The German-built Amphicar, built from 1961-1966, had 2 propellers and a body that was actually watertight when new, but failed commercially not only because of a limited market but from a serious rust/leakage problem. One owner said “We like to think of it as the fastest car on the water and fastest boat on the road.”. The Amphicar used the front wheels as rudders and had a British Triumph Herald engine.
People always complain about not having a flying car like they were promised but it is the consumer’s fault. Flying cars have been available since before 1949. The Aerocar is the most famous early examples of these but never took off so to speak. A newer model of flying car that is both fully air and road worthy is being built now in Massachusetts for the fairly low price of 200K or so and operators are standing by.
The Bee Gee’s first #1 UK hit was “Massachusetts.” The didn’t have a US #1 until two and a half years later with “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?”
The Gee Bee R-1 racing plane won the 1932 Thompson Trophy piloted by Jimmy Doolittle, who set a new aircraft speed record in the process. “Gee Bee” stood for “Granville Brothers”, the Springfield, Massachusetts outfit that designed it and built it in the former Rolls-Royce auto factory there (yes, it’s true). The Gee Bee had a distinctive appearance, looking like an engine with stub wings and little else, and was so dangerously unstable that it killed many of the pilots who tried to fly it.
In 1958, Thompson Products merged with the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation to form a company called TRW.
Thomson and Thompson are are the two detectives are friends and allies of Tintin in the various comic books. Their names in the original French were Dupont and Dupond, and, despite the rock group saying so, their names show they were not twins.
Graham Greene’s novel “The Power and the Glory”, about a whiskey priest, was originally titled “The Labyrinthine Ways”, which name comes from a line in Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven”.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was one of four novels by Arthur Conan Doyle that featured the great detective Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, Watson.
On May 4, 1975, Bob Watson of the Houston Astros was credited with scoring Major League Baseball’s one millionth run. Although Watson won $10,000 (one million cents) and 1,000,000 Tootsie Rolls for the accomplishment, later recalculations showed that the “countdown” to the milestone had been inaccurate, and that nobody actually knows who deserved the money and candy.
Houston served as the capital of the Republic of Texas from 1837-39. The capital was then moved to Austin, as it was closer to the western reaches.
Sam Houston is the only person to have served as the governor of two different states (Tennessee and Texas), and the only state governor or U.S. Senator to have once been a foreign head of state.
Sam Houston’s first marriage is a mystery to his biographers; he married Eliza Allen in January 1829 when he was 36 and governor of Tennessee and she was 18, and they separated within a month of their wedding for unknown reasons. He resigned the governorship in April and left Tennessee due largely to the scandal of his wife leaving him but he wrote to her parents that while their marriage was over he believed in her fidelity and virtue and asked them to “publish in the Nashville papers that if any wretch ever dares to utter a word against the purity of Mrs. Houston I will come back and write the libel in his heart’s blood”. A few years later he married in Cherokee fashion a half-blooded Cherokee woman, though he did not divorce Eliza until years later. After his Cherokee wife died he married a 21 year old Alabama woman (my grandmother’s grandmother’s sister) when he was 47 and they had 8 children, and his first wife Eliza remarried the same month.
The neighborhood in Manhattan called “Soho” is not named for the neighborhood in London of that name, but stands for “South of Houston Street.” The street’s name’s first syllable rhymes with house or mouse. The cuteness of the abbreviation has led to similar versions in other neighborhoods and cities - NYC’s own Tribeca means “Triangle Below Canal Street”, for instance.
The University of Massachusetts has always been called “UMass.” When the University of Connecticut followed suit and became “UConn” (prounounced Yu-kon), they changed the name of their sporting teams to the Huskies (get it: UConn Huskies?).
The UConn Huskies women’s basketball program has recorded 87 consecutive victories, winning both the 2009 and 2010 NCAA titles after 39-0 seasons and beginning the current campaign with a 9-0 mark. If the Huskies beat Ohio State on Sunday, coach Geno Auriemma will match John Wooden’s streak of winning 88 straight from 1971 to '74 as head of the UCLA men’s basketball squad.
I once shared a flight out of Hartford Airport with the UConn Huskies women’s basketball team!
Fans of the world-famous Ohio State University Marching Band refer to it as TBDBITL (The Best Damn Band In the Land).
Both the Ohio State and UMass marching bands (of which my daughter is a proud alumna trombonist 
) have been awarded the John Philip Sousa Foundation’s Sudler Trophy, which is “awarded annually to a college or university marching band which has demonstrated the highest musical standards and innovative marching routines and ideas, and which has made important contributions to the advancement of the performance standards of college marching bands over a period of years.”
(Ohio State used to be Ohio A&M, UMass has been both the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Massachusetts State College).
John Philip Sousa asked the G. G. Conn Company, instrument makers, to develop a version of the tuba that improved upon the helicon to play bass notes in a marching band. The instrument developed was named in his honor: the sousaphone.
John Philip Sousa was born in Washington, D.C. He conducted the U.S. Marine Band, “The President’s Own,” in recording several of his own compositions for Thomas Edison.
Con-man and liar Harold Hill sings the huge number “76 Trombones” in The Music Man as a commemoration of the “when Gilmore, Liberati, Pat Conway, the Great Creatore, W.C. Handy and John Philip Sousa all came to town on the very same historic day!”