In 1992, all of the major candidates for President - Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Ross Perot of Texas and President George H.W. Bush of Texas - were lefthanded, as is the current incumbent, Barack Obama of Illinois.
The title of *The Left Handed Gun *(1958), starring Paul Newman and adapted from a Gore Vidal teleplay, was based on the reversed image-influenced idea that Billy the Kid was lefthanded.
Billy the Kid’s given name was William Bonney.
Anne Bonney and Mary Read are the most famous – and ferocious – women pirates in history, and they are the only ones known to have plied their trade in the Western Hemisphere.
Playing off both the above:
Billy the Kid’s birth and early years are disputed by biographers. While he definitely went by the name William Bonney most historians believe he was born Henry McCarty, the son of impoverished Irish immigrants in the slums of New York City, though some claim his name was Henry Antrim (which sounds like a pseudonym- Antrim being a county in Ulster). His death is also debated, with some historians claiming his death was faked and the real ‘Kid’ changed his name and identity again.
Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created the TV show "Get Smart.: The opening scene of the series was prophetic – it showed a theater audience being disturbed by a phone ringing in its midst.
Buck Henry was injured during a skit on “Saturday Night Live”, a slash to the forehead, delivered by John Belushi. Cast members wore bandages for the rest of the episode in solidarity.
Richard Sanders was injured during the taping of the pilot episode of *WKRP in Cincinatti *and forced to wear a bandage. After that his character, Les Nessman, wore a bandage somewhere on his body in every episode.
When (Kentucky) Colonel Harland Sanders appeared as the guest on “What’s My Line”?, the unblindfolded panel failed to guess that he ran a fried chicken company, but he was recognized as “a southern gentleman” by Arlene Francis.
When the American Basketball Association shut down in 1976, four of its remaining six teams joined the NBA: the Indiana Pacers, Denver Nuggets, New York Nets, and San Antonio Spurs. The two survivors that were folded, due to inadequate market size, were the Spirits of St. Louis and the Kentucky Colonels, who played in Louisville. Colonels owner John Y. Brown, owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and later the state’s governor, and who later bought (and badly damaged, thanks to meddling by his wife, Phyllis George) the Boston Celtics, took a one-time $3M cash settlement, but the owners of the Spirits took a perpetual share of NBA TV revenues instead that has added up to over $250M since.
Charles Lindbergh took along a bag of sandwiches with him when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis from the U.S. to France, but was concentrating so hard on flying the plane that, relieved but starved, he didn’t eat anything until he passed over the Irish coast and knew he was very close to the end of his trip.
Captain James Cook named Hawaii the Sandwich Islands when he “discovered” them, after his boss, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, PC, FRS, First Lord of the Admiralty. Besides his idea of putting a slice of beef between two slices of bread, so he could dine without leaving the card table, Sandwich is otherwise best known as the target of one of the great snarks in the history of the English language. In a famous exchange with the actor Samuel Foote, Sandwich declared, “Foote, I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end; but I think, that you must either die of the pox, or the halter.” “My lord”, replied Foote instantaneously, “that will depend upon one of two contingencies; – whether I embrace your lordship’s mistress, or your lordship’s principles.”
The radical politician John Wilkes has also been credited with that riposte.
Two of the great explorer Capt. James Cook’s ships have been memorialized by naming space shuttles after them, Discovery and Endeavour, the latter of which was so named after thousands of American schoolchildren in a national poll suggested it.
The first public excursion trip by train was organized by Thomas Cook in 1841, who convinced a railroad to charge a set rate in exchange for Cook’s promoting a trip to a temperance lecture.
The longest plane trip in terms of time and distance is held by two men, Robert Timm and John Cook, who stayed aloft for over 64 days in 1958 - 1959 in a Cessna 172 through low altitude refueling from moving trucks.
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The Cessna 172 (most versions are called Skyhawk) is the most-produced airplane in history, with over 43,000 having been made since 1956. Factories producing it have been in Wichita and Independence, Kansas and Reims, France. It is not yet the airplane with the longest production run, however - the Lockheed C-130 Hercules has been in production continuously since 1954. Besides, Cessna suspended manufacture of single-engined aircraft 1986-1994 until a new law limiting product liability for aircraft manufacturers was passed.
President John F. Kennedy, who had already served in the U.S. Senate for three years by 1956, kept on his Oval Office desk the coconut shell onto which he’d scratched a request for help after the sinking of PT-109.
A veryfamous photofrom 1963 showed JFK sitting at the Oval Office desk while his two year old son John-John played in the not-so-secret compartment.
The Kennedy’s NEVER called JFK Jr. “John John”.
JFK Jr. was the only People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” who was not primarily known as an actor (though he had appeared in several plays while a student at Brown, and does have IMDb credits).