Laura Ingalls Wilder lived to see atomic energy, jetliners, “I Love Lucy” and cures or vaccines for every childhood disease that bedevilled her family.
In 1943, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane came into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would, she felt, ultimately destroy the United States. Wartime monitoring of mail eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her home to question her motives. Her strong response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, “What is this, the Gestapo?”, that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights despite the wartime exigencies. During this time period, an FBI file was compiled on Lane.
John David Sweeney, Jr., of Westchester County, New York, was the first person to be issued a Social Security Number. Sweeney received the number 055-09-0001 in November 1936.
Sweeney died at the age of 61 and never collected any Social Security benefits, but his widow did until she passed away in 1982.
When Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opened on Broadway in 1979, it won all the major Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score (Stephen Sondheim), Best Book (Hugh Wheeler), Best Performance by a Leading Actor (Len Cariou), Best Performance by a Leading Actress (Angela Lansbury), and Best Direction (Harold Prince).
Audra McDonald has won six Tony Awards for acting, more than anyone else, and has won in all four possible categories - winning for both leading and featured (the stage term for supporting) actress in both a play and musical. Her two repeats were in the featured performer category.
The six productions for which she won are:
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill
Carousel
Master Class
Porgy and Bess
A Raisin in the Sun
Ragtime
The House on the Rock, a tourist attraction near Spring Green, Wisconsin, is home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest carousel. It is 80 feet in diamater, 35 feet high, and features over 20,000 lights, and 269 animals (though, apparently, none of them are horses).
A small section of window frame just off the Truman Balcony on the south face of the White House still shows scorchmarks from the burning of the building by British troops during the War of 1812.
Impressive!
In Fullerton CA are three public parks, named:
- Virgil (Gus) Grissom Park, Fullerton
- Roger B Chaffee Park, Fullerton
- Edward White Park, Fullerton
They are named for the three astronauts who died in the burning of Apollo 1 during a test.
gMap — Google Maps
Author E.B. White graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1921. He got the nickname “Andy” at Cornell, where tradition confers that moniker on any male student whose surname is White, after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White.
The White Tree of Gondor was planted from a seedling surreptitiously taken from the doomed island of Numenor by Isildur, eldest son of Elendil the Tall, in the Middle-earth legendarium of JRR Tolkien.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s father Arthur died in 1896, leaving his wife Mabel to bring up their two sons, aged 4 and 2. In spite of serious family opposition, Mabel converted to Catholicism in 1900 and for this was rejected by her own family and her husband’s. In 1904, Mabel passed away from diabetes; J.R.R. Tolkien was 12 years old.
Many years later Tolkien wrote a letter to his own son Michael about his mother, saying she was a “gifted lady of great beauty and wit, greatly stricken by God with grief and suffering who died in youth (at 34) of a disease hastened by persecution of her faith.”
J.R.R. Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called The Hobbit, which he had written some years before for his own children, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication.When it was published a year later, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel, an act which prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic novel The Lord of the Rings (originally published in three volumes 1954–1955). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings.
Homo floresiensis (“Flores Man”; nicknamed “hobbit”[2]) is an extinct species in the genus Homo.
The remains of an individual who would have stood about 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) in height were discovered in 2004 at Liang Bua on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Partial skeletons of nine individuals have been recovered, including one complete skull, referred to as “LB1”.[3][4] These remains have been the subject of intense research to determine whether they represent a species distinct from modern humans;[5] the dominant consensus is that these remains do represent a distinct species due to genetic and anatomical differences.
Who but Kinky Friedman could write the song Homo Erectus?
You know that I’m a Homo Erectus
Got to connect this
Bone that I discovered yesterday
Tyrannosaurus
Lived in the forest
Died because its heart got in the way
(Outstanding user name / post combo. 
)
In play:
In 1913, toymaker A.C. Gilbert created the first Erector Set – a construction toy, featuring metal parts, such as girders, gears, wheels, nuts and bolts.
After Gilbert’s death in 1961, the Erector trademark passed through a number of owners. The brand is currently owned by Meccano (an English toy company, which makes a similar metal construction set), which bought Erector in 2000.
In 1949, an Erector set was used to build the precursor to the modern artificial heart by William Sewell and Dr. William Glenn of the Yale School of Medicine. The external pump successfully bypassed the heart of a dog for more than an hour.
The first heart transplant was performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in 1967 at Groote Schuur Hospital in Capetown, South Africa. He implanted the heart of accident-victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, with Washkansky regaining full consciousness and being able to easily talk with his wife, before dying 18 days later of pneumonia.
The first doctor to perform open-heart surgery was Daniel Hale Williams. He is mentioned (though not by name) in Stevie Wonder’s song “Black Man” (“heart surgery/was first done successfully/by a black man”).
:: bows ::
U.S. Navy submarines during World War II did not carry a ship’s doctor, but usually a corpsman or pharmacist’s mate trained in first aid and basic medicine. One, aboard USS Seadragon, had to conduct an emergency appendectomy while his submarine was submerged. Two others later did the same aboard other subs.
An estimated 10% of the 1.35 million bombs dropped on Germany during World War II failed to explode, a Smithsonian investigation found in 2016.
Even now, though the war ended in Europe in May 1945, upward of two thousand pounds of unexploded munitions are uncovered every year.