The moose seen walking during the opening credits of the Northern Exposure TV series was named Mort (sometimes called Morty).
Comedian Mort Sahl used to perform at the hungry i nightclub at 546 Broadway St., San Francisco.
Tom Lehrer’s album That Was The Year That Was was recorded at the hungry i
The i in the name of the hungry i stood for “intellectual”, which represented target-marketing to a specific demographic. The name was echoed in that of the Naked I, a strip club in what was Boston’s “Combat Zone”, an area that set a national precedent by being legally designated for adult entertainment that has since been destroyed by home videos and the expansion of the thriving Chinatown adjacent to it.
Shecky Greene left the 1960s TV series Combat after eight episodes because he was losing money due to the filming time taking him away from his popular Las Vegas show.
When trainer Bob Greene first started working with Oprah Winfrey, he did not even own a television set, and knew very little about her. She asked him where he grew up, and he replied “New Jersey.”
Oprah: Oh, like Stedman.
Greene: You must mean Camden. I don’t know of a Stedman, New Jersey.
He could not figure out why she cracked up until she explained it.
Opened in 1992, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore was the first of the “retro” ballparks.
The “Green Monster” wall at Fenway Park in Boston was built only 315 feet from home plate at the left field line. Some measurements have indicated it might be even closer. Its location was dictated by the fact that Lansdown Street runs right behind it, and by that fact that, when it was built in 1912, no one was going to hit the ball to the wall, anyway.
At the major league level, anyway. Pilot Field in Buffalo came earlier.
The majority of the newer “retro” ballparks were designed by the architectural firm of HOK in St. Louis. The firm’s name is derived from the surnames of its three founding partners: George Hellmuth, Gyo Obata and George Kassabaum, all graduates of the School of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. The HOK Sport Venue division has since been spun off and is now named Populous.
One of the founders of Washington University in St. Louis was William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister whose grandson, Thomas Stearns Eliot, moved from the USA to England shortly before gaining fame as a poet.
John Greenleaf Whittier was one a group of 19th-century New England writers called the Fireside Poets, for their popularity (based in their conventional structures and accessible subjects) that rivaled that of contemporary British poets. Other members were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Richard Nixon was a graduate of Whittier College in Whittier, California, which was founded by the Quakers in 1887.
While running for Vice President in 1952, Richard Nixon admitted to receiving a little cocker spaniel dog as a gift, 6-year old Tricia naming it Checkers. He adamantly vowed to keep the dog even if some thought that corrupt.
Abraham Lincoln’s dog at the time of his election as president was named Fido. He was left with a family friend in Springfield and never actually lived in the White House, but as Lincoln became increasingly immortalized after his death Fido became an extremely popular name for dogs.
Dogs famously faithful to their masters include:
[ul][li]Fido, who visited a bus stop in Luco del Mugello (near Florence) every day until 1957 apparently hoping to find his master, who had been killed in an air raid in 1943, and[/li][li] the prgenitor of the Lyme Hall Mastiffs, who stood guard over his wounded master, Sir Peers de Legh, for several hours at the Battle of Agincourt.[/li][/ul]
The Battle of Agincourt is the climax of William Shakespeare’s play Henry V, which George Bernard Shaw once dismissed as “the National Anthem in five acts.”
The Battle of Agincourt is one of the most famous battles in history and must have set some record for deaths of high nobility, but had relatively little impact on the Hundred Years’ War. At the time of the battle, there was a 3-year old peasant girl in Domrémy, Jehanne d’Arc, whose historical impact might have exceeded that of King Henry V.
There have been five Royal Navy warships named HMS Agincourt. The last, a destroyer, was scrapped in 1974.
The Royal Navy has also had five warships named HMS Ark Royal. The first was the flagship of the English fleet that fought the Spanish Armada in 1588, and the third was an aircraft carrier whose Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers (fabric covered biplanes!) disabled the Bismarck.
The Bismarck Archipelago, once included in the German New Guinea protectorate, is now part of the Islands Region of Papua New Guinea.