I haven’t read the book in a while, but I thought I remembered Major Major’s promotion as having been some Personnel weenie’s idea of a joke.
Both “Gomer Pyle: USMC” and “Hogan’s Heroes” had characters named Sergeant Carter. Frank Sutton played the former character, Larry Hovis the latter.
Frank Jackson, mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, had a black father and an Italian mother. He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. A Democrat, he is now serving his second term.
Franco Harris of the Pittsburgh Steelers, also the son of a black father and an Italian mother (he was a GI, she was a war bride) was both the first African-American and the first Italian-American to be Super Bowl MVP. His best-known play was, however, the “Immaculate Reception” in a 1972 playoff game against Oakland.
According to Wikipedia:
My apologies for using “computer error” as shorthand for “caused by an IBM machine.”
(Playing off both the last post and an earlier one!):
Major Harris, who scored a Top 10 hit with “Love Won’t Let Me Wait” in 1975, was previously a member of The Delfonics (“Didn’t I Blow Your Mind”) and The Jarmels (“A Little Bit of Soap”).
Major Harris (no relation) quarterbacked the West Virginia University Mountaineers to the 1988 NCAA championship football game, in the Fiesta Bowl. Their defeat by Notre Dame, after Harris’ early injury, was their first loss of the season.
Gotham Bowl, an attempt to have a yearly college bowl game in New York City from 1961-62, was a dismal failure: the first year, the bowl committee couldn’t find an opponent for Oregon State. The next year, 1961, Baylor defeated Utah State in front of only 15,000 fans in the Polo Grounds. They nearly couldn’t find an opponent for Miami until 11 days before the game, when Nebraska accepted. A 14-degree day kept paid attendance down to only 6000 (though it did have a national TV audience). Nebraska won, 36-34. The promoters gave up at that point.
There were four installments of the Garden State Bowl between 1978 and 1981 at the Meadowlands in East Rutherford. Failing to catch on, it was replaced by the season-opening “Kickoff Classic”, which usually matched two highly ranked teams and would end up virtually spoiling the national title hopes of one of the teams. This ran through 2002.
If that Wiki entry is accurate, my apologies. That’s not how I remember the book, and I’m frankly amazed that computers were being used for officer assignments during WW2.
In the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, 2002 was one of the few years in U.S. political history that an incumbent president’s party made gains in Congressional off-year elections.
(I remember the mention of the IBM machine error when I read the book; it was clearly an anachronism, perhaps deliberate.)
The most recent incumbent president to be denied his party’s nomination (as opposed to choosing not to run or not finishing his term) was Chester A. Arthur.
Robert Todd Lincoln, son of “Honest Abe”, was Chester Arthur’s Secretary of War.
Philadelphian Todd Rundgren’s first group of any renown was Nazz, with whom he recorded the original version of “Hello It’s Me.”
Meanwhile in Phoenix, Arizona, Vincent Furnier formed a band in 1968 which he named The Nazz. Upon learning of Rundgren’s group, Furnier changed his outfit’s name to Alice Cooper, and ultimately adopted the group’s name as his own.
Nazz took its name for a comedy monologue by Lord Buckley called “The Nazz,” in which the Nazz was a hip name for Jesus.
Singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley (Grace) was the son of singer-songwriter Tim Buckley. However, he only met his father once, at the age of eight.
Both artists died tragically young…Tim Buckley at 28, Jeff Buckley at 31.
William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal loathed each other for many years, and once almost got into a fistfight while being interviewed together on TV in New York City.
Gore Vidal achieved some notoriety as the telephone company customer regularly called by snorting Ernestine the Operator, played by Lily Tomlin, on “Laugh-In”. The joke was that she always pronounced it “Gor-ee Vee-dal”.
Ernestine the Operator would often boast, “Here at the Phone Company we serve everyone from the President of the United States to the sssssssssssscum of the earth.”
The Phone Company (TPC) was ultimately revealed as the villain, run by robot executives trying to make the entire population love them by implanting electronic devices in their heads, in the 1967 film The President’s Analyst, starring James Coburn and Godfrey Cambridge.
Godfrey Cambridge played the male lead as the son of Molly Picon in the Broadway adaptation of Dan Greenberg’s How to be a Jewish Mother. Despite (or perhaps because of) the color-blind casting, the play only lasted 12 performances.
Godfrey Cambridge died while on the set of the made-for-TV film Victory at Entebbe, in which he was slated to portray Idi Amin.