The first head of the FBI’s serial killers unit Robert Ressler grew up in the same Chicago neighborhood as serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Ressler was skeptical about this claim at first, but Gacy remembered delivering groceries to Ressler’s house, and described some very unusual flower pots Ressler’s mother had on their front porch. They also went bowling at the same lanes and attended Cub Scout meetings at the same church.
The 1974 Paper Lace song “The Night Chicago Died” (a follow-up to their “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero”) begins Daddy was a cop / On the east side of Chicago / Back the USA / Back in the bad old days. Chicago’s east side would be in Lake Michigan if it existed.
State Street is the divider between addresses in Chicago which include an East/West locator. It probably is still called “that Great Street” (from the lyrics to “Chicago, That Toddlin’ Town”) by some, but most are saddened by the loss of Marshall Field, Carson Pirie Scott, Sears, etc.
Chicago Midway International Airport is a commercial airport on the southwest side of Chicago, Illinois, located eight miles from the Loop. Established in 1927, Midway served as Chicago’s primary airport until the opening of O’Hare International Airport in 1955. It was originally named Chicago Municipal Airport, but in 1949 it was renamed to honor the 1942 World War II Battle of Midway.
The custom of naming the rides, exhibitions, and games area of a US county or state fair the Midway comes from the Midway Plaisance, the location of those features in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The airport name was not based on that at all, even if it echoed.
The phrase “Great White Way” in reference to Broadway, has been attributed to Shep Friedman, columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph in 1901, who lifted the term from the title of a book about the Arctic by Albert Paine. The headline “Found on the Great White Way” appeared in the February 3, 1902, edition of the New York Evening Telegram. It refers to the fact that the midtown theater section of Broadway was one of the first streets in the United States to be illuminated by electric lights.
The mechanical Great White Shark in the Steven Spielberg oceanic blockbuster Jaws was nicknamed “Bruce” by the production crew. It often malfunctioned, which led Spielberg to use it less on-screen than he’d planned.
An open-jaw ticket is an airline return ticket where the destination and/or the origin are not the same in both directions. There are three types: Destination open-jaw (A to B, C to A), Origin open-jaw (A to B, B to C), and Double open-jaw (A to B, C to D). Open-jaw tickets are priced as round-trip fares, which are almost always less expensive than purchasing two one-way flights between the destinations visited.
Art Linkletter was born Arthur Gordon Kelly in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Happy Man (1960), he revealed that he had no contact with his natural parents or his sister or two brothers since he was abandoned when only a few weeks old. He was adopted by Mary (née Metzler) and Fulton John Linkletter, an evangelical preacher.
Art Linkletter had one of the longest marriages of any famous person in America, at nearly 75 years. He married Lois Foerster on November 25, 1935, and they had five children. Linkletter died on May 26, 2010, at the age of 97, having outlived three of their five children. Lois Foerster Linkletter died at the age of 95 on October 11, 2011.
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a board game originally created in 1860 by Milton Bradley, as The Checkered Game of Life. The Game of Life was America’s first popular parlour game. The 1960’s version had Art Linkletter as the spokesman, included his likeness on the $100,000 bills (with his name displayed on the bills as “Arthur Linkletter Esq.”) and a rousing endorsement from Linkletter on the cover of the box. It was advertised as a “Milton Bradley 100th Anniversary Game” and as “A Full 3-D Action Game.”
Game of Thrones is the name of the HBO series based on George R.R. Martin’s bestselling series of books about a long dynastic struggle in a fictional quasi-medieval kingdom, but the book series itself is called A Song of Ice and Fire. Only the first book is called A Game of Thrones.
In his poem “Fire and Ice”, Robert Frost commented
… I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost wrote a poem expressly for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy at the United States Capitol on Jan. 20, 1961, but couldn’t read it in the glare of a recent snowfall, so he recited another poem of his, “The Gift Outright,” from memory.
Former University of Central Florida head football coach Scott Frost brought the team from winless in 2015, the year before his arrival, to undefeated and a (disputed) national championship in 2017. He is now back home in Nebraska as the head coach, where he quarterbacked the Huskers to the 1997 national title.
The UCF Knights’ most notable player in those seasons was Shaquem Griffin, who has only one hand, but was still the AAC’s Defensive Player of the Year and the 2018 Peach Bowl Defensive MVP. Griffin was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks, making him not only the first one-handed player to be drafted but one of the few to be teammates with a twin brother.
The University of Central Florida (UCF) is located in Orlando, Florida. With more than 64,000 students enrolled, UCF is the largest university by enrollment in Florida and one of the largest universities in the nation. This includes 55,773 undergraduates, 8,066 graduate students and 479 M.D. students.
The Spartan team colors of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio are blue and white.
The Connecticut Western Reserve was a portion of land claimed by the Colony of Connecticut and later by the state of Connecticut in what is now mostly the northeastern region of Ohio. The Reserve had been granted to the Colony under the terms of its charter by King Charles II. Connecticut retained ownership of the land, although its other territorial claims were ceded to the new United States in return for assumption of war debt, and sold it to settlers. A number of towns around Cleveland retain the names of Connecticut towns.
Charles II granted a charter of incorporation to the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay” in 1670. Although the Company no longer owns or governs the vast territory known as Rupert’s Land, named after Prince Rupert, the king’s cousin and first Governor, it had operated continuously for 348 years, now primarily as a department store. (I’m sitting outside a Bay store now with my coffee. )
Ernie Hudson has had a long and distinguished acting career, including as the prison warden in Oz, but is nevertheless best known as the black Ghostbuster, Winston Zeddemore.