Musician Bill Haley was a key figure in the early popularization of the rock & roll genre. With his band, Bill Haley & His Comets (a play on the name of “Halley’s Comet”), Haley’s recordings of songs like “Rock Around the Clock” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll” were among the first rock & roll songs to achieve mainstream success in the U.S.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Washington, D.C. home was recently featured in Architectural Digest magazine. The couple bought the house after Hillary was elected to the US Senate from New York in 2000.
In 1978 when Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. Hillary Clinton continued working at her job at the Rose Law Firm. She thus became the first First Lady of Arkansas to continue working while her husband was governor.
Winthrop Rockefeller, younger brother of Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, was Governor of Arkansas from 1967 through 1971. He was defeated in an attempt for a third term in the 1970 election, and he passed away just 3 years later in 1973 at the age of 60.
The life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr (1839-1937) spanned from the presidency of Martin Van Buren to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt before his death at age 97. Nelson (1908-1979) was his second son.
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. suffered from alopecia and was hairless by the end of his life. He is buried under an impressive obelisk at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, not far from the graves of President James A. Garfield, and Lincoln aide and later Secretary of State John Hay.
Actor Patrick Stewart suffered from alopecia and was almost hairless by age 19. In a number of early roles in BBC productions he wears a hairpiece, including the role of Sejanus in I, Claudius. In Hedda, the BBC’s 1975 film version of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, he wears a long curly wig to play Ejlert Løvborg, a character whom Hedda imagines as a godlike Dionysian figure “with vine-leaves in his hair”.
Patrick Stewart did not wear a hairpiece in Excalibur (1981) when he played the fictional King Leodegrance, the father of Queen Guinevere in Arthurian legend (played by Cherie Lunghi). The film also starred Helen Mirren as Morgana, Liam Neeson as Sir Gawain, and Gabriel Byrne as King Uther Pendragon. Excalibur helped launch the film and acting careers of a number of British and Irish actors, including Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds.
After achieving moderate success in the late 1970’s as part of the new wave band The Tourists, Annie Lenox and fellow musician David A. Stewart went on to achieve major international success in the 1980’s as Eurythmics. With a total of eight Brit Awards, which includes being named Best British Female Artist a record six times, Lennox has been named the “Brits Champion of Champions”.
And, on a personal note, Annie Lennox shares the same birth date as me: December 25, 1954.
And the origin of your Dope username becomes quite clear!
In play: Lennox International Inc. is a provider of HVAC products. It was founded in 1895 in Marshalltown, Iowa, by Dave Lennox. Lennox designed and patented a riveted steel coal-fired furnace, which led to numerous advancements in heating, cooling and climate control solutions. The company headquarters are now located in Richardson, Texas.
The game of Mintonette was created by William G. Morgan in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Morgan was the director at the local YMCA and he created the sport as an alternative to the more physical basketball. Today it is called volleyball.
Morgan invented Mintonette on 09 February 1895.
The game of Hooverball was invented in the late 1920s by Joel T. Boone, who was President Herbert Hoover’s personal physician. Inspired by seeing a game of Bull-in-the-Ring being played by sailors on the battleship Utah, and looking for a way to keep Hoover in shape, Boone created the game – in Hooverball, which is played on a volleyball court, players on two teams throw a medicine ball back and forth over the net.
(I’d never heard of this game until last night, when I saw a short profile of it on a program, on, I think, the Smithsonian Channel.)
The Simpsons’s Elizabeth Hoover was named after Matt Groening’s first grade teacher.
The Big Hill, the nickname for the Canadian Pacific Railway’s track through the Kicking Horse Pass, originally had a grade of 4.5%, one of the steepest railway grades in the world. Accidents and runaway trains were common, leading to the building of the Spiral Tunnels early in the 20th century. The Tunnels increased the length of the track by doubling back on their own course, twice. The grade now is 2.2%.
(Missed the edit window)
Very cool. I’ll have to add that to my list named Things to Do, Places to Go, People to See.
It can be part of a nice road trip; gMap — https://is.gd/ewHklP.
In play: The Tehachapi Loop is a ¾-mile long railroad loop helix climbing the Tehachapi Pass at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada. Any train more than 4,000 feet long passes over itself going around the loop. In 1998 it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and is designated as California Historical Landmark #508.
gMap satellite view of Tehachapi Loop and overlook — Google Maps
ETA: If the average railroad car is 50’ long (and they may be longer), then any train longer than 80 cars would pass over itself going around the Tehachapi Loop.
Not in play: the wiki article on the Big Hill has a graphic showing the two Spiral Tunnels, and a photo of an engine coming out of Tunnel 2, underneath the last part of the train about to enter the top of Tunnel 2.
That is a very cool picture of the locomotives pulling the train that’s above them. Thanks for sharing.
In play: In what is perhaps their most famous song, entitled Willin’, Little Feat sang about a trucker who had ‘been from Tuscon to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonapah…’ The song was written by group founder Lowell George, who had previously played with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. George died in 1979 at the age of 34, shortly after launching a solo tour.
Frank Lloyd Wright did not begin sketching plans for what became the world-famous house Fallingwater in Western Pennsylvania until he learned that his client, Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., was on his way for a visit to Wright’s studio.
“Lloyd” is a Welsh name derived from the words “llwyd” or “clwyd”, which can mean grey or brown.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, a village located on the island of Anglesey in Wales, has the longest one-word place name in Europe (and the second-longest in the world).