DeForest Kelley claimed in interviews to have seen a UFO- a hovering round ‘saucer’- when he was stationed on Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, AL at the end of World War II.
“Foo fighters” were small metallic spheres and colorful balls of light repeatedly spotted, and on occasion photographed, by military air crews around the world during World War II.
Foo Fighters is the name of a “post grunge” rock band from Seattle fronted by Nirvana’s drummer Dave Grohl.
Dave is a political comedy about a lookalike for the President of the United States who is stuck in the role when the President is hospitalized. Kevin Kline played both the lookalike and the President; Sigourney Weaver played the First Lady and Ben Kingsley played the Vice President.
(Wasn’t the President actually dead?)
Ben Kingsley was knighted for his eminent acting career, most notably his Oscar-winning title role in Gandhi.
(He was in a coma, and eventually died, though IIRC, he died after the ruse had been revealed.)
The 1968 Oscar award for Best Actress was a tie, going to both Katharine Hepburn (for The Lion in Winter) and Barbra Streisand (for Funny Girl).
(No, the ruse wasn’t revealed to the general public. Dave faked his own death after the real president died and the VP took over.)
Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau did not get along at all playing opposite each other in Hello, Dolly. Matthau, exasperated with Streisand, once said to her, “I have more talent in my smallest fart than you have in your entire body.”
Nicky Arnstein, played by Omar Sharif in Funny Girl opposite Barbra Streisand, had actually served a prison term before marrying Fanny Brice in 1918. He was divorced from his first wife earlier that year. Brice had also been married before, but only for a few days before filing for divorce, and not to Walter Matthau.
Omar Sharif’s real name is Michael Shalhoub, though is not related to actor Tony Shalhoub. He is also an expert contract bridge player, and for many years co-wrote a syndicated bridge column.
The Delaware Memorial Bridge connects two pieces of Interstate 95 (the NJ Turnpike in NJ, I95 in Delaware), but is not part of I95 itself. It is a toll bridge, charging $3 southbound, with no toll northbound.
The most prominent sight on I-295 southbound, heading toward the DelMem, is the USS Rancocas, the US Navy’s only landlocked commissioned vessel. It resembles the full-sized bridge of a cruiser mounted atop a warehouse, and is used for testing Aegis electronic equipment by the adjacent Lockheed-Martin facility.
Allan and Malcolm Loughead founded the Alco Hydro-Aeroplane Company in 1912, and subsequently changed the name to Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company. After this venture failed, Allan formed the Lockheed Aircraft Company, changing the spelling (but not pronunciation) of the family name.
The American Locomotive Company – often referred to as “Alco,” was, with General Electric, the two major manufacturing companies headquartered in Schenectady, NY in the first half of the 20th century, giving the city the nickname, “The City that Lights and Hauls the World.”
The Tower of Light and the City of Light were the great attractions at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, both designed to show the beauty ofelectric light. Today the exhibition is best remembered as the place where William McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, an event that is musicalized in the number “The Ballad of Czolgosz” in the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins.
Harry Warren is often called America’s most overlooked popular composer; when a musical of his hits made Broadway, his name wasn’t even on the posters. Yet he wrote the music for such classics as “42nd Street,” “Lullabye of Broadway,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (the first record to sell a million copies), “That’s Amore,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “September in the Rain,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Dames,” “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” and “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
German rock artist Udo Lindenberg added new lyrics to the music of *Chattanooga Choo Choo * in 1983. The revised song, Sonderzug nach Pankow, was a personal favorite of East German chairman Erich Honecker, although officially banned in that country.
In one scene in the 1950 film The Big Lift, set in Berlin during the Airlift, US serviceman Montgomery Clift, who is visiting a nightclub in the wrong zone while in civilian clothing, escapes the notice of the MP’s by joining the quartet singing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in German, adding train sound effects.
The Glenn Miller song, the first to be awarded a Gold Record, was previously used in Sun Valley Serenade, starring Sonja Henie (in her pre-Nazi-sympathizer days).
John Glenn flew as a Marine pilot in both World War II and Korea. In 1962, he became the first American to orbit the Earth. After his astronaut career, he entered politics and was elected a U.S. senator from Ohio. He returned to orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998, and is now retired.
Baseball legend Ted Williams also flew as a Marine pilot in both wars, as a stateside Corsair* instructor in WW2 and a Panther pilot in-theater in Korea. If not for the 5 seasons of his physical prime in which he was on active duty, he arguably would have passed Babe Ruth for the career home run record.
*The Vought F4U Corsair is the state airplane of Connecticut, where it, its engine, and its propeller were manufactured.
And, to connect the two, John Glenn and Ted Williams flew on missions together in Korea.