The title song “Hello, Dolly!” was first sung by Carol Channing, who starred as Dolly Gallagher Levi in the original 1964 Broadway cast. In December 1963, at the behest of his manager, Louis Armstrong made a demonstration recording of “Hello, Dolly!” for the song’s publisher to use to promote the show. Kapp Records released Armstrong’s publishing demo as a commercial single. His version reached number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, ending the Beatles’ streak of three number-one hits in a row over 14 consecutive weeks (in addition to holding the second and third chart positions) and becoming the most successful single of Armstrong’s career, followed by a gold-selling album of the same name. The song also spent nine weeks atop the adult contemporary chart shortly after the opening of the musical. The song also made Armstrong the oldest artist ever to reach #1 on the Hot 100 since its introduction in 1958. Billboard ranked the record as the No. 3 song of 1964, behind the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.”
“Hello, Dolly!” won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year in 1965, and Armstrong received a Grammy for Best Vocal Performance, Male. Louis Armstrong also performed the song (together with Barbra Streisand) in the popular 1969 film Hello, Dolly!.
In the movie, In and Out, one of the characters argues that Streisand was too old to star in Yenta. There was also criticism of her being too young to play Dolly Levi.
In the movie The Prince of Tides (1991), with Nick Nolte and Barbra Streisand, Barbra Streisand’s character is married and they have a son together. Nick Nolte teaches the son some basic football skills and effectively becomes his coach. The actor who played the son is Jason Gould, the son of Elliott Gould. Jason Gould’s mother in real life is Barbra Streisand. Gould and Streisand were married for about 8 years in the 1960s before they divorced. Jason Gould is the only child of Barbra Streisand.
Prince of Persia is a long-running series of computer action-adventure games. The original Prince of Persia game, which was created by Jason Mechner, was released in 1989; over the course of the past 30 years, titles in the series have been released by several companies, including Brøderbund (the publisher of the original game), The Learning Company, and Ubisoft.
The series has also inspired a number of spin-off properties, including comic books, and a 2010 movie, which starred Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, and Gemma Arterton.
The first Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus the Great around 550 BCE, stretched from Europe’s Balkan Peninsula in the West to India’s Indus Valley in the East.
The term Balkanization came into use in the aftermath of the First World War, referring to the numerous new states created after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. The term is currently also used to refer to the disintegration or break-up of other entities such as companies, Internet websites, or neighborhoods.
The term “ottoman,” in the context of furniture, originally referred to a couch or cushioned seat without a back or arms, and was derived from a style of furniture common in the Ottoman Empire. The term later expanded to include a smaller such furnishing, more commonly used as a stool or footstool, and the smaller form of ottoman is now how the term is most commonly used in modern American parlance.
NFL center Jim Otto’s career spanned 15 seasons, from 1960 to 1974, and all with the Oakland Raiders. He was the last member of the Oakland Raiders inaugural team from 1960 to retire.
Even though I disliked the Raiders (and still do), I always thought it was cool that Jim Otto wore the number 00.
In play: The American Football League began play in 1960 with eight teams: the Boston Patriots, Buffalo Bills, Dallas Texans, Denver Broncos, Houston Oilers, Los Angeles Chargers, New York Titans, and Oakland Raiders. All eight franchises are still in existence, although the Titans are now the Jets, the Boston Patriots are now the New England Patriots, and the Texans relocated to Kansas City and are now the Chiefs.
The first selection 1969 AFL-NFL Common Draft was held by the AFL’s Buffalo Bills, after finishing 1–12–1 in 1968. They took O.J. Simpson, but he demanded what was then the largest contract in professional sports history: $650,000 over five years. This led to a standoff with Bills’ owner Ralph Wilson, as Simpson threatened to become an actor and skip professional football. Eventually, Wilson agreed to pay Simpson.
In play: the original AFL charter member Houston Oilers won the first-ever AFL championship over the Los Angeles Chargers in 1960, and then they repeated over the same team that was by then in San Diego in 1961. From the AFL-NFL Merger of 1966 to 1970, when the leagues agreed to merge in 1966 and then played separate schedules in the 1966 to 1969 regular seasons before forming as one league with two conferences in 1970, the Houston Oilers retained their city and team name through their final season in 1996. They became the Houston Texans and began olay in 2002.
(I did always like Otto, in part for the uniform number; I liked Oilers wide receiver Ken Burrough for wearing 00, as well. In '73, the NFL adopted a standardized system for assigning uniform numbers based on position, and the number 00 (and 0) was no longer valid, though the use of 00 by Otto and Burrough was grandfathered in.)
In play: Two different NFL teams have moved away from Los Angeles, and then later returned to the city. The Los Angeles Chargers played their inaugural season of 1960 in the city, before moving to San Diego, where they remained until 2016; the Chargers returned to Los Angeles for the 2017 season.
The Rams had moved to Los Angeles in 1946, where they played until 1994. The Rams relocated to St. Louis for the 1995 season, before returning to Los Angeles for 2016.
(I liked Jim Otto too. And I always thought his teammate, Otis Sistrunk, had the coolest non-nicknamed name in all of football, for all time. And I’m not a Raiders fan either.)
In play:
Greg Papa is now announcing games for the San Francisco 49ers. Previously he was the Oakland Raiders’ announcer. In last week’s sports talk radio interview, he referred to the game that most of us call the “Tuck Rule Game”, but he instead called it by a different name and he said that most Raider fans call it by that same name:
Starfleet Command is, according to what can be seen in the movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, going to someday be built on the grounds of the Presidio in San Francisco, Calif.
Tuck Everlasting, a 1975 young adult novel by award-winning author Natalie Babbitt, was adapted into 2 movie versions, a little-known 1981 version and a 2002 Disney version that featured Ben Kingsley, Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving and William Hurt. In 2016 it was also adapted into a musical which closed after 39 Broadway performances.
Early in his acting career, Ben Kingsley was approached by John Lennon and Ringo Starr, who had seen him in a play, and felt that he could be a rock star. The two Beatles introduced Kingsley to music publisher and producer Dick James, who offered to work with Kingsley, but Kingsley declined the offer, choosing to focus on stage acting; he was invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company soon after.
The Lennon Sisters are an American vocal group of four sisters that came from a family of six sisters and five brothers. Dianne, Janet, Kathy, and Peggy Lennon were all born in Los Angeles, as were all their siblings. The four sisters were born in the 1939s and 1940s and typically sing traditional pop songs. They started singing together in the 1950s and they are still active today. For thirteen years, from 1955 to 1968, the group appeared regularly on The Lawrence Welk Show.
Some of the primary sponsors of The Lawrence Welk Show included Geritol, Sominex, Serutan, Polident, and Ocean Spray. During the later years of the show’s airing, a number of Welk cast members appeared in commercials for many of the show’s sponsors, filmed specifically to play during Welk broadcasts.
