Eldred Street in Los Angeles is the steepest drivable street in California. It is steeper than any street in San Francisco.
gMap: Google Maps
gImages: https://goo.gl/Hjkb7o
ETA: Eldred St. in Los Angeles has a grade of 33%. West 28th St. in San Pedro has a very short stretch, about 50 feet, that is 33.3% – so short that most do not consider it to qualify as ‘steepest drivable street’. Baxter and Fargo streets, near Dodger Stadium, sections with grades in the 32% range.
Cal Eldred was a major league pitcher for fourteen seasons. He was a first-round draft choice of the Milwaukee Brewers, for whom he finished fourth in AL Rookie of the Year voting in 1992 (losing to his teammate, shortstop Pat Listach). Eldred also pitched for the Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Cardinals, and is now the pitching coach of the Kansas City Royals.
John Calvin Coolidge (also known by his nickname “Silent Cal”) was the only U.S. President to be born on the 4th of July (in 1872). With the issue of United States Sesquicentennial coinage in 1926, he also became the only living American President to feature on U.S. coinage.
Eldred Gregory Pack dropped his first name when he dropped out of University of California-Berkeley (just one course short) and headed to New York City to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse with the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner.
He later played President Abraham Lincoln in the TV series The Blue and the Grey.
The song “A Bushel and a Peck” from the Broadway show was left out of the film version of Guys and Dolls because the song had become so familiar that the producers thought it better to replace it with something new.
Also, Eldrad must live!
(I very nearly used a Doctor Who / Eldrad reference for my earlier post, instead of Cal Eldred. 
)
Frank Sinatra resented the casting of non-singer Marlon Brando as the romantic lead, Sky Masterson, in the film version of Guys and Dolls, which led to Sinatra’s petulance during the production, and outright hostility between Brando and Sinatra.
Marlin Perkins (1905–1986), was a zoologist and TV personality. He hosted the television program Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom from 1963 to 1985. He remained with the Saint Louis Zoo as Director Emeritus until his death on June 14, 1986, when he died from lymphatic cancer in St. Louis.
In 1960, Perkins and Sir Edmund Hillary went on a Himalayan expedition to search for the legendary Yeti.
Many people who watched Wild Kingdom recall Marlin Perkins being bitten by a venomous snake, but it actually never happened on air. Instead, while hosting his previous program Zoo Parade, a venomous snake bit Perkins on the hand while crews were preparing to film. He was rushed to the hospital and required three weeks to recuperate.
Despite being bitten off camera on a different show, Perkins wrote in his autobiography that people approached him and swore they remembered watching it on Wild Kingdom.
Jim Fowler, age 86 and born in 1932, was Marlin Perkins’s sidekick on Wild Kingdom. In 2003, he received the Lindbergh Award for his 40 years of dedication to wildlife preservation and education.
In medicine, Fowler’s position is a standard patient position in which the patient is seated in a semi-upright sitting position (45-60 degrees) and may have knees either bent or straight. It is named for George Ryerson Fowler, who saw it as a way to decrease the mortality of peritonitis.
About 20% of people with cirrhosis who are hospitalized have peritonitis.
Harry Houdini died of peritonitis, secondary to a ruptured appendix, at 1:26 p.m. on October 31, 1926,
After his successful Broadway run, magician Doug Henning approached NBC with the idea of producing a television special. It was not until Henning suggested that he would reproduce live Harry Houdini’s famous and dangerous water-torture escape—for the first time since Houdini performed it himself—that the NBC executives signed him.
Henning spent the next eight months reworking his stage act for TV and practicing the water-torture escape act. More than 50 million viewers tuned in for the December 1975 broadcast of Doug Henning’s World of Magic.
In 1926, the year US Route 66 was commissioned, Marilyn Monroe and Andy Griffith were born, Al Capone was at the height of his ‘career’, and Annie Oakley and Harry Houdini died. Also in 1926, the Kelly Blue Book and the Children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh were first published, television was first demonstrated to the public, high school students first sat for the dreaded SAT, and it was also the year that Ford announced a 40 hour work week. Today, you can stay in the Marilyn Monroe Room at the El Trovatore Motel, built in 1939, in Kingman AZ — right along US Route 66.
ETA: more trivia — When Route 66 was commissioned, 80% of all registered cars worldwide were in the United Sates.
Queen Elizabeth II was born on April 21, 1926 in Mayfair, London. British actress Claire Foy, who played her early in her reign on Netflix’s smash-hit TV series The Crown, won an Emmy last night for her portrayal.
From Wikipedia’s 1926 in the United States, the year US Route 66 was commissioned:
[ul]
[li]March 16 – Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fuel rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts.[/li][li]July 26 – The National Bar Association incorporates in the United States.[/li][li]August 18 – A weather map is televised for the first time, sent from NAA Arlington to the Weather Bureau Office in Washington, D.C.[/li][li]November 11 – The plan for a United States Numbered Highway System is approved by the American Association of State Highway Officials, so establishing U.S. Route 66.[/li][li]November 27 – In Williamsburg, Virginia, the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg begins.[/li][li]Prohibition is in effect (1919–1933)[/li][/ul]
The Goddard Space Flight Center is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately 6.5 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. It is NASA’s first, and oldest, space center.
Robert Goddard was born in Worcester MA (“WOO-stuh”) in 1882, and he died in 1945 — on 10 August 1945, the day after Major Charles Sweeney, piloting Bockscar, dropped the plutonium bomb named Fat Man, an implosion-type nuclear weapon with a solid plutonium core, on Nagasaki.
In 1959, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center was named in his honor.
American rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard was featured in the opening credits of the TV series Star Trek: Enterprise.
De Laval’s Nozzle optimized a rocket’s heat energy transforming into kinetic energy. In Robert Goddard’s early work he determined that for a rocket, which is essentially a heat engine (converting heat into mechanical energy), only about 2% of its available energy contributed to the speed of a jet. Gustaf De Laval (1845-1913), a Swedish engineer of French descent, found that the most efficient conversion depended on the shape of the nozzle. Using a De Laval nozzle, Goddard obtained efficiencies of up to 63%.