The expression “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” refers to White Sox player “Shoeless Joe” Joseph Jefferson Jackson, who helped throw the 1910 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds for $5000. The elgend has it that when the story came out, a young boy met Jackson coming out of the stadium and said “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
<nitpick> The 1919 World Series was thrown. <nitpick>
<game> Joe Jackson has the highest career Batting Average of any player not in the Hall of Fame. <game>
Jackson initially confessed to accepting money to throw the Series, but later recanted his confession. His actual involvement remains controversial. Sox third baseman George “Buck” Weaver accepted no money but admitted knowing of the plot and not telling anyone. He, too, was banned for life from baseball.
After her death, most of Eva Peron’s jewelry was sold at auction. The bulk of them were bought by Newark, New Jersey jeweler George J. Busch.
Busch Stadium in St. Louis replaced Sportsman’s Park, which in its later years had also been called Busch Stadium, after the local family best known for brewing Budweiser. It included bronze statues of Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Dizzy Dean, Rogers Hornsby, Red Schoendienst, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, James 'Cool Papa Bell, George Sisler, Jack Buck and Ozzie Smith.
Sonny Shroyer played Deputy Enos Straight on Dukes of Hazzard and a short lived spinoff; he also played Bear Bryant in Forrest Gump and a family abusing redneck in the critically acclaimed (but also short lived) series I’ll Fly Away.
Beatrice Straight won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Network, despite appearing on screen for five minute and forty seconds.
One of Peter O’Toole’s anecdotes about his drinking days is the night he and his pal, Network star Peter Finch, went to the only pub still open in a small town way past midnight and the owner refused to serve them because they were already so drunk. That was, per O’Toole, the last thing he and Finch remembered of the evening until they woke up the next morning and one of them looked at his checkbook, then the other did, and they realized they had bought the bar (each paying half the purchase price with a check).
The bar owner did not cash them and ended up becoming friends with the two.
Victor Kiam liked the Remington shaver so much, he bought the company.
Victor Hugo spent the last 15 years of the reign of Napoleon III in exile from France on the English Channel Island of Guernsey, a culturally English island whose occupation by the Nazis is central to the plot of the bestselling novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
The final immigrant to be processed through Ellis Island in New York, in 1954, was a Norwegian merchant seaman.
Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca, whose own Italian ancestors had come through Ellis Island, was the honorary chair of the 1986 restoration and refurbishment of the immigration station there, and the nearby Statue of Liberty.
Havelock Ellis was an English physician who, along with John Addington Symonds, wrote the first English-language study of homosexuality, in 1896.
The 1st modern Olympics were held in 1896 in Athens, home of the Ancient Olympics.
Ray Ewry won eight gold medals in the 1900, 1904, and 1908 Olympics in Paris, St. Louis, and London in the standing long jump, the standing high jump, and the standing hop, step, and jump (events no longer contested). He also won two in the 1906 games in Athens, which was an Olympic level event at the time. If those two were counted, he’s be the most successful Olympic athlete of all time; as it is, his eight medals puts him second.
The defending Olympic champion in rugby union, which will be contested at the 2012 London games, is the United States, which won the gold in both 1920 and 1924, at Antwerp and Paris. In 1920, the US players had mostly never played the game before, but most of the team returned for the next Olympiad.
The winners of the Rugby World Cup tournament, to be played this year in NZ, receive the William Webb Ellis cup. Webb Ellis was reputed to be the originator of rugby football when he caught the ball and ran forward with it during a footbal game at Rugby School. However the story is now thought to be incorrect with no first hand evidence available.
“Macarthur Park,” written by Jimmy Webb and sung by Richard Harris, is often high on any list of worst rock songs of all time.
The primary setting of Jerry Niven and Larry Pournelle’s classic first-contact novel The Mote in God’s Eye is the Imperial battlecruiser MacArthur.
Jesus’ parable of the mote and the beam was part of the Sermon on the Mount, in the book of Matthew. In the King James translation, its full (brief) text goes