Ralph Boston competed in three Olympic games in the long jump, winning a gold, silver, and bronze medal. He was the world record holder in the event, beating Jesse Owen’s 25-year-old record in 1960 and holding it until Bob Beamon broke it in the 1968 Olympics.
beaten to the punch.
The Oscar-nominated, Ben Affleck-written, -acted and -directed bank-robbery thriller The Town is set in Boston.
Stephen King, who admits most of his books are based on the fusing of two ideas together, says “Salem’s Lot” was his fusion of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town.”
George R.R. Martin’s vampires-along-the-Mississippi novel Fevre Dream is essentially a fusion of Mark Twain’s and Bram Stoker’s works.
Brett Favre, a native of Kiln, Mississippi who now lives in Hattiesburg, where he played college football at Southern Miss, was drafted by and originally played for the Atlanta Falcons in the NFL. The Green Bay Packers got him for a first-round pick that Atlanta used on Tony Smith (Who? Exactly). He won 3 MVP awards but only 1 Super Bowl in a career which finally seems to have ended.
[del]Samuel Clemens invented a game he called Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder. Designed to teach historical facts, it was too complicated for the general public, and sold poorly.[/del]
Southern Miss alumni who have played Major League Baseball include pitcher Chad Bradford, infielder Jarrett Hoffpauir, and pitcher Pat Rapp.
An episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 indicated that Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise, had once attended Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi at Oxford).
The role of the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life (“Look at me. I’m making angels”) was played by Sheldon Leonard, who appeared in dozens of films, usually as a gangster or lowlife due to his distinctive way of speech. As his acting career waned in the 1950s, he started producing TV shows, including The Dick van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Danny Thomas Show, I Spy, (one of the first shows to have Black and White cast members who treated each other as equals) and Gomer Pyle, USMC
Bill Cosby of I Spy fame is the only actor to have four TV shows with titles based on his real name: The Bill Cosby Show, The Cosby Show, Cosby and Cos.
Bob Newhart also had four TV shows named after him. A short-lived 1960’s variety show and 1970’s sitcom both named the Bob Newhart Show, Newhart and Bob. Newhart once joked that if he ever had another show, it would be called simply* B*.
Newhart departed from his usual practice by playing George Stoody opposite Judd Hirsch’s Leo Wagonman on the short-lived sitcom George & Leo.
Judd Hirsch played a principled but burned-out TV producer in the pilot episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived followup series after the far more successful *The West Wing. *
After leaving The Donna Reed Show, Carl Betz, who played her husband, switched genres into the legal drama Judd, for the Defense.
James Forrestal, the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, committed suicide by jumping from an upstairs window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He had wrestled with depression for awhile.
The aircraft carrier USS Forrestal was the first in the US Navy to have been built for jets, with an angled steel deck and steam catapults. She was nicknamed “Forest Fire”, “Firestall” and “Zippo” for several fires, including one in 1967 in the Gulf of Tonkin that killed 134 sailors. With his aircraft surrounded by flames, LCDR John McCain, pilot of A-4 Skyhawk side No. 416, escaped by climbing out of the cockpit, walking down the nose and jumping off the refueling probe before his plane was destroyed by a cooked-off bomb.
The Chinese characters used to write “Tonkin” are identical to the kanji used to write “Tokyo” in Japanese.
The 1954 film Godzilla is credited as the first in which a kaiju monster destroys Tokyo. The story was inspired by the fate of the Lucky Dragon 5, a Japanese fishing boat which was contaminated by radioactivity from the unexpectedly-strong Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll, with further inspiration from the 1953 Ray Harryhausen work The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The monster’s name (“Gojira” in truer phonetic Japanese) is a combination of the words for “gorilla” and “whale”.
In Monsters Inc (2001), the restaurant that Billy Crystal’s character Mike takes his girlfriend to is called Harryhausen (or Harryhausen’s), in homage to the animation legend Ray Harryhausen.
Country singer Crystal Gayle, the youngest of eight children, is the only one of the eight born in a hospital.