Roy Gleason had one official at-bat in the major leagues and hit a double, thus finishing his career with a 1.000 batting average. After his brief stay with the Dodgers in 1963, he was drafted by the U.S. military and eventually saw front-line duty in Vietnam. After earning a Purple Heart, he returned to the Dodgers’ minor-league system, but war injuries prevented him from ever returning to “the show”.
Mickey Mouse ears – made famous by The Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s, were suggested and in part created by Roy Williams, a Disney staff artist, who appeared on the show as the only adult other than Jimmy Dodd.
Jimmy Carter is the only U.S. President in history to have a Navy submarine named after him while he was still alive. He is also the only U.S. Naval Academy graduate to become President. He recently became ill while visiting Cleveland, Ohio, and had to be hospitalized, but was discharged after three days and has apparently made a full recovery.
Joe Bellino of the U.S. Naval Academy won the Heisman Trophy in 1960. Because active military duty loomed following his graduation, he was not selected until the seventeenth round of the 1961 NFL draft – still the lowest a Heisman recipient has been selected in the league’s history.
The Heisman Trophy was named for John Heisman, a prominent college football player in the early 20th Century. Heisman later went on to a successful coaching career, notably at Georgia Tech when his team defeated the Cumberland College Bulldogs 222–0 in the most one-sided college football game ever played.
Florida State quarterback Charlie Ward, the 1993 Heisman winner, was never drafted at all, because of his determination to play basketball instead. He wound up playing 11 season in the NBA as a point guard for the Knicks, Spurs, and Rockets. Vic Janowicz , the 1950 winner at Ohio State, went on to play major league baseball with Pittsburgh, although he did later join the NFL.
John Heisman was born in Cleveland, Ohio and coached at Oberlin College in 1892 and 1894, developing its football team into a regional powerhouse (today, um, not so much). The Oberlin field house is today named after Heisman.
Oberlin is the last Ohio college to beat Ohio State in football, having accomplished the feat in 1921.
President Barack Obama spoke on Sunday afternoon on the campus of Ohio State University to an estimated crowd of 35,000 (larger than assembled there during the 2008 campaign), urging their support for the reelection of Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, and the election of Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher to the U.S. Senate seat now filled by George Voinovich, who is retiring. Fisher, as it happens, is a graduate of and formerly served on the board of trustees of Oberlin College.
THE Ohio State University, originally Ohio A&M, is the state’s land grant school, having been created by the Morrill Act of 1862, created by Vermont Rep. Justin Morrill, during the Abraham Lincoln administration. Like many other land grant universities, it has buildings named after both Lincoln and Morrill - in Ohio State’s case, they are twin dormitory towers, nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah”.
R. A. Lafferty was one of the major science fiction/fantasy short story writers of the 1960s and 70s, writing a type of magic realism set in the American West and elsewhere. He was less successful with novels, but wrote strange and wonderful stories like “What Was the Name of that Town?,” “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,” “Continued on Next Rock,” “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem,” and “Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas.”
Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the Golden West) premiered in 1910 in New York. Set in a mining camp in the California Sierras, it tells the story (in Italian) of saloon girl Minnie (soprano) and her competing suitors, Sheriff Jack Rance (baritone) and Dick Johnson (tenor), who has a secret identity as the Mexican bandito, Ramerrez. Minnie cheats at a poker hand with Jack to spare the life of Johnson, who escapes. When finally captured (as Ramerrez), he agrees to go quietly if the secret is kept from Minnie, in the aria “Ch’ella mì creda libero”, although she figures it out and rescues him once again anyway.
Retired agent Gerald “Jerry” Blaine has just written a book about his Secret Service work in the 1960s, including on the tragic Dallas trip, called The Kennedy Detail. He tells, for the first time, how he almost shot the newly-sworn President Lyndon B. Johnson, who surprised him late on the night of Nov. 22, 1963 while Blaine was on patrol.
Idaho’s Blaine County is the home of Ketchum (where Ernest Hemingway is buried) and Sun Valley (which was developed as a ski resort by Union Pacific Railroad chairman W. Averell Harriman in order to encourage winter vacationers to ride his trains).
1941’s Sun Valley Serenade was a star turn for Sonja Henie, who got far more screen time skiing than skating. It was also the film debut of Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, in a scene featuring Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers (scenes with black performers were made to be easily edited out for use by Southern theaters). It was the first of only two films including the Glenn Miller Orchestra prior to his enlistment in the US Army Air Force.
Dorothy Dandridge was played by Cleveland-born actress Halle Berry in the 1999 HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, for which she won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Ray Dandridge was a star third baseman in the Negro Leagues and Mexican League in the 1930s and 40s. He finished his career as the premier player in Triple-A baseball, batting .362 and leading all American Association third basemen in fielding percentage in 1949. He batted .360 in his last minor league season in 1955. While Dandridge never played in the major leagues, he’s credited with tutoring a young Willie Mays during Mays’ time in the minors. Dandridge was later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Mickey Mantle is the only member of the Baseball Hall of Fame to be named after another member of the Baseball Hall of Fame (Mickey Cochrane, though Cochrane’s real name was Gordon Stanley Cochrane).
In the Star Trek universe, Zefram Cochrane was the first human being to invent the warp drive. He was played by actor Glenn Corbett in “Metamorphosis,” an episode of the original series, and by James Cromwell in the movie Star Trek: First Contact.
Leo McKern played Henry VIII’s advisor turned chancellor turned victim Thomas Cromwell (a maternal* great-great-uncle of Oliver) in the 1960s film version of A Man for All Seasons; James Frain portrayed him in The Tudors.
*Oliver’s ancestor changed his own surname to Cromwell when he married Thomas’s sister in order to cash in on his famous and powerful brother-in-law.