Andy Griffith first appeared with Don Knotts in the film “No Time For Sergeants”, adapted from the stage play by the same name, which also starred Griffith. Knotts and Griffith were lifelong friends and of course went on to co-star in The Andy Griffith Show. “No Time for Sergeants” was the inspiration for the TV series “Gomer Pyle, USMC”.
Don Knotts served in the US Army during WWII.
Frank Sutton served in the US Army during WWII. He was a Sergeant. He played Gunnery Sergeant Vince Carter on the CBS television series Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
The late Jim Nabors, who played the title character in Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., also was an accomplished singer. From 1972 to 2014 he sang the song “Back Home Again in Indiana” before the start of the Indianapolis 500 race.
Jim Nabors sang the national anthem before Game #1 of the 1973 World Series in Oakland.
Bart Giamatti, who was the seventh Commissioner of Baseball, assumed that office on April 1, 1989. He died just five months later on September 1, 1989. Because he was an alumnus and former professor at Yale University, the Yale Whiffenpoofs were asked to perform the national anthem before Game 1 of the 1989 World Series. Their rendition, which intermixed the Star-Spangled Banner with America the Beautiful, was initially booed, but they won the crowd over to rousing applause by the end of their performance.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/The_Star_Spangled_Banner
Bart Giamatti negotiated the agreement resolving the Pete Rose betting scandal by permitting Rose to voluntarily withdraw from the sport to avoid further punishment.
Living people with uterine descents from Lady Cecily Neville, known as ‘the Rose of Raby’, were used to confirm the identity of the recently-discovered corpse of King Richard III. Lady Cecily’s father was the 4th Baron of Raby and the 1st Earl of Westmoreland; her husband was Richard Plantagenet-York, the rightful Heir to the Throne of England.
Richard III’s Y-chromosome was also checked and found to be of group G2a3, not a match with other tested Plantagenets. It can be deduced that some Plantagenet wife, perhaps the Rose of Raby herself, was impregnated by someone other than her lawful husband.
Richard III was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His death during the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 made him the last English king to die in battle.
Singer and actress Kathleen “Bird” York starred as as a young Naomi Judd in the NBC miniseries, Naomi & Wynonna: Love Can Build a Bridge. Her personal web site is birdYork.com,
York Minster is the second largest Gothic cathedral of Northern Europe. The present building stands on a site where various churches have been built since 627; it was begun about 1230 and completed in 1472. York is the largest cathedral completed during the Gothic period of architecture. Cologne Cathedral is larger but was completed only in 1880, after being left uncompleted for 350 years.
La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres, one of the most famous of Gothic cathedrals, has several mysterious carvings. For example, Melchizedek (leftmost in this image) holds a ‘Holy Grail’ and was carved about the same time as Wolfram von Eschenbach was writing Parzival.
Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, based on Eschenbach’s poem, was his last opera, although he described it not as an opera, but as Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel (“A Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage”). At Bayreuth, where it premiered, a tradition has arisen that there be no applause after the first act of the opera. For the first twenty years, it was banned by himself and his later-widow, Cosima, from performance anywhere else to preserve its purity of image.
“I Will Always Love You” is a song originally written and recorded in 1973 by American singer-songwriter Dolly Parton. Her country version of the track was released in 1974 as a single and was written as a farewell to her one-time partner and mentor of seven years, Porter Wagoner, following Parton’s decision to pursue a solo career.
Whitney Houston would record the song for the 1992 movie The Bodyguard, and to this day there are people who believe the song was written for the movie. It was not.
In 2012, Kevin Costner said he had discussed with Diana, Princess of Wales, before her death the possibility of her appearing in The Bodyguard 2. The original movie was, she told him, a favorite of hers.
Princess Diana appeared on the cover of PEOPLE more than 50 times, Time eight times, Newsweek seven times, Vanity Fair five times, and at least once on Tatler, LIFE, Vogue, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and others.
*Vanity Fair *is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
The book’s title comes from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress first published in 1678. In that work, “Vanity Fair” refers to a stop along the pilgrim’s route: a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man’s sinful attachment to worldly things.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, “Candle in the Wind 1997,” Elton John & Bernie Taupin’s tribute to England’s Princess Diana, is the second highest selling single of all time (behind Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” from 1942), and it is the highest selling single since charts began in the 1950s.
Paul Bunyan Day is celebrated every June 28th. One of the Paul Bunyan myths is that the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota were formed from the footprints of Babe his blue ox and Paul when they got lost in a snow storm. Perhaps, maybe, during a White Christmas.
The Northwest Angle, part of Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, is the only place in the United States outside Alaska that is north of the 49th parallel. The land area of the Angle is separated from the rest of Minnesota by Lake of the Woods, but shares a land border with Canada.
In 1921, the Curtiss Candy Company of Chicago reformulated one of their candy bars, which had been known as the Kandy Kake bar, and renamed it the Baby Ruth bar. It was generally assumed that Curtiss named the candy after baseball star Babe Ruth, who had, at that time, become one of the biggest stars in baseball.
Curtiss, however, maintained that they had named the candy after “Baby Ruth” Cleveland, daughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. However, the introduction of the Baby Ruth bar occurred seventeen years after Ruth Cleveland had died (at age 12, of diptheria), and 24 years after her father had left the White House, making it appear more likely that Curtiss was attempting to cash in on the baseball player’s fame, while not actually paying him for use of his name.
Edit: Today, Baby Ruth bars are made by Nestle, and are available in both the United States and Canada.