The Sesame Street character Grover was originally named Fuzzyface and colored green before evolving into his present blue self.
Grover Cleveland had been sheriff of Buffalo, N.Y., and had personally acted as hangman when executions were scheduled. As a reformist Democratic Governor of New York, he worked closely with likeminded state legislator Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican.
The “hangman”-inspired “Wheel of Fortune”, a popular TV game show, once featured a puzzle where the phrase “FRESH FROM YOUR GROCER’S SHELF” was completely spelled out, yet the first two with a chance to read it to win botched it, and it took a commerical break judge’s conference to determine the third player’s reading was good enough.
“Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” were both created by talk show host Merv Griffin.
Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character of A Confederacy of Dunces, frequently makes reference in his journals to the goddess Fortuna spinning him upward (good luck) or downward (bad luck) on her divine wheel.
The Constitution of the Confederacy, adopted in 1861, provided that the President would have a single, six-year term and be ineligible for reelection. It also gave him a line-item veto. Only one person ever held the office, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.
The TV series *Mr. Lucky *featured a professional gambler who operated a lavish floating casino, named the Fortuna. Staying beyond the 12-mile limit, where he could operate a gambling ship legally, Mr. Lucky played host to a wide variety of people, all of whom came to make use of his luxurious facility. The series, starring John Vyvian and Ross Martin, is dimly remembered today, usually only for its jazzy theme, composed by Henri Mancini.
Weaving the two above:
Sam Clemens was piloting riverboats on the Mississippi (the last one probably The Empress Josephine) when he resigned to join a Confederate volunteer regiment. He soon deserted to join his brother Orion in the Nevada territory; if he ever traveled to Las Vegas while there he would have found a few Mormon farms and perhaps a few Ute Indians but nothing like a gambling mecca.
Clemens brother’s name was pronounced OR-ee-on, unlike the constellation, which is pronounced O-Ryan.
Former baseball pitcher Nolan Ryan played for four teams during his major-league career: the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Houston Astros, and the Texas Rangers. He holds the major-league records for most seasons played (27), most career strikeouts (5,714) and most career no-hitters (7)…but also holds the records for most career walks allowed (2,795) and most career wild pitches (277).
In a high school baseball game, Nolan Ryan broke one batter’s arm and the next batter’s helmet. The next batter begged his coach to not make him bat but to no avail. He struck out on 3 pitches.
Philip Nolan is the protagonist of Edward Everett Hale’s 1863 short story “The Man Without a Country”, describing a man who had cursed the United States during a treason trial for being an accomplice of Aaron Burr. Nolan was sentenced to spend the rest of his life at sea aboard US Navy vessels, never again to see the land he claimed to hate or even to hear it mentioned, although he reconciled on his deathbed (deathberth?). Intended as pro-Union propaganda, Hale’s story, perhaps inspired by the Flying Dutchman legend, was so successful that many readers mistook it for nonfiction.
I’ve always liked that story, Elvis, since I saw a TV movie of it as a kid.
Aaron Burr’s beautiful daughter Theodosia (with whom, his political foes whispered, he had an incestuous relationship) disappeared at sea in 1813 while aboard the Patriot. Legend in the Nags Head, N.C. area has it that she was killed by piratical locals when her ship was wrecked there in a storm.
Capt. William Kidd, hanged as a pirate in London in 1701, was a privateer licensed by England / the UK. His “piracy” was taking a merchant ship flying a French flag, a ship captained by an Englishman.
After “Mack the Knife”, the second most famous song from the Kurt Weill / Berthold Brecht “Threepenny Opera” is “Seeräuberjenny (Pirate Jenny)”, aka “The Black Freighter”, in which a seaport hotel maid daydreams of joining the crew of a pirate ship, with eight sails and fifty cannons, arriving in the port and destroying all of it except the hotel. The pirates then round up the citizenry and ask her what to do with them - her triumphal sneer “Kill them all” is the climax of the song.
Ernie Kovacs, the early genius of TV comedy, once did an entire show of blackout gags without dialog, the only audio consisting of sound effect and a recording of “Mack the Knife” sung in German.
John M. Mack was the first president of the Mack Brothers Co., having begun work with its predecessor in 1890. First based in Brooklyn, N.Y., the truck-manufacturing company is now based in Greensboro, N.C., and is a subsidiary of Volvo.
Ted Mack took over from Major Bowles in 1946 as the host of “The Original Amateur Hour” on ABC Radio and the Dumont Television Network. Winners who went on to show business careers included singers Gladys Knight, Ann-Margret, Pat Boone, Raul Julia, Teresa Brewer, Irene Cara, The Rock and Roll Trio and Los Concertinos from Puerto Rico.
The Dumont Network was a serious competitor for a third TV network with ABC (CBS and NBC were well entrenched when TV came along). Though they did develop stars (e.g., Jackie Gleason), they were hampered by low budgets. Part of this was due to the fact they were limited in their ability to own TV stations. The FCC had a limit on how many stations you could own, and ruled that since Paramount Pictures was a major investor in Dumont, Paramount’s stations would count against Dumont’s limit.
Without the TV stations (which was the major source of profit for NBC, CBS, and ABC in the beginning), Dumont was at a strong disadvantage. In addition, many affiliates were on the UHF spectrum, but TV sets were not sold with UHF tuners. Eventually, they had to give up.
One of Dumont’s stars was Monty Hall, a young Canadian who hosted a tv Bingo game for them and moved into other shows, later finding his greates fame and fortune hosting Let’s Make a Deal. His daughter is stage and screen actress Joanna Gleason (she took the surname of her first husband, who was no relation to Jackie).