Incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush ran behind both Democrat Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot in the voting returns in Maine, site of his Kennebunkport summer home, in the 1992 Presidential election.
Come on, man.
H. Ross Perot Jr. and Jay Coburn piloted the first round-the-world helicopter flight in September 1982, flying a Bell 206 L-1 Long Ranter II made in Fort Worth, TX, where the flight began and ended.
Fort Worth is the seventeenth-largest city in the US and the fifth largest in Texas.
Fort Worth is home to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
Van Cliburn is the only classical musician to get a Broadway ticker-tape parade, when he returned from his victory in the 1958 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, at the height of the Cold War. Cliburn’s performance at the competition finale of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 earned him a standing ovation lasting eight minutes. When it was time to announce a winner, the judges were obliged to ask permission of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev asked. “Then give him the prize!”
Tchaikovsky died after drinking a glass of unboiled water during a cholera epidemic.
Though that is not disputed, there are questions as to whether he died of cholera or something else. He made a big show of drinking that water, and there are conflicting accounts as to where he drank it, leading to the possibility that he did it for show at several places so it would be seen. There are also doubts as to the symptoms, which came on very rapidly for cholera. Some have suggested that he was committing suicide by taking poison, possible to prevent a scandal that was brewing over his homosexuality.
Elliot Frost, son of poet Robert Frost, also died of cholera.
Robert Frost, who recited a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy on Jan. 20, 1961, is buried in a churchyard family plot in Bennington, Vt.
Bennington NY was named after Bennington VT. It is located in Wyoming County, where he county seat is Warsaw.
The J.C. Penney “mother store” was founded in 1902 in Kemmerer, Wyoming. It is still in business, but has shorter hours of operation than most other locations in the chain.
Wyoming is named for the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, which was made famous in the 1809 poem “Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale” by Thomas Campbell (a Scot). The poem describes a massacre in 1778 by Loyalists and their Iroquois allies of 300 members of the rebel stronghold in the valley.
The state flag of Wyoming and the flag of the U.S. Department of the Interior both feature buffaloes.
The “Big Five” of game hunting – the animals most dangerous to hunt – are the African elephant, rhinoceros, Cape buffalo, lion, and leopard. Of the five, the Cape buffalo is considered the most dangerous.
The Black Rhinoceros has 84 chromosomes, the most of any mammalian species.
Sirius Black, brother of Regulus Black, was Harry Potter’s godfather, a close friend of his parents James and Lily during their Hogwarts days, and the title character of J.K. Rowling’s The Prisoner of Azkaban. He fell in a magical battle against Voldemort’s minions.
The jet-engine-powered SSM-N-8 Regulus was the Navy’s first submarine-launched cruise missile, deployed in the fleet from 1955 to 1964. Each missile sub carried 2 of them in a hangar just aft of the sail. One Regulus sub, USS Growler, is now open for tours at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in Manhattan.
The Regulus was made by Chance Vought Aircraft, best known for the F4U Corsair, the official state airplane of Connecticut (the only state to have one), where it and most of its components were made.
George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Conn. on July 6, 1946, the eldest child of George H.W. and Barbara Bush, but moved with his family while still very young, and was raised in Midland and Houston, Tex.
James Haven is the brother of Angelina Jolie and the pair made headlines and tabloids for their implicitly incestuous kissing and flirting (though it’s generally believed to have been a publicity stunt). Both are the children of Jon Voight, though both dropped his surname due to personal issues.
Jon Voight played FDR in the highly ahistorical blockbuster Pearl Harbor. Voight is personally pretty conservative, unlike Roosevelt.
Another Voight who changed his surname was Jon’s songwriting brother Wes. Known as Chip Taylor, he penned Wild Thing (the 1966 Troggs hit) and Angel of the Morning (recorded separately by Juice Newton, Merrilee Rush, Dusty Springfield, and many more).