(I’m sorry to have missed the Henry Clay references; I pass his house almost every day!
Playing …
Van Morrison’s real name is George Ivan Morrison.
Van Johnson relieves the mentally unstable Humphrey Bogart of command, in “The Caine Mutiny.”
After winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, 24-year-old pianist Van Cliburn received the only ticker-tape parade which New York has ever given to a classical musician.
Van Cliburn, who was born in Shreveport, La., played for Reagan and Gorbachev at a White House summit in 1987.
The Shreveport Pirates were a franchise in the Canadian Football League’s brief attempt to expand into the US in 1994-5.
Shreveport hosts the annual Independence Bowl, which was once sponsored by the Poulan Weedeater garden tool.
Born and raised in Beaver Falls, PA, Joe Namath received offers from six Major League Baseball teams before deciding to play football.
[del]Scofield won a Tony, an Oscar, a Golden Globe and several other awards for his portrayal on stage and on screen of the English statesman/Catholic saint (and ancestor of Robert E. Lee) Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS.[/del]
Bear Bryant called Joe Namath the best player he ever coached but astonished many Bama fans when in spite of being a college football superstar he suspended him for two games due to breaking curfew.
The 1995 movie Crimson Tide takes place on the nuclear submarine U.S.S. Alabama. “Crimson Tide” is, of course, also the nickname of the University of Alabama’s sports teams.
“They call Alabama the Crimson Tide” is a line from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blue”.
In the decade before the U.S. Civil War the U. of Alabama was a military college nicknamed “South Point”, or “the West Point of the South”; because of its role in training cadets and officers it was burned to the ground during the final month of the war (April 1865) by U.S. General James Wilson’s “Raiders”.
Paul Revere (his real name, by the way) and the Raiders only had one single that went to #1 on the Billboard charts: “Indian Reservation.”
[del]Since it’s hard to create a costume representative of Crimson Tide, the University of Alabama uses an elephant as its mascot. There are conflicting stories as to the origin of “Big Al”.[/del]
Paul Revere and the Raiders played themselves on an episode of Batman which featured the band performing at a rally for Gotham City mayoral candidate Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, better known as The Penguin.
The Siamese royal government in ancient times used elephants to execute criminals by squashing their heads.
The real name of the father of Paul Revere (the silversmith, not the singer) was Apollos de Rivoire; he was a French Huguenot who Anglicized his named when he moved to Boston.
Mongkut, the king upon whom The King and I is (vvvveeeeeeeerrrrrrryyyy) loosely based, was a celibate Buddhist monk from the age of 20 until his mid 40s, when he became King Rama IV and fathered 82 children in 14 years.
Mohandas’ Gandhi’s last words were “Oh, Rama!”
Years before Rosa Parks defied Jim Crow laws, Mohandas Gandhi was beaten by a stagecoach driver in Natal (now part of South Africa) for refusing to move to the vehicle’s foot board in order to make room for a European passenger.
When Rosa Parks, a native of Tuskegee, left Montgomery she took a job at Hampton University, the alma mater of Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute.