The Lawrence Welk Show ran from 1951 to 1982. Therefore it ran throughout the entire decades of the 60s and the 70s.
60 is the number that NFL defensive lineman Otis Sistrunk wore for the Oakland Raiders. Sistrunk is one of the very first, if not the very first, NFL players who entered the league straight from high school.
Otis Sistrunk did a 3-year stint with the US Marines after high school, then played 5 years of semi-pro football before signing with the NFL. The Raiders listed his educational background as “US Mars”, which was supposed to be an abbreviation for the US Marine Corps. Monday Night Football commentator Alex Karras suggested that Sistrunk’s alma mater was the “University of Mars”.
I served 13 years in the Marine Corps, and I’m a big football fan, and I never before heard of US Mars as an abbreviated US Marines.
In play: Samuel Nicholas was the first officer commissioned in the United States Continental Marines and by tradition is considered to be the first Commandant of the Marine Corps.
St. Nicholas was a bishop in the early Christian church, serving in the Greek city of Myra during the 4th Century AD. Nicholas is venerated in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches.
Very little is known about the historical Nicholas, but a large number of legends arose about him, leading to him being considered to be the patron saint of a variety of professions and groups, including sailors, prostitutes, children, brewers, students, and pawnbrokers. Due to stories about Nicholas giving anonymous gifts, he served as the basis for the legend that evolved into Santa Claus.
Adam Rich, who played the youngest child Nicholas Bradford on Eight is Enough, has lead a life since then that reads like a bad “child actor goes bad” movie script:
At age 14, he tried smoking marijuana.
At age 17, he dropped out of high school.
At age 20, he almost died of a Valium overdose.
At age 23, he was arrested and charged with attempted burglary of a pharmacy.
At age 28, there was a media hoax that Rich had been murdered; the story was published in the San Francisco-based magazine Might, with Rich’s consent.
At age 35, he was arrested for driving under the influence (DUI). He has been in drug rehabilitation at least three times.
Adam Selene is the fictional identity taken by the lunar supercomputer HOLMES IV in the 1966 Robert Heinlein sf novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. HOLMES, also known as “Mike,” is able to create a very realistic telepresence avatar for himself so that he can both talk to supporters and mislead foes.
2001: A Space Odyssey’s super-intelligence computer HAL’s name, according to writer Arthur C. Clarke, is derived from Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. After the film was released, fans noticed HAL was a one-letter shift from the name IBM and there has been much speculation since then that this was a dig at the large computer company, something that has been denied by both Clarke and 2001 director Stanley Kubrick. Clarke addressed the issue in his book The Lost Worlds of 2001:
...about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution ... As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence.In the latter part of the 20th century, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein were frequently referred to as the “Big Three” science fiction authors of the era.
Clarke and Asimov, who had a friendly rivalry, established, between themselves, the “Clarke-Asimov Treaty,” as both of them found themselves frequently asked to compare their writing to the other’s. In the treaty, both men agreed to always state that they felt that Clarke was the better science fiction writer, while Asimov was the better science writer.
Asimov wrote a movie musical for Paul McCartney. Housed in the Boston University archives is a story outline called “Five and Five and One.” Asimov penned it for McCartney, a long-time science fiction fan who had asked him to write a screenplay for a sci-fi musical. The former Beatles’ idea centered on a band that realized it was being impersonated by aliens, and he thought Asimov would be the perfect writer for the job. However, McCartney didn’t like Asimov’s treatment, and the movie was never made.
In 1875, Boston University gave Alexander Graham Bell a year’s salary advance to allow him to pursue his research. The following year, Bell invented the telephone in a Boston University laboratory.
Alexander Graham Bell’s daughter Marian was born in 1880, only days after he successfully tested a new wireless telecommunication invention at Volta Laboratory, one which Bell would name as his greatest achievement. Bell was so ecstatic that he wanted to name both his new invention and his new daughter Photophone, Greek for “light–sound”. However, his wife Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell rejected the name for the baby.
The photophone, which allowed transmission of speech on a beam of light, was a precursor to the fiber-optic communication systems that achieved worldwide popular usage starting in the 1980s.
Cool trivia — I didn’t realize that it happened in a BU lab!
In play: NFL running back Ricky Bell went to college at USC. He was the #1 overall draft pick in the 1977 draft by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He only played six seasons in the NFL. Sadly, Bell died at age 29 of heart failure caused by dermatomyositis.
The University of Southern California (commonly referred to as USC) was founded in Los Angeles in 1880. The school’s first graduating class, in 1884, consisted of three students: two men, and one woman. The woman, Minnie C. Miltimore, was USC’s first valedictorian.
California’s Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge contains the largest winter population of bald eagles in the continental United States.
On June 20, 1782, the US Congress adopted a design for the Great Seal of the United States. The design featured a bald eagle, which has since been designated as the national bird of the USA.
Contrary to popular legend, there’s no evidence Ben Franklin that protested to Congress about the choice of the bald eagle and lobbied for the turkey, although in a 1784 letter to his daughter he did label the bald eagle “a bird of bad moral character.”
There is no evidence that turkey was on the menu at the original Thanksgiving, although the bird was certainly easily available in the area. We know that the Wampanoag tribe brought six deer to the meal, and there would have been various vegetables, but not sweet potatoes, which were not native to the eastern US. There could possibly have been turkey, or duck or other fowl, but there is no record of it.
Colonist and Governor of Plymouth Colony (in present-day Massachusetts) William Bradford noted in his book Of Plymouth Plantation that wild turkeys were definitely in the area. Bradford’s journals were reprinted in 1856 after being lost for several decades, and in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. These events contributed to Americans eating turkey at Thanksgiving, and that practice grew into the tradition we have today for having turkey at Thanksgiving.
President Abraham Lincoln’s rambunctious sons Willie and Tad often played during the Civil War with a soldier doll named Jack. One day the boys told him that Jack had deserted and was to be shot by firing squad. The President sat down and wrote a brief note for them: The doll Jack is pardoned, by order of the President. A. Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln II (nicknamed “Jack”) was Abraham Lincoln’s only grandson. He died in March 1890, aged 16, in London. At that time, Jack’s father, Robert Lincoln, was the American ambassador to the Court of St. James. Jack underwent surgery in Paris to lance a carbuncle that had formed under his arm, and left France in January with his parents. A second surgery was performed in February, but it gave no relief and Jack died a week later.
Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith (July 19, 1904 – December 24, 1985) was a great-grandson of Abraham Lincoln. His mother was Lincoln’s granddaughter. In 1975, he became the last undisputed descendant of Lincoln when his sister, Mary Lincoln Beckwith, died without children. Thus, when he died in 1985, also without children, there were no more descendants of President Lincoln.