The last car owned by Frances Bavier, the character actress best known for playing Aunt Bea on The Andy Griffith Show, was a 1964 Studebaker Lark that, according to one source, she last drove in 1983. Though she was born in NYC and raised in Brooklyn, she left the bulk of her $732,000+ estate to various people and agencies in her adopted hometown of Siler City, North Carolina where she spent the last few years of her life.
Frances Bavier’s first movie appearance was in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, as a boarder in the roominghouse where Klaatu stayed.
Klaatu was a Canadian Rock group of the 1970s. Because of their sound, and the fact that they initially released no information about their members, there were rumors that the band was secretly the Beatles, reunited and performing under a psudonym.
The Town of Southold on Long Island has more lighthouses than any town in the US: seven. The location of the Horton’s Point lighthouse on Long Island Sound was suggested by George Washington.
The first documented lighthouse in the world was built on the island of Pharos, which was named by the Greeks. The island is near the ancient city of Alexandria, which is now part of Egypt.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Another was the Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the sun God Helios which stood over 100 feet high, erected near the harbor of Rhodes in Greece around 280 BC.
Dusty Rhodes was a run-of-the-mill major leaguer with a lifetime .254 BA, but was the hero of the 1954 World Series where he hit .667 with an OBA of .714 with two game-winning home runs.
Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar. He studied literature at Oxford.
B-movie actor Rex Reason was the star of This Island Earth. His brother, B-movie actor Rhodes Reason, starred in the Japanese monster movie ***King Kong Escapes.
Rex Reason’s role in *This Island Earth *was scientist Cal Meacham. The bit o’ T&A was Faith Domergue, girlfriend of Howard Hughes. The film was the subject of the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” film.
Born and raised in Louisiana, Faith Ford appeared as a ditzy receptionist in 30something and a ditzy reporter in *Murphy Brown * before playing the (comparatively) level-headed sister of Kelly Ripa in Hope & Faith. Ford is also good friends with actress Jane Leeves.
The coat of arms and flag of Louisiana depict a pelican with its young. Pelicans are native to Louisiana, and are also a symbol of early Christianity, as the birds were mistakenly thought to feed their young with their own blood (“a pelican in its vulning,” in heraldic terms).
A French fleet led by Le Pélican won the Battle of Hudson’s Bay in 1697, defeating an English squadron and taking control of the fur-trading port of York Factory, near the current city of Churchill, Manitoba.
Winston Churchill nearly drowned as a young man while swimming alone in a Swiss lake, when the wind kept pushing his rowboat just out of reach. In later life, he was hit by a New York City taxi and had to be hospitalized.
Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a storm on the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy when his yacht, Don Juan, which was named in honor of his friend Lord Byron sank from under him. Byron had previously successfully swum the Hellespont (Dardanelles) and described the experience in his poem “Don Juan”.
Lord Byron was a hellraiser and a lively personality, to say the least, as well as a very skilled poet. A friend described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
Byron Dafoe, a British-Canadian hockey goalkeeper nicknamed “Lord Byron”, played for the Boston Bruins, Washington Capitals, Los Angeles Kings and Atlanta Thrashers between 1992 and 2004.
The original Washington Senators existed as a Major League Baseball team from 1901 to 1960. In 1961, the team moved to Minnesota and was rechristened the Minnesota Twins. In that same year, a brand new Washington Senators was formed, with no connection to the previous team. That team played in Washington until 1971, at which time it too moved, becoming the Texas Rangers the following year.
George Washington’s historic home, Mount Vernon, just down the Potomac from Washington, D.C., is owned and operated by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, founded before the Civil War as a Virginia nonprofit group. The MVLA bought the house, by that point rather run down, from Washington’s heirs, and has since refurbished it and maintained it without a penny of government support over the years. Mount Vernon remains one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country.
In 1953, Al Rosen of the Cleveland Indians led the American League in home runs and RBIs, but just barely missed out on the Triple Crown when Mickey Vernon edged him by one point in the race for the batting title.