John Anderson had been a centrist Republican congressman from Illinois before his 1980 run for the Presidency as an independent; he and incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter both lost to Republican challenger Ronald Reagan, who was also originally from Illinois.
Longtime Cincinnati Bengals QB Ken Anderson attended Augustana College
in Rock Island IL.
I read years ago that the reason Anderson went there was that he could
take Swedish for credit (he grew up in a bilingual Swedish-English family,
and Augustana had become oriented toward Swedish-Americans in the late 1800s).
I interpreted that as meaning Anderson might not have been smart enough
to pass any other foreign language. However, according to his Wiki bio
he was an excellent student.
The first name used most often for a character in multiple skits on** Monty Python’s Flying Circus** was “Ken.”
Graham Chapman, who had gone to medical school, acted as the unofficial set “doctor” during filming of the the various Monty Python movies. He kept a short journal of the care he provided, which was published in the trade paperback for The Life of Brian.
Despite the fact that Mark David Chapman was apprehended andd arrested at the sight, plead guilty and is now serving prison time for the murder of John Lennon, there is a nutjob who insists the crime was really committed by Stephen King.
Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre that his mother, a very sophisticated woman who loved to read, would sometimes give him books she described as “trash, but good trash.”
One of the recurring characters in the Pogo comic strip was Sarcophagus MacAbre, a buzzard who was the swamp’s undertaker, speaking in word balloons that looked like death notices, bordered in black.
WMMS, one of Cleveland, Ohio’s oldest and most time-honored rock-and-roll radio stations, is known as “The Buzzard.”
While working at WJW radio in Cleveland, disc jockey Alan Freed popularized the term “rock and roll.”
Just south of Cleveland is Hinckley, where the annual “return of the buzzards” is the basis for a civic festival. It was inspired, perhaps after a few drinks, by the return of the swallows to Capistrano, CA, an event made famous in a song by the Ink Spots.
A later Secret Service review of crowd footage showed that John Hinckley shadowed President Jimmy Carter during the last days of the 1980 presidential campaign before turning his attention to the newly-elected Ronald Reagan, whom he wounded in a March 1981 assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton.
I don’t see the connection here. However, considering the thread has grown by about 20 posts since then, I’ll just play off Elendil’s Heir’s latest:
Gordon Hinckley, who died in office at the age of 97 years and 7 months, was the oldest person to serve as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I think Ike Witt may have mistakenly latched onto your earlier reference to Wyoming on the same page.
In play: The oldest medalist at a Summer Olympic Games was Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn, who was 72 when he won a silver medal at the 1920 Antwerp Games.
After it was liberated by Allied forces late in World War II, Antwerp was hit by more V-2 weapons than all other targets the Germans aimed at combined. The Germans were attempting to destroy Antwerp’s port facilities, which gave the Allies the ability to bring in huge amounts of men and material.
During the Vietnam War, more bombs than fell on all of Europe during World War II were dropped on Laos alone. Up to 30% of them failed to detonate.
Sen. John McCain, Republican of Arizona, played a key role in helping President Bill Clinton normalize diplomatic and trade relations with Vietnam, despite having been tortured while in Vietnamese custody as a captured U.S. Navy aviator.
The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 was intended to facilitate construction of a southern route for the transcontinental railroad. It added nearly 30,000 square miles in Arizona and New Mexico and was the last major territory addition to the 48 contiguous states.
The Long Island Railroad was built with an eye to getting contracts to move mail from New York to Boston by bypassing some impenetrable forests in Connecticut; the plan was to put it on ships at its terminus in Greenport, NY, and take it from there to another rail link in Connecticut or Rhode Island. In order to build it quickly, it was built as straight as possible, in areas where there was little population (who might be willing to sell the land cheaply). By the time it was completed, the impenetrable forests of Connecticut turned out to be penetrable after all, and the LIRR was stuck with a railroad that avoided most of the population centers of the area it served. It managed to survive until Long Island became a suburban area after WWII and became the busiest commuter railroad in North America.
Characters in John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year regularly take the Long Island Railroad.
On his long-running novelty-song show on syndicated radio, Dr. Demento often plays Frank Gallop’s “Ballad of Irving”, the hundred-and-forty-second-fastest gun in the West.
*He came from the old Bar Mitzvah spread,
With a 10-gallon yarmulke on his head.
He always followed his mother’s wishes,
Even on the range he used two sets of dishes. *