When the Indian Terriotry of Oklahoma was opened for settlement in 1889, some of the settlers crossed the border early to find good spots to claim. They became known as “Sooners” because they had crossed the border too soon.
Oklahoma was the last continental state settled by Europeans.
Only one U.S. warship was ever named the USS Oklahoma: a battleship which was capsized and sunk during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, killing over 400 of her crew. She was later righted, raised and towed away, but sank while under tow on May 17, 1947.
Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! is considered the first “modern” musical, integrating story, song, and dance into one whole. Songs were used to advance characterization and plot, as was dance. Though some earlier shows had integrated song and story, Oklahoma! used all three.
Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, his prequel to The Wizard of Oz, was published in 1995, but gained international acclaim in 2003 when the musical adaption opened on Broadway. It has since become a world wide megahit, and Maguire has penned four sequels: Son of a Witch , A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz, along with four other retellings of fairy tales: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister , Lost, Mirror, Mirror and The Next Queen of Heaven.
Buddy Ebsen, of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame, was the original Tin Man in the 1939 movie. The gray paint make him sick, so he bowed out.
The gold painted actress, Jill Masterson, in the Bond film Goldfinger wasn’t killed by the gold paint applied to her supple flesh.
Old West lawman William Barclay “Bat” Masterson spent his last seventeen years as a writer and sports editor for the New York Morning Telegraph.
I think I played that one earlier. He died at his desk of a heart attack, I think.
“Buffalo soldiers” were Black soldiers serving in the Old West. The original ones were members of the US 10th Cavalry Regiment formed on September 21, 1866 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The nickname was given to them by the Indian tribes they fought, and the term eventually became applied to all of the Black regiments formed that year.
Leavenworth is the site of the U.S. Military prison.
In the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, Rufus T. Firefly suggested that Chiccolini be sentenced to “ten years in Leavenworth, or eleven years in Twelveworth.”
Karl Marx was for some time a European reporter for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.
Horace Greeley won the Democratic nomination for president in 1872, despite the fact he was a lifelong Republican and often denounced Democrats in his paper. He lost in a landslide to Grant, which was a good thing, since he died before the Electoral College met. His electoral votes were scattered among various candidates, including his VP running mate Benjamin Gratz Brown.
John Wilkes Booth wangled his way into a company of Richmond militia and attended the execution of abolitionist firebrand John Brown in Charles Town, Va. in December 1859.
Booth Tarkington, the early-20th-century Indiana author who wrote The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams as well as the Penrod series, was one of only three novelists (the others being William Faulkner and John Updike) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
A famous essay about Ted Williams’ final game, which appeared in the October 22, 1960 issue of The New Yorker, was John Updike’s only subject in sports writing.
In a season-12 episode of The Simpsons, “Insane Clown Poppy” (2000), John Updike is the ghost writer of a book that Krusty the Clown is promoting. The book’s title is Your Shoe’s Too Big To Kickbox God, a 20-page book written entirely by John Updike as a money-making scam.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court said, unprecedentedly, that its 5-4 presidential election decision Bush v. Gore in 2000 could not be used as precedent, it has been cited by lower courts in several elections and equal protection cases since then.
Gore Vidal’s father, aviation industry pioneer Gene Vidal, was a West Point football captain, Olympic decathlete, and one of the first Army aviators. Later, Vidal was Director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Air Commerce and helped found three American airlines during the 1920s and '30s; Eastern Airlines, TWA and Northeast Airlines, along with Amelia Earhart, whom he was nailing.
At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Jim Thorpe won both the pentathlon and decathlon.