Not for play: About three years ago, Ted Sorensen was interviewed by Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and was asked who had actually written “Profiles and Courage”. Sorensen replied “ask not”.
For play: When, in 1997, JFK Jr. in his “George” magazine called RFK’s sons Michael (affair with the babysitter) and Representative Joe (various domestic woes) “poster boys for bad behavior”, Joe replied “Ask not what you can do for your cousin, but what you can do for his magazine”.
Joe Cartwright, the youngest son on Bonanza, was played by Michael Landon. After Adam goes off to sea and Hoss dies, Joe becomes the only Cartwright brother to ever get married on the series. He was wed to Alice Harper, who became pregnant before she was murdered by the men to whom her brother owed a gambling debt.
For a time in the 1960s, Paul Newman appeared in a series of films with “H” in the title: The Huster, Hud, Hombre, Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. It was more than coincidence; when he was cast in the lead of a detective film based on Ross Macdonald’s detective Lou Archer, the character (and film name) was changed to Harper. The change may have been for copyright reasons, but the selection seems to have been due to Newman’s liking the “H.”
Hubert H. Humphrey, who served as Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, first gained national prominence in 1948 when, as mayor of Minneapolis, he forcefully advocated a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic party platform.
Humphrey was known as “the Happy Warrior,” and was once so exuberant in explaining his policy views to Frank Sinatra that the singer growled, “Hands off the threads, creep!”
In 1928, The New York Yankees “Muderer’s Row” lineup posed holding, in place of their usual bats, signs reading “For”, “Al”, and “Smith”, in support of Alfred E. Smith, “the Happy Warrior” and first Roman Catholic major party candidate for president.
Although a 1918 article alluded to the first six batters in the Yankees’ lineup as a “murderers’ row”, the classic late-1920’s members of the select group were Earle Combs, Mark Koenig, Babe Ruth. Lou Gehrig, Bob Meusel, and Tony Lazzeri.
Beaten to the punch.
Bob Feller, legendary Cleveland Indians hurler, died late last year. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and ended up serving aboard the battleship USS Alabama. He is the only former chief petty officer in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Cleveland Cavaliers and Kraft Macaroni & Cheese were in the news last week for offering voiceover work to homeless viral video star Ted Williams.
The Canadian term for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, “Kraft Dinner”, became known to Americans by its mention in the Barenaked Ladies song “If I Had a Million Dollars”. BNL observed that they would no longer have to eat the stuff, but, in fact they’d eat more, with fancy Dijon ketchup. Their fans traditionally bring boxes of the stuff to throw at the stage when they reach that line in the song.
Forty-two varieties of cheese (including the nonexistent but delightfully evocative Venezuelan Beaver Cheese) are mentioned in Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop sketch.”
French President Charles de Gaulle once lamented, “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
As a French Army officer, Charles de Gaulle presciently wrote before World War II of the likely importance of fast attacks by tanks in any future conflict. The Germans agreed, using blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) tactics to conquer France.
German WWII officer General Heinz Guderian, a leading architect of the * blitzkrieg*, found SS commander Heinrich Himmler “an inconspicuous man with all the marks of racial inferiority”.
The Heinz Regional History Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., has extensive exhibits on the food company as well as on the French and Indian War, Fort Pitt, the American Revolution, the industrialization of Pittsburgh, labor unrest, the glory days of the Steelers and Pirates, and so on.
“Glory Days” was the fifth single released from Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born in the USA. Its first verse tells of a man who was once a great baseball pitcher back in high school (“He could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool”), but has never moved on psychologically.
The Rock Bottom Remainders are a band formed by famous authors, including Dave Barry, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, Cynthia Heimel, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, Sam Barry, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow, Joel Selvin, James McBride, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groening, Tad Bartimus, and Greg Iles. Bruce Sprinsteen once played with them, using Barry’s Guitar. He later remarked “Your band’s not too bad. It’s not too good either. Don’t let it get any better, otherwise you’ll just be another lousy band.”
“Stand By Me” is the only movie based on a Stephen King work which does not share it’s title with the source material. (“The Body”)
Stephen King credits his mother, a very elegant woman, with providing him with what she appreciatively called “trash” to read when he was a child, and thus instilling in him a love of genre fiction like mystery, horror, crime and science fiction.