Harry Truman was a captain of artillery in France during World War I, and by all accounts served bravely and capably. He kept in touch with comrades from his battery for the rest of his life, and many of them helped him in his political career.
The final act of the movie Glory reenacts the bloodbath of the assault on Battery Wagner, a fortress on a small island in Charleston harbor, by the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. The 54th suffered 50% casualties, though ironically the highest single day fatalities on Morris Island occurred a few months later when drunk soldiers accidentally caused a fire that set off captured Confederate gunpowder and killed 300 Union troops.
Battery Wagner was long ago washed into the sea and no longer exists. Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial to the 54th Massachusetts on Boston Common, just across the street from the State House, has lasted much longer.
The most valuable baseball card was one of Hall-of-Famer Honus Wagner, put out by the American Tobacco Company. Wagner insisted they halt production of the card. There are less than 60 known, and on sold for over $2.5 million in 2007.
Jim Steinman’s love of Richard Wagner’s music inspired him to create “Wagnerian rock.” He is quoted as using the phrase in the liner notes of the Meat Loaf album, “Rock 'N Roll Hero.” The term is used to refer to a merger of twentieth century rock and roll and nineteenth-century opera reminiscent of Wagner.
Richard Wagner was an ardent anti-Semite whose work was much admired by Adolf Hitler. The performance of Wagner’s work was illegal for many years in Israel; the first public performance there after the law changed was interrupted by protests from Holocaust survivors.
Richard Hatch, winner of the first series of Survivor (US version), goes by the name of “Rich” to reduce confusion with the actor Richard Hatch (Apollo on original BSG, Zarek on reimagined BSG).
Richard Finch, musician and co-founder of K C & the Sunshine Band, co-wrote 6 #1 Billboard Hot 100 hits, but in a 1983 legal agreement, he lost his royalties to the songs he wrote with Casey and receives no money from them.
Finch was recently sentenced to prison for having ex with teenaged males, ages 13 to 17.
Better ex than sex, I guess.
Richard M. Nixon went to Whittier College, where he heard U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas speak on public service. Many years later he told Douglas that the speech had inspired him to go into politics. Douglas later confided to a friend, “I was never closer to committing suicide than at that moment.”
{now for REALLY trivial trivia}
Whittier Boulevard, a residential thoroughfare in Bethesda, MD, is the location of Walt Whitman High School. One of its alumni, Ryan Kuelh '90, was on the NY Giants team that won Super Bowl XLII. Ryan and I were classmates (although neither our activities nor our classes overlapped, AFAICR).
Tom Sizemore, who played Sgt. Horvath in Saving Private Ryan, has battled drug addiction since age 15 and has had repeated brushes with the law.
Horvath is the Hungarian word for “Croat”.
In My Fair Lady, Eliza, having been taught a proper upper-class British accent by Henry Higgins, goes to a ball in order to see whether anyone is fooled. A colleague of Higgins, Zoltan Karpathy, who claims to be even better than Higgins at determining an accent, carefully listens to Eliza and determines she isn’t what she seems to be. But instead of identifying her as a cockney, Karpathy is certain that she is Hungarian.
New England Patriots rookie punter Zoltan Mesko is the first player with that first name ever to play in the NFL. When he was at the University of Michigan, T-shirts reading “Zoltan for Space Emperor (of Space)” were reportedly a hot seller.
Brothers Alexander, Zoltan, and Vincent Korda were all filmmakers. Vincent’s son Michael wrote the book Charmed Lives about the family’s history.
Zoltan Kodaly was a Hungarian composer, educator and musicologist. His study of folk music was embraced by his protege, Bela Bartok. He also introduced a system of hand signs to signify musical notes that was featured in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In My Fair Lady Zoltan Karpathy is a former student of Henry Higgins who “uses the science of speech/more to blackmail and swindle than teach” and so Higgins is delighted when he ‘misdiagnoses’ Eliza Doolittle as being a Hungarian princess rather than a Cockney flower girl. Karpathy was portrayed by Israeli actor Theodore Bikel in the movie.
Theodore Bikel played Sergey Rozhenko, the Russian adoptive father of Worf and a retired Starfleet NCO, in the 1990 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Family.”
Although his background was in folksinging, Bikel came to stardom in the US by playing Captain Von Trapp on Broadway in “The Sound of Music”.
After viewing The Trapp Family, a 1956 West German film about the von Trapp family, and its 1958 sequel, The Trapp Family in America , stage director Vincent J. Donehue thought that the project would be perfect for his friend Mary Martin; Broadway producers Leland Hayward and Richard Halliday (Martin’s husband) agreed