In 1988, in “The Trade”, the Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky, quite possibly the best hockey player of all time, to Los Angeles for a dependable, but not stellar, player named Jimmy Carson.
Asked about the trade, Carson took it in good humour: “Twenty years from now I’m going to be the answer to a question in Trivial Pursuit: who did the Oilers pick up in exchange for Wayne Gretzky?”
In October 2001, a Callery pear tree was discovered at Ground Zero severely damaged, with snapped roots and burned and broken branches. The “Survivor Tree” was removed from the rubble and placed in the care of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. After its recovery and rehabilitation, the tree was returned to the World Trade Center Memorial in 2010. New, smooth limbs extend from the gnarled stumps and are laden with white blossoms every Spring.
The Oklahoma City National Memorial, which commemorates the 1995 domestic terrorism bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, also has a Survivor Tree, an American elm. Hundreds of seeds from the tree have since been planted throughout the world.
Dutch Elm Disease was first reported in the United States in 1928, with the beetles believed to have arrived in a shipment of logs from The Netherlands destined for use as veneer in the Ohio furniture industry. Of the estimated 77 million elms in North America in 1930, over 75% had been lost by 1989. The largest surviving urban forest of elm trees in North America is believed to be in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where close to 200,000 elms remain – at least double that of Amsterdam, the “Elm City of Europe”.
The only Dutch musical to make it to Broadway was Cyrano: The Musical. It had music by Ad van Dijk, an original book and lyrics (in Dutch) by Koen van Dijk. For the Broadway production, English lyrics were provided by Peter Reeves, with additional lyrics by Sheldon Harnick. Itra for 137 performances and received a Tony nomination for Best Musical.
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Broadway Theatre, more commonly known as the Tony Award, recognizes excellence in live Broadway theatre. The first awards ceremony was held on April 6, 1947, at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. The first prizes were a scroll, cigarette lighter and articles of jewelry such as 14-carat gold compacts and bracelets for the women, and money clips for the men.
The Times Square section of Broadway, which runs along the route of an old Indian trail, is nicknamed “The Great White Way” because of the well-lit theater marquees and billboards there.
Albany Post Road in NY state was a postal mail route connecting NY City and Albany. Parts of Albany Post Road still exist (gMap) and is part of US Route 9, which incorporates Broadway in Manhattan.
In Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws, about the depredations of a Great White Shark on a seaside community, the marine biologist has an affair with the police chief’s wife. In the Steven Spielberg summer blockbuster movie based on the book, the marine biologist (played by Richard Dreyfuss) does not.
In Cannery Row, John Steinbeck never explicitly stated if the marine biologist was having an affair. The character “Doc” was based on his real-life friend Ed Ricketts, proprietor of Pacific Biological Laboratories, which stood at 800 Cannery Row in Monterey, California from 1928 to 1948.
In the sequel, Sweet Thursday, the marine biologist is driven off into the sunset by Suzy, an alumna of the Palace Flophouse, presumably to a lifetime of happiness, but we don’t know for sure.
The British House of Commons and House of Lords meet in the ornate Palace of Westminster in London. It is just down the road from the government offices of Whitehall and 10 Downing Street, where the Prime Minister lives and works.
The Banqueting House on Whitehall is the only surviving part of the original Palace of Westminster. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649 Charles I stepped out of a first floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold which had been erected outside for the purpose of his execution.
Rene Descartes, the famous French philosopher and mathematician, had his portrait painted by the Dutch artist Franz Hals in 1649. Descartes soon afterwards moved to Sweden, where he was the tutor of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had invited Descartes to her court in to organize a new scientific academy (the Queen was only 23 at the time). He died there in 1650 of pneumonia. As a Catholic in a Protestant nation, he was interred in a graveyard used mainly for orphans.
Here’s the portrait: File:Frans Hals - Portret van René Descartes.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Charles I became heir to the throne of England at age 12 when his older brother Henry, Prince of Wales, age 18, died of typhoid. Henry was tall, strong, intelligent, energetic and more popular than his father James I; he overshadowed the younger, sickly, hesitant Charles whose peak height was only 5’4". Henry’s death was seen as a great tragedy for the nation and must have seemed even more tragic in 1649.
(I always thought that Charles was tall; his portraits must flatter him)
Capt. James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise once told his friend and chief medical officer, Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, that he had been a very serious student at Starfleet Academy. “Bones,” said he, “I was positively grim!”
Before landing the role of Dr. Leonard McCoy, DeForest Kelley was offered the choice to play Mr. Spock. Years later, he played both for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). He was the only cast member from the original Star Trek (1966) series never to write an autobiography.
In a TLC cable TV interview done in the late 1990s, DeForest Kelley jokingly said one of his biggest fears was that the words etched on his gravestone would be “He’s dead, Jim” — an obvious reference to STAR TREK’s Captain Jim Kirk. Reflecting this, when Kelley died in 1999, his obituary in Newsweek magazine began: “We’re not even going to try to resist: He’s dead, Jim.”
Lee de Forest’s most famous invention, in 1906, was the three-element “Audion” (triode) vacuum tube, the first practical amplification device. Although De Forest had only a limited understanding of how it worked, it was the foundation of the field of electronics, making possible radio broadcasting, long distance telephone lines, and talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.
The first ‘talking motion picture’ was The Jazz Singer, which was released in 1927. Prior to that, during the silent-film era that existed from the mid-1890s to the late 1920s, a pianist, theater organist, or even a small orchestra would often play music to accompany the films. The musicians would play either from sheet music or improvisation.
