Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham was a black comedian who was very successful on vaudeville, but took years to break the color line. His chance came when Sammy Davis, Jr. took his catchphrase, “Here come da judge” and used it on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The bit was a hit, and the show added Markham to the cast the next year.
Dan Rowan, the co-host and co-creator with Dick Martin of Laugh In, disowned his daughter during the run of the show when she married Peter Lawford, the divorced former Rat Pack member and former Kennedy in-law who was one year younger than Rowan and already in serious career decline; Rowan disliked Lawford for many reasons, among them his belief that Lawford was a WW2 draft dodger and known heavy drug user and the fact Rowan’s daughter was 21 when she and Lawford began living together. The marriage broke up and Lawford remarried twice more, dying penniless on Christmas Eve, 1984.
New Jersey’s Glassboro State College was renamed Rowan College of New Jersey in 1992, and later Rowan University, after Henry Rowan and his wife Betty gave $100 million to the school, at the time the largest gift to a public college. It had previously been named Glassboro Normal School and New Jersey State Teachers College at Glassboro. The school was the site of the 1967 Glassboro Summit Conference between President Lyndon B. Johnson and USSR Premier Alexei Kosygin, which produced essentially nothing of substance.
Newspaper columnist Carl Rowan, a graduate of Oberlin College, held several executive and diplomatic posts under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He was prosecuted after he shot a teenager who trespassed in his Washington, D.C. swimming pool one night in 1988. There was a mistrial, and he was never retried. He died in 2000.
David Angell submitted a script for the TV shoe Cheers. The creative team was so impressed that thry hired him as a regular writer. He later helped develope the Cheers spinoff Fraiser.
David Angell and his wife Lynn were also on flight 11, the one to hit Tower 2 on 9/11.
David Kennedy, the fourth of Robert and Ethel’s eleven children, lived from 1955 to 1984. He was the first of “Old Joe” and Rose Kennedy’s grandchildren to reach adulthood before dying. Christopher Lawford (Peter’s son and David’s cousin) described David as his best friend in Christopher’s book Symptoms of withdrawal: a memoir of snapshots and redemption.
I don’t see how that jumps off the preceding post.
Blues legend Robert Johnson’s entire recording output was recorded in only two sessions held over five total days: November 23, 26 (one song) & 27, 1936, and June 19-20, 1937. He died – probably of strychnine poisoning after drinking from a poisoned bottle of whiskey – in 1938.
(That should knit things back together.
Robert Baratheon is the larger-than-life King of Westeros in the George R.R. Martin fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire. Like Henry VIII of England, on which he seems loosely based, Robert loves food, wine, women and song, the first three to excess.
Henry VIII’s autopsy showed his measurements at the time of his death as a 52" waist and a 54.5" chest. A recent analysis of the medical data suggested to modern medical scholars that his death was brought about by kidney failure which was caused by a combination of diabetes and deep vein thrombosis; previous historians and biographers had attributed the death to syphilis which it is now believed he did not have (at least not the sexually transmitted variety, though he did have other STDs).
Syphilis has been called “the French disease” by Italians, Poles, and Germans; “the Italian disease” by Frenchmen; “the Polish disease” by Russians; “the Spanish disease” by Dutch; “the British disease” by Tahitians; and “the Christian disease” by Ottoman Turks.
Mark Twain once joked about having “the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.”
Use of the term “ace” in military aviation circles began in World War I, when French newspapers described Adolphe Pegoud, as L’As (“The Ace”) after he became the first pilot to down five German aircraft. The term had been popularized in prewar French newspapers when referring to sports stars such as football players and bicyclists.
French WWI flying ace Charles Nunguesser was known for his wildness, but was still able to survive the war. He decorated his plane with a black heart with a skull and crossbones and a coffin and candles painted inside the heart. Despite numerous wounds, he survived the war as the #3 French ace, but died when his plane vanished when he tried to fly across the Atlantic in 1927, a few weeks before Lindberg.
Charles, Prince of Wales, also holds the titles Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. His son Prince William will get hitched next year.
Less than two weeks after Lindbergh’s crossing, Clarence Chamberlin and Charles Levine flew nonstop from New York’s Roosevelt Field to Eisleben, Germany in the monoplane Columbia, made by Giuseppe Bellanca. They likely would have been first if not for some legal entanglements that delayed their departure.
NBC newsman Irving R. Levine was the first American television correspondent accredited to report from the Soviet Union.
ABC television correspondent John Scali became a key intermediary between US and Soviet leaders in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later served in the Nixon administration and as President Ford’s UN ambassador.
Richard M. Nixon’s first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, resigned in 1973 and pled no contest to a single Federal bribery charge dating to his service as Baltimore County Executive and Governor of Maryland. He was succeeded by Gerald R. Ford, at the time House Minority Leader, the first person appointed under the terms of the 25th Amendment to fill a vacancy in the Vice Presidency.
The city of Baltimore is not part of Baltimore County. The city of St. Louis is likewise not part of St. Louis County.