Whitman Mayo is best known for the role of Grady Wilson in the tv series *Sanford & Son *(& also the short-lived spinoff Grady.)
In the 1988 Kevin Costner baseball movie (his first of three), Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon as the groupie narrates: "Walt Whitman once said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up. "
OK, I did. The fuller quote is "“It [baseball] will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.”
Walt Whitman, living in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War and serving as an attendant to wounded soldiers in hospitals there, was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. The two never met, as far as we know, although Whitman did see the President ride past in his carriage several times.
Walt Whitman wrote his poem “O Captain! My Captain!”, about the death of Abraham Lincoln, after his long-time companion, Peter Doyle, who was down in the audience at Ford’s Theatre watching “Our American Cousin” at the time of the assassination, returned home and related the incident to him.
Peter Boyle, best known for playing the monster in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein, later played Frank Barrone in Everybody loves Raymond. In one Halloween episode, he dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster.
Boyle’s Law states that, for an ideal gas at a given temperature, the pressure and volume are inversely proportional.
Writer T.C. Boyle’s first two initials stand for Tom Coraghessan. However, his original name was the more prosaic Thomas John Boyle.
Fictional writer T.S. Garp’s first two initials stood for Technical Sargeant. Garp was the soldier his mother used to impregnant herself in the 1940’s because she wanted a baby, not a husband. Garp had been lobotomized by a bullet and had a permanent erection, so Jenny just straddled him and got pregnant.
John Irving, author of The World According to Garp, is a great fan of wrestling, and includes a scene of wrestling in most of his books. He played a wrestling referee in the Robin Williams movie based on Garp.
Though Kathleen Turner was tapped to be the voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, her singing voice left something to be desired, so her singing was performed by Amy Irving.
According to tabloids at the time, Amy Irving married her long time partner and baby-daddy Stephen Spielberg in order to be his Plus-1 when he was presented to the queen. Their divorce not long after left her a very rich woman.
And1 is an athletic shoe company founded in 1993 by students at Penn’s Wharton School of Business. The name refers to a successful basketball shot accompanied by a following foul shot. Following an attempt to build “street cred” with a grainy video of razzle-dazzle shots, the company’s first celebrity player was the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Stephon Marbury, aka “Starbury”.
Walter Annenberg, who attended the Wharton School of Business but did not graduate, was the founding publisher of TV Guide and Seventeen magazine.
Desi Arnez, Jr. was the cover photo of the first issue of *TV Guide *in 1953 (accompanied by a small inset photo of his mother, Lucille Ball.)
B.B. King has named his guitar “Lucille” since the 1940s, after a couple of men set off a fire in a bar where he was performing fighting over a woman by that name. King ran back into the burning building to retrieve his guitar and chose the name to remind himself to never do anything as stupid as fighting over a woman or run into a burning building. He has had various Lucilles since then, made by different manufacturers, but most were Gibsons.
Somebody on the New York Knicks circa 1981, citing BB King naming his guitar, gave his own jump shot the name “Candace”. Sorry, but I don’t remember the player’s name.
Basketball player Anthony Michael Parker , currently with the Cleveland Caveliers, has a younger sister, Candace Nicole Parker who is a basketball player for the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
When Candace Parker was playing at Tennessee, Courtney Paris was starring for the Oklahoma Sooners. Because they had not only initials but a uniform number in common, each was known as “CP3” during her college days.
Parker, played by Yaphet Kotto, was the chief engineer of the USCSS Nostromo in the Ridley Scott-directed Alien.
Yaphet Kotto is both Jewish and also part of the royal family of Doualla, in Cameroon. He also claims descent from Queen Victoria.