Russell Johnson, better known to most as the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, played the guy who spun the Chuck-a-Luck wheel in Rancho Notorious.
Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, was born in West Virginia. He eventually rose to become a general in the U.S. Air Force. He had a cameo appearance as a bartender in the movie The Right Stuff, in which he was played by Sam Shepard.
Ace began in World War I as a term for a pilot who had five confirmed combat kills. In World War II Chuck Yeager became one of an elite few to earn the title “ace in a day” by shooting down 5 Nazi planes on a single mission.
Yeager also got credit for shooting down an Me262 Jet while
(necessarily) piloting a propeller-driven aircraft himself.
This might not have been as exceptional a feat of combat
skill as it seems at first glance. The Me262 was vulnerable
during takeoff and landing, and lacked the manoeverability
of the P51 Mustang, the best all-round fighter of the war,
and the plane probably being used by Yeager.
In the US military, a “mustang officer” is one who was previously in the enlisted ranks. The highest rank ever attained by a mustang was that of General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1993-7, who entered the US Army as a draftee.
Shalikashvili’s father was a Russian-Revolutionary era Georgian exile
who seved with the German armed forces in WW2. The whole family
endured numerous harrowing experiences before luckily winding up
in the US after the war.
Shalikashvili did not learn of his father’s Axis military service until his
CJCS confirmation hearings.
Stalin was born in the Republic of Georgia
Georgia on My Mind was written by Hoagy Carmichael, either for his sister, named Georgia, or for the state. It has been recorded by artists as disparate as Louis Armstrong, Michael Bolton, Ray Charles, Glenn Miller and Willie Nelson. An instrumental version by Doc Severinson was the theme for the sitcom Designing Women.
The author Ian Fleming, who served as a spy himself during WWII, said that Hoagy Carmichael looked a lot like his mental image of his creation, British superspy James Bond.
Fleming also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Art Fleming, best known as the original host of Jeopardy!, was earlier the first person to deliver the grammatically-incorrect but eminently successful “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” slogan on the air.
Hubert Humphrey pedantically corrected the 1960s cultural working SOP
“Tell it like it is” to “Tell it as it is”.
Might have cost him the '68 election.
That Vietnam thing might have hurt him a little, too.
Humphrey was the name the media applied to a humpback whale that twice entered San Francisco Bay and upstream into the Sacramento River, on his annual migration from Mexico to Alaska, in both 1985 and 1990. Both times he required rescue by the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County, with assistance from the US Coast Guard and numerous volunteers.
The U.S. Coast Guard’s training vessel, the sailing ship USCGC Eagle, was originally a Nazi German vessel named the Horst Wessel. In German service during World War II, she shot down three Soviet aircraft and, through “friendly fire,” one German aircraft. The pilot survived and was shown to have been using the wrong radio codes that day.
Horst Ludwig Wessel was the author of the lyrics to the song “Die Fahne hoch” (“Raise High the Flag”), usually known as Horst-Wessel-Lied (“the Horst Wessel Song”), which became the Nazi Party anthem and, de facto, Germany’s co-national anthem from 1933 to 1945.
According to the U.S. Flag Code, made part of the United States Code but not legally enforceable for First Amendment reasons, the only flag that should ever be flown above the U.S. flag on the same flagstaff is a Christian flag, and then only aboard U.S. Navy vessels while religious services are actually being conducted at sea.
Per earlier post: LBJ’s comment “Hell, Ah keep Hubert’s balls in mah back pocket” didn’t help HHH any, either.
England’s Cross of St. George flag became its symbol during the early Crusades, as a Christian flag. Wiki dump follows:
Although the Pope decided English crusaders would be distinguished by wearing a white cross on red, and French crusaders a red cross on white (Italian knights were allocated a yellow cross on a white background), English knights soon decided to claim “their” cross of red on white, like the French. In January 1188, in a meeting between Henry II of England and Philip II of France, the two rivals agreed to exchange flags (France later changed its new white cross on red for a white cross on a dark blue flag). Some French knights carried on using the red cross however, and as English knights wore this pattern as well, the red cross on white became the typical crusader symbol regardless of nationality.
King Arthur is dubbed a knight “in the name of God, St. Michael and St. George” by a rival claimant to the crown in the 1981 John Boorman sword-and-sorcery epic Excalibur.
From 1990 to 2000, the USA metropolitan area which gained the greatest percentage of population was the set of communities centered in St. George, Utah.