The Coral Courts motel in St. Louis featured garages for each cabin and short-term rates. It soon gained a reputation for being a “no-tell motel.” In 1953, Carl Austin Hill and his girlfriend, Bonnie Heady, were arrested at the Coral Courts and charged with the kidnapping and murder of 6-year old Bobby Greenlease, Jr.
A name like “Coral Courts” from that timeframe is evocative of the Googie style of architecture.
It is named for the Googies chain of coffee shops, founded in LA in 1949. The largest and best-preserved Googie district is in the beach resort of Wildwood, New Jersey, where it is called “Doo Wop”.
John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts won his party’s nomination for President of the United States at the Democratic National Convention of 1960, which was held in Los Angeles. He fended off a relatively late challenge from Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, and then offered Johnson the second spot on the ticket. Somewhat to JFK’s surprise, LBJ accepted, and the pair went on to win that fall.
LBJ received very little inheritance from his parents while his wife Claudia Alta “Ladybird” Taylor Johson inherited approximately $45,000 from the estate of her mother, Minnie Patillo Taylor [formerly of my mother’s hometown, Billingsley, AL] and her husband. By the time of her death Ladybird was worth well over $200 million, most of it from interest in radio stations that benefited from legislation her husband passed. (Their radio riches were not lost on their detractors.)
*Ladybird’s “ancestral manse”. I used to play there as a kid.
Ladybird is the name of Hank’s family’s dog on the animated series King of the Hill. Hank, who lives in the Lone Star State town of Arlen, is depicted as a Texas history buff on the show.
Hank Hill had the same voice as Tom Anderson, the befuddled old neighbor of Beavis and Butthead - unsurprisingly, since the creator of both shows, Mike Judge, provided the voices for all of them.
Stephen Root, who voiced Bill Dauterive on Judge’s King of the Hill, played the judge in Judge’s Idiocracy and, most famously, Milton the annoying creepy mumbler in Judge’s Office Space. The popularity of that character resulted in thousands of requests for red staplers from Swingline, which had never marketed a red stapler but came out with one strictly due to the demand.
The basic idea of Idiocracy was lifted from Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” a story in which a man is put into suspended animation and awakes to a future where the general IQ has dropped because stupid people bred faster than smart people. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” – later made into an episode of The New Twilight Zone, with Kornbluth getting credit – was partially set in the same future.
In the 1963 Morris West novel The Shoes of the Fisherman, a Russian dissident cardinal named Cyril Lakota is unexpectedly elected Pope during a Cold War-era conclave of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. The book was later turned into a film starring Anthony Quinn in the lead role.
Quinn Buckner, ESPN personality and former NBA player and coach, is one of three men to win a basketball championship in all levels: high school, college, Olympics, and professional. The other two are Jerry Lucas and Earvin “Magic” Johnson.
Simon Bolivar Buckner, later a governor of Kentucky during the Hatfield-McCoy feud, was the first Confederate general to surrender an army, when his outnumbered forces succumbed to Grant’s at the Battle of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee.
It was during the Ft. Henry-Ft. Donelson campaign that Ulysses S. Grant’s insistence on “unconditional surrender” by Confederate forces resulted in major newspaper coverage and his being given that phrase as a nickname, which of course matched his own initials. Grant went on to win at Shiloh (after nearly losing) and Vicksburg (decisively), and was offered command of all Union armies by President Lincoln in late 1863.
Henry Ford scored a triumph of sorts when he bought the bankrupt Lincoln Motor Company from its founder, Henry Leland, who had been a leader of the investors who fired Ford from the Henry Ford Company in 1902 and renamed it Cadillac. Ford turned Lincoln into his old company’s primary rival in the luxury market, a situation that continues today.
President Lincoln’s two principal assistants were John Nicolay and John Hay, who later wrote a biography of him. While in the White House, they referred to the President, whom they came to love, as “the Tycoon,” but his wife Mary Todd Lincoln, of whom they were much less fond, as “the Hell-Cat.”
The only film starring both Ronald and Nancy (Davis) Reagan was 1957’s “Hellcats of the Navy”. Even though the Hellcat was the name of a WW2 Navy fighter airplane, the movie was actually about the submarine force - Ronnie played the captain of the submarine USS Starfish and Nancy played a Navy nurse for whose affections he vied.
Ronald Reagan, Republican of California, served as President of the United States from 1981-1989. He was preceded by Jimmy Carter, Democrat of Georgia, and succeeded by his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, Republican of Texas (or Connecticut, or Maine, or…)
The 1996 film “My Fellow Americans” starred Jack Lemmon and James Garner as two former Presidents of differing persuasions who team up to fight a framing scheme hatched by the current President, played by Dan Ackroyd. Walter Matthau’s health prevented him from taking a role opposite his old friend Lemmon, so Garner replaced him. At one point, the two characters have to join a Gay Pride parade alongside the “Marching Dorothys”.
Dan Aykroyd was born with syndactyly (webbed toes) and heterochromia (having differently colored eyes – his right eye is green, while his left one is brown).
The early 60s TV children’s show Diver Dan never showed the face (let alone the toes) of the title character, who only appeared sporadically. The real stars were a group of marionette fish, fighting the nefarious schemes of the evil Baron Barracuda. Dan wore an old-fashioned (even for 1960) diving suit and occasionally gave the fish some sage advice. The show was shot with a fish tank between the camera and the marionettes, so real fish would swim in and out of the frame.
The George Clooney character in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen Brothers’ Depression-era retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, is constantly on the lookout for more Dapper Dan Hair Pomade.