The Chicago Seven was a name given to seven (originally eight) activists who were charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot in conjunction with the demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The defendants were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Lee Weiner. Bobby Seale, the eighth person charged, had a separate trial after he disrupted the courtroom.
While in hiding after skipping bail on a drug charge, Abbie Hoffman lived in upstate New York in the Thousand Islands, under the pseudonym “Barry Freed”, using some of the techniques for living free that he described in his book Steal This Book. He and Amy Carter, and fourteen others, were arrested in 1986 at UMass Amherst for protesting CIA activities there.
A famous incident at Woodstock has Abbie Hoffman trying to grab the mic to make a political speech about John Sinclair in between songs of The Who’s set.
While much has been made of the subsequent confrontation between The Who’s Pete Townshend and Hoffman, the incident was not captured by the camera crew at Woodstock, who were changing film at the time.
Thus, just as with the infamous incident of Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, memories vary as to exactly what happened, and how serious it really was.
Pete Townshend of The Who suffers from significant hearing loss and tinnitus. He has noted that his hearing problems began with drummer Keith Moon detonating his drum kit during The Who’s appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967.
Group Captain Peter Townsend caused a great scandal in 1950s Britain due to his romance with Princess Margaret. Because he was divorced, it wasn’t possible for them to marry, and the fact that she was dating a divorced man was a royal scandal of the time.
Peter Sellers played RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake and US President Merkin Muffley, as well as the title character, in Dr. Strangelove.
Mandrake the Magician’s sidekick was a muscular African prince named named Lothar.
Lothar and the Hand People were a late-60’s psychedelic rock band whose orchestration featured the theremin and the synthesizer.
Among the tracks on Lothar and the Hand People’s first album is “Machines,” a Doc Pomus-Mort Shuman song first recorded by Manfred Mann.
Mort Shuman was in the original off-Broadway cast of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.
Mort was a character in the Bazooka Joe bubble gum comics who always wore a red turtleneck sweater pulled up so high that it covered his mouth.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was a 1967 collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison, who was later creative consultant for the video novel Babylon 5.
Babylon was the title of the second album by Dr. John (the Night Tripper), the follow-up to his debut LP Gris-Gris.
Babylon was the name of the biggest gay nightclub in the Showtime series Queer as Folk which was filmed in Toronto but set in Pittsburgh and based on the *Channel 4 *series of the same name which was set in Manchester, England (which was the title of a song from Hair).
Theresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Mass. Sen. and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, has a country estate in Fox Chapel, Pa., just outside of Pittsburgh.
“The Hunter” was a cartoon segment of The King and Odie Show, featuring the voice of Kenny Delmar as the title character, who was called on to capture the arch-villain, the Fox. The joke was that the Hunter was pretty dim but always managed to accidentally capture the Fox.
Former LA Rams player Fred Dryer, as Sgt. Rick Hunter, and always-perfectly-made-up Stepfanie Kramer, as Sgt. Dee Dee McCall starred in “Hunter”, a 1980’s detective series continuing the TV tradition of the LAPD.
Fred Dryer achieved an unusual feat as an NFL defensive end: he scored two safeties in one game.
On November 10, 1968, the Oakland Raiders performed a feat that has probably never been equaled: they scored in all possible ways before the other team (the Denver Broncos) ran a play from scrimmage.
Oakland took the kickoff and ran off several plays to score a touchdown. They kicked the extra point. Then, they kicked off to Denver. Receiver Floyd Little dropped the ball in the end zone. It squirted out onto the field, so Little picked it up and ran back behind the goal line, where he was tackled. Safety. Denver then kicked to Oakland, who drove into field goal range, culminating in a field goal. 12-0 Oakland.
Denver has a sister-city relationship with Brest, France which started in 1948, making it the second oldest sister-city relationship in the US.