO(ZOUREE!). The film was shot in Missouri, at Arrow Rock and Lupus. Although the film’s story is set along the Mississippi River, it was shot along the Missouri River — Arrow Rock and Lupus lie on the Missouri River. They’re about 140 miles west of St. Louis. Hannibal MO is some 100 miles NW of STL, on the Mississippi River.
Mark Twain was not born in Hannibal. His family moved to Hannibal when young Samuel Clemens’ was five years old, and house where he was born, a historic monument, is the only building remaining in the now uninhabited Florida, Missouri. My father was born in Hannibal, and his family was already established in the town before the Clemens family moved there.