Not in play: Cool trivia, gkster. I love that song by Arlo Guthrie.
In play: AMTRAK’s City of New Orleans runs over 900 miles through five states in about 19 hours, for an overall average speed of about 47 MPH. Along the way it passes from Chicago and through Kankakee IL, Champaign IL, Carbondale IL, Fulton KY, Dyersburg TN, Memphis TN, Greenwood MS, Yazoo City MS, Jackson MS, and Hammond LA (near Ponchatoula LA), on its way to New Orleans LA.
Country singer Patsy Cline (“Crazy”, “I Fall to Pieces”) died in the 1963 crash of a Piper Comanche which had taken off in a fog from Dyersburg, Tennessee. Like in the Buddy Holly crash, visibility was poor and the pilot was un(der)qualified to fly in instrument conditions. Cline’s pilot had learned to fly from the same instructor as country singer Jim Reeves, who crashed and died flying his own plane the following year.
I’ve been to the cornfield memorial of the Buddy Holly crash, after visiting the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake IA. The Surf Ballroom has a lot of memorabilia on the walls, it’s almost a museum in its own right. The phone booth inside the ballroom where Holly last spoke to his wife, Maria, has her autograph on it.
The path to the cornfield memorial site in Clear Lake is marked by this simple marker representing the eyeglasses Buddy Holly wore (from Wiki): Buddy Holly - Wikipedia
Clear Lake is a natural freshwater lake in Lake County in California, north of Napa County and San Francisco. It is the largest natural freshwater lake wholly within the state, with 68 square miles of surface area. Clear Lake was most recently ranked by Bassmaster Magazine in 2016 as the #3 best bass lake in the United States and the #1 best bass lake on the West Coast. However, locals strongly recommend against eating the fish from Clear Lake because of potentially toxic levels of mercury.
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting it every 87.96 days (as opposed to the Earth’s 365.25 days). Although it has been visited by two NASA automated probes, one of which crashed on it, there has never been a controlled landing on its surface.
A space probe is a robotic spacecraft that does not orbit the Earth, but is designed to explore further into outer space. Space probes have been launched by the space agencies of the USSR, the USA, Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, Japan, China and India. Voyager 1, one of the first probes, was launched in 1977 and is expected to be functional until about 2025.
The first US satellite to reach orbit, Explorer 1, was equipped with a Geiger counter that demonstrated the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts. It was launched from Cape Canaveral by a Jupiter-C rocket whose technology derived from the German V-2, also developed by Wernher von Braun and his team.
Cape Canaveral first appears on Spanish maps in the 1560s. The word Canaveral means a canefield. In 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson to change the name to Cape Kennedy in recognition of her late husband’s interest in the space program. However, due to strong lobbying from local residents, the name was changed back to Cape Canaveral in 1973.
CCAFS, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, is part of PAFB, Patrick Air Force Base. CCAFS is headquartered at PAFB and is an installation of the United States Air Force Space Command’s 45th Space Wing. It has a 3km long runway for military airlift aircraft delivering heavy and outsized payloads to Cape Canaveral. The CCAFS area has been used to test missiles since 1949 during President Harry S. Truman’s terms in office.
President Harry S. Truman ignored a Secret Service recommendation not to go to Arlington National Cemetery to take part in a ceremony there just hours after he survived an attack by Puerto Rican nationalists on Blair House, where he was staying while the White House was undergoing major interior restructuring.
In 1898, at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the United States claimed rule over the island of Puerto Rico, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Revolts of the 1950s were a series of coordinated armed protests for the independence of Puerto Rico. In addition to the attack on President Truman in 1950, another armed assault took place on March 1, 1954. In that assault, four Nationalists fired shots from the visitors’ gallery in the House of Representatives of the United States Capitol during a full floor debate, wounding five Congressmen, one seriously.
To this day, there are bullet holes visible in the ceiling of the House of Representatives chamber in the Capitol, from the March 1, 1954 shooting incident.
To this day, there are bullet marks dug into (and visible on) the concrete facade of Union Station in Kansas City MO from the 1933 “Kansas City Massacre” when gang members gunned down four lawmen. As a result, the FBI began arming all of its agents.
Bullet holes are still visible in the walls of the lobby of the Louisiana state capitol, from the assassination of Senator Huey P. Long. Several times, the bullet holes have been paneled over, and then re-exposed, accoding to the prevailing administration’s reverence for The Kingfish.
On 22 Sep 1975, Sara Jane Moore took a shot at President Gerald Ford as he was leaving the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco CA. She missed, sending the bullet into the wall above the doorway. A bullet fragment ricocheted and struck a cabdriver in the groin. It was the second assassination attempt against Ford in 17 days. The first occurred when Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme pointed a loaded gun at him as he walked across Capitol Park in Sacramento.
The bullet hole in the wall of the St. Francis is still there today.
Francis de Sales was a Bishop of Geneva and is honored as a saint in the Catholic Church. He died in 1622, and his body was buried in the church of the Monastery of the Visitation in Annecy, France. However, Sales’ heart was kept in Lyon, in response to the popular demand of the citizens of the city to retain his remains. During the French Revolution, however, it was taken to Venice, where it is venerated today.
It was during the French Revolution that the famous French tricolor flag first came into use. Before that, the flag of France was that of the Bourbon kings, a white field with gold fleur-de-lis.
Paris, Kentucky is the seat of Bourbon County. Whiskey was an early product of the area, and whiskey barrels from the area were marked Old Bourbon when they were shipped downriver from the local port on the Ohio River. As it was made mostly from corn (maize), it had a distinctive flavor, and the name bourbon came to be used to distinguish it from other regional whiskey styles, such as Monongahela, a product of western Pennsylvania, which may have generally been a rye whiskey.
The Federal Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits state that bourbon made for U.S. consumption must be, among other things, produced in the United States, made from a grain mixture that is at least 51% corn, and aged in new, charred oak containers.
(I must admit that I had no idea that there was such a thing as the Federal Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits!)