Clatyon, the county seat of St. Louis County, was named for Ralph Clayton, who donated the land for the county courthouse. It is the home of several large businesses, including Brown Shoe, maker of Buster Brown shoes for children.
The Justice Center, which houses both the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County and the Cleveland Municipal Court, is at the intersection of Ontario and Lakeside streets, just north of Public Square in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Abraham Lincoln, John Kerry and Barack Obama each made public appearances nearby.
Cleveland obtained its name on July 22, 1796, when surveyors of the Connecticut Land Company laid out Connecticut’s Western Reserve into townships and a capital city they named “Cleaveland” after their leader, General Moses Cleaveland. Cleaveland oversaw the plan for the modern downtown area, centered on the Public Square, before returning home, never again to visit Ohio.
“Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously,” was turned into a song and dance by Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain
Donald O’Connor starred in six Army-based films in the Fifties opposite Francis the Talking Mule (voiced by cowboy actor Chill Wills). These were the inspiration for the Sixties TV series “Mr. Ed”, whose starring horse, Bamboo Harvester, was trained by the same man, Les Hilton, who trained Molly in the Francis films. O’Connor eventually quit the films, claiming “When you’ve made six pictures and the mule still gets more fan mail than you do…”. He was replaced by Mickey Rooney for one final film.
Major Carroll O’Connor roles before he played Archie Bunker included Charles Bromley- wealthy New England father of Jerusha Bromley (Julie Andrews) in Hawaii- and Casca in the Liz Taylor/Richard Burton/Rex Harrison epic Cleopatra. It was while filming the latter in Italy that he adopted his son Hugh through an Italian adoption agency.
Carroll O’Connor showed that his range was larger than Archie Bunker’s in a 1972 TV production of the 1930’s Gershwin musical “Of Thee I Sing” (book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind), as President Wintergreen, whose love affair with Michele Lee and subsequent breach of promise suit evntually makes Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom (Jack Gilford) the President. Cloris Leachman and Jim Backus also appeared.
George S. Kaufman wrote the scripts for the Marx Brothers Broadway shows The Coconuts and Animal Crackers. But the Marx Brothers were notorious of ad libbing their lines. Supposedly, Kaufman was standing in the wings talking to someone else, but seemed distracted. He said to the other person, “I’m sorry, but I though I heard one of the original lines.”
With Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman wrote the book of I’d Rather Be Right, a musical which starred George M. Cohan as then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The songwriting team employed for the show was Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.
Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin Roosevelt both served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York and President of the United States. TR was a Republican, however, while FDR was a Democrat.
Roosevelt Franklin was a major Muppet character during the first few seasons of Sesame Street, but began to fade from prominence after criticism that he was either “too black” (he loved to sing in scat and blues styles) or “not black enough” (he generally spoke Standard English, with only an occasional pronunciation or idiom typical of urban African-Americans of his day).
The real life individual Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce, upon whom the MAS*H character is based, currently resides in La Crosse, Wisconsin on the Mississippi River. Ironically, the name Benjamin Franklin Pierce (M.D., 1861) appears on a plaque of Harvard College graduates killed in the Civil War. It is in the lobby of Harvard’s Memorial Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served as an Assistant Surgeon in the US Navy in the Mississippi Squadron and drowned in the Mississippi River in March 1864.
Hawkeye was the only character on the TV series “MAS*H” whose hometown was fictional - in his case, Crabapple Cove, Maine. Other fictional Maine towns that have served as the settings of TV series include Cabot Cove (“Murder, She Wrote”), which became a ghost town after a killing spree by grandmotherly writer Jessica Fletcher, who oddly was never suspected, and Collinsport (“Dark Shadows”), where the residents of the Collins mansion oddly never changed over the centuries. Several films based on Maine resident Stephen King’s novels are also set in fictional Maine towns, most notably Shawshank (“The Shawshank Redemption” was filmed in Mansfield, Ohio).
A Star is Born has been filmed three times, originally with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March in the leads. Remakes were made in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, and again in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. The original tells the story of actor Norman Maine, who marries an aspiring actress and sees his career going downhill as she achieves greater fame.
Stephen King’s wife Tabitha has referred to several of her husband’s fictitious Maine towns, including Castle Rock, 'Salem’s Lot and Derry, in her own books.
Stephen King named Castle Rock after the fort Jack adopted as the base for his tribe in Lord of the Flies.
King Henry II of England and Ireland’s other titles included Count of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Duke (by right of marriage) of Aquitaine, and many lesser titles. His favorite residences were his castle at Chinon in Anjou, his de facto capitol which he rebuilt into one of the greatest castles in Europe, and Winchester Castle in England, where he eventually imprisoned his wife Eleanor in comfortable but heavily guarded house arrest.
John Ireland met and started seeing his future wife Joanne Dru on the set of the movie Red River. Hollywood rumor has it that director Howard Hawks also had a thing for Dru, and quietly reduced Ireland’s part in the movie as punishment.
Guglielmo Marconi, pioneer of wireless telegraphy, was half Irish - his mother was Anna Jameson of the Jameson Irish Whiskey Jamesons of Dublin. Jameson family money and business connections in Britain were key to Marconi’s founding his telecommunications empire there.
David Sarnoff was a manager at the American Marconi Wireless Company. He did nothing to deny the story that he stayed at his post for three days relaying messages about the sinking of the Titanic. When General Electric bought American Marconi and formed the Radio Corporation of America, Sarnoff’s constant advocacy about using radio as a commerical mass communication medium led to his promotion to manager of RCA’s broadcast division, later known as NBC.