Not long after becoming President, John F. Kennedy was talking to an aide in a room in the White House residence. A phone rang which neither had realized was there before, and Kennedy answered it. The caller was trying to reach an animal hospital, and didn’t believe the President when he identified himself and told her she had the wrong number.
Just read this in Kennedy by Theodore Sorensen.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reported once remarked that Daryl Hannah, her son John’s longtime girlfriend had no fashion sense and “looked like an unmade bed.”
Mike Storen served (at different times) as commissioner of the American Basketball Association; president of that league’s Indiana Pacers, Kentucky Colonels, and Memphis Sounds; and president of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. His daughter Hannah changed her last name to Storm, and has hosted numerous TV sports programs.
When the American Basketball Association merged with the NBA, the St. Louis Spirits were one of two franchises that weren’t absorbed. The team’s owners, Ozzie and Dan Silna, chose to take a continuing share of television receipts, and have made more than $168 million from a defunct franchise. The owner of the other team, John Y. Brown of the Kentucky Colonels, chose a one-time cash buyout of $3.3 million.
The New York State Sex Offender Registration Act official number is § 168.
Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, said he looked forward to moving back into the Governor’s Mansion in Albany, where he lived when his dad Mario had the same gig.
New York’s capital was named in honor of the British Duke of Albany, who eventually became King James II of England as well as James VII of Scotland.
There are only two Hollywood films where two actors reprised their roles from an earlier film in a film that wasn’t a sequel to the first. Brian Donleavy and Akim Tamiroff played McGinty and Boss from The Great McGinty in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy played the Duke brothers from Trading Places in the movie Coming to America. Other actors who did this include Michael Keaton, James Cagney, and Margaret Rutherford.
A ‘Smallville’ episode called ‘Exposed,’ reunited ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ stars Tom Wopat and John Schneider. Wopat played Sen. Jack Jennings (a nod to the “Dukes” balladeer, Waylon Jennings), an old friend of Jonathan Kent’s who came to Smallville to seek his help in an upcoming campaign.
Although his first name is Waylon, Smithers of The Simpsons was named not after Waylon Jennings, but Wayland Flowers of Wayland and Madame fame.
Pierce Brosnan provided the voice of Selma and Patty Bouvier’s suave but murderous computerized house in a “Treehouse of Horror” segment of The Simpsons.
In 1909, Sweden’s Selma Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Swedish director Victor Sjostrom gained world fame with his adaptation of Selma Lagerlöf’s novel The Phantom Carriage in 1921. Sjostrom moved to Hollywood, where he did an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter on the insistence of Lilian Gish. Gish later worked with him on The Wind. Sjostrom didn’t care for sound movies and left Hollywood to direct in Sweden. He is now best known for his appearance in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries; Bergman was a big fan of The Phantom Carriage and would rewatch it every year.
In her last role, Ingrid Bergman played Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 1982 TV movie A Woman Called Golda, and won an Emmy for it; Leonard Nimoy played her long-suffering husband.
Golda Meir was born in Kiev and raised in Milwaukee under the name Golda Mabovitch. She and onetime Peru President Alberto Fujimori both earned degrees at what is now the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Golda Meir appears as a character in the Steven Spielberg-directed Munich, authorizing the assassination of PLO members who planned or took part in the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
The Englischer Garten, a large and picturesque park in the heart of Munich, was was created in 1789 by Sir Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814), later Count Rumford (Reichsgraf von Rumford), for the Palatinate archduke and elector Carl Theodor. Rumford was a self-exiled Loyalist from Woburn, Massachusetts who was better known as a physicist and inventor, and pioneer of the discipline of thermodynamics.
Another notable one-time resident of Woburn was Charles Goodyear, who pioneered the vulcanization of rubber.
Charles C. Ryan of the Woburn Daily Times wrote a series of articles investigating the illegal dumping of industrial waste in the area. The stories were used as the basis for the book and movie A Civil Action. A few years later, Ryan started up the magazine Aboriginal Science Fiction, which he edited from 1986-2001.
The New York Times strongly supported the Lincoln Administration and the Republican Party during the Civil War, putting it out of step with most of the rest of Gotham’s press, which was heavily Democratic, as was (then and now) the city’s electorate.