The flag patch on the right shoulder of a Boy Scouts of America uniform is not oriented the same way as on a U.S. Army uniform (and always looks backward to me).
The Theodore Roosevelt Council, in Nassau County, Long Island, NY, is a local council of the Boy Scouts of America. It was established under the name Nassau County Council in 1917 and is one of the nation’s oldest. Theodore Roosevelt was a founding member of BSA, a troop committeeman of Troop 39 in Oyster Bay, New York (where his home, Sagamore Hill, was located), and first council commissioner of Nassau County Council.
The council wanted to change its name to Theodore Roosevelt after his death, especially since many councils are named for historic figures connected with their geographic areas, but it was taken by another council in Arizona. That council was merged into the Grand Canyon Council in 1993, freeing the name, and the Nassau County Council was finally able to take on the Theodore Roosevelt name in September 1997.
The Roosevelt River (Rio Roosevelt, sometimes Rio Teodoro) is a Brazilian river, a tributary of the Aripuanã River about 760 kilometres (470 mi) in length. Formerly called Rio da Dúvida (“River of Doubt”), the river is named after Theodore Roosevelt, who traveled into the central region of Brazil during the Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition of 1913–14. The expedition, led by Roosevelt and Cândido Rondon, Brazil’s most famous explorer and the river’s discoverer, sought to determine where and by which course the river flowed into the Amazon. Roosevelt and his son Kermit undertook the adventure after the former U.S. president’s failed attempt to regain the office as the “Bull Moose” candidate in 1912. The Roosevelt-Rondon expedition was the first non Amazonian-native party to travel and record what Rondon had named the “Rio da Dúvida”, then one of the most unexplored and intimidating tributaries of the Amazon. Sections of the river have impassable rapids and waterfalls, which hindered the expedition. Roosevelt later wrote Through the Brazilian Wilderness recounting the adventure.
Note: There was a recent PBS show in the USA on that trip: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/into-the-amazon/
in play: ***Swallows and Amazons *** is a series of twelve children’s books by English author Arthur Ransome, named after the title of the first book in the series and set between the two World Wars. The twelve books involve adventures by groups of children, almost all during the school holidays and mostly in England, but including four sailing trips that go outside England.
[Not in play]
Roosevelt’s own account of his Brazilian trip is at this link, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Through the Brazilian Wilderness, by Theodore Roosevelt, but a really exciting retelling is Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt Amazon.com
There’s a good audiobook of it as well.
The interwar period of the 20th century is the period between the end of the First World War in November 1918 and the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939.
Despite the relatively short period of time, this period represented an era of significant changes worldwide, including the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the rise of both Communism and Fascism, and increasing challenges to European Imperialism.
P.G. Wodehouse set his Jeeves and Wooster stories in the interwar period between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, but was always careful not to specify in what year the good-natured but dim British man-about-town and his trusty, unflappable, all-knowing valet were having their offbeat adventures.
P.G. Wodehouse rewrote some of the lyrics of Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” for the British production of Anything Goes.
(I’m reading River of Doubt on my Kindle right now)
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Worcester MA (pronounced wooster, or wusster) is a private research university founded in 1865. Robert Goddard (Class of 1908) is its best-known alumnus and is widely regarded as the Father of Modern Rocketry. He is credited with creating and building the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. Goddard successfully launched his model on March 16, 1926, and has been called the man who ushered in the Space Age.
Worcester is also where Worcester Academy is located, and Cole Porter (Class of 1909) is one of its best-known alumni, as is Mark Fidrych (1974), the former Detroit Tigers pitcher.
Forbidden Broadway creator Gerard Alessandrini went with his parents to see a an out of town tryout of the revival of Grand Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a minimal production, with a bare set of chairs. The line “Not much happens at the Grand Hotel. People move in. People move out” was followed by Mrs. Alessandrini’s ad lib “People move chairs.”
Of course, that made it into Forbidden Broadway’s parody “Grim Hotel.”
In 1971 the Boston Patriots moved from Boston to Foxborough, about 30 miles to the SW. they also wanted to change their name to the Bay State Patriots, but the NFL rejected that name. Perhaps it was in part because they could be called the BS Patriots. They changed to the New England Patriots.
The New England Patriots just lost their fifth Super Bowl to tie the Denver Broncos with the most losses by any team. John Elway lost 4 of those games, tied for the most by any quarterback (with Minnesota Vikings’ Fran Tarkenton and Buffalo Bills’ Jim Kellyj. Craig Morton is the other Broncos QB to have lost a Super Bowl.
BTW, “The Bay State Patriot” is the name of the newsletter from the Massachussets Department of Veterans’ Services. (Bay State Patriot Massachusetts Department of Veterans’ Services: http://www.mass.gov/veterans/docs/vol1-issue2.rtf.)
Tom Brady, New England Patriots quarterback, did not win his sixth Super Bowl ring. And that’s no BS :D.
The Boston Patriots were the 8th franchise awarded by the new American Football League, in November of 1959. The other original franchises were teams in Buffalo, New York, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. However, after the league held its first draft on November 22, 1959, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul team accepted an offer from the NFL and became the Minnesota Vikings. The franchise was then awarded to Oakland.
Oakland is the place Gertrude Stein referred to when she wrote “There is no there there”. She did not mean that in a patronizing way, but was observing that all the old landmarks she remembered from her childhood in Oakland were gone.
Oakland CA’s Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny PA. Her mother died when she was 14, and her father when she was 17. She attended Radcliffe College where her instructor helped her explore “stream of consciousness” writing. That instructor, William James, declared Stein as his “most brilliant woman student” and encouraged her to enroll in medical school. She applied to and was accepted at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, but she eventually got bored there. Stein became a novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. In Paris she hosted a salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse, would meet.
Allegheny County was Pennsylvania’s first county to bear a Native American name. The word “Allegheny” is of Lenape origin, with an uncertain meaning. It is usually said to mean “fine river”, after the Allegheny River, but sometimes is said to refer to an ancient mythical tribe called “Allegewi” that lived along the river before being destroyed by the Lenape
The Allegheny Mountains run for about 400 miles from north-central Pennsylvania, through western Maryland and eastern West Virginia, to southwestern Virginia.
The Allegheny River is a principal tributary of the Ohio River. It joins with the Monongahela River to form the Ohio River at the “Point” of Point State Park in Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania -x the “Three Rivers” of Pittsburgh‘s Three Rivers Stadium. The Allegheny River is, by volume, the main headstream of the Ohio River. The Allegheny River runs about 325 miles from NW Pennsylvania, into SW New York state, to its terminus in western Pennsylvania.
In Asimov’s Foundation series, the First Foundation is located on the planet Terminus, at the edge of the Galaxy, while the mysterious Second Foundation is located “at Star’s end.”
Atlanta, Georgia, which was founded as a railroad hub but is now much more significant as an airline hub, was originally named Terminus, then Thrasherville and Marthasville. The final name was shortened from a railroad engineer’s suggestion of Atlantica-Pacifica.
The CSS Atlanta was a Confederate ironclad warship which ran aground and surrendered after just four shots hit her, fired by the Federal monitor USS Weehawken, in Wassaw Sound near Savannah, Ga. on June 17, 1863. Recommissioned as the USS Atlanta, she served in the United States Navy through the end of the Civil War.
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The longest running commercial Coca-Cola soda fountain anywhere was Atlanta’s Fleeman’s Pharmacy, which first opened its doors in 1914. Coca Cola headquarters are also in Atlanta, the city where Coca Cola was purportedly invented.