In the Meredith Willson musical “The Music Man”, “Old Miser” Madison gave the town of River City, Iowa the Madison Public Library, but he left all the books to Marian the Librarian. “Chaucer! Rabelais! Ballll-zac!”
Before he worked on The Music Man, Meredith Willson was the music director and composed the score for the Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator and was nominated for an Oscar for it.
It has been claimed that a print of The Great Dictator was sent to Adolf Hitler, and that he viewed the film twice. The story is disputed, however, by architect and Hitler confidante Albert Speer.
Albert, King of the Belgians, was a heroic leader of the Belgian people during World War I, personally leading the Belgian Army and sharing in the risks of the ordinary soldiers.
Juan Pujol Garcia, the subject of the documentary Garbo the Spy, was the only man decorated by both sides in World War II. Throughout the war, he kept fooling the Germans with misinformation, intelligence he passed along to the Third Reich from a “spy network” that existed entirely in his imagination. His biggest success was convincing the Germans that the Normandy invasion was a decoy to draw their troops away from the “real” landing site of Calais. But he even managed to have a pension paid to an imaginary “widow” of one of his spies when he felt it was time for one to die.
P.S.: The film review calls him the only man to be decorated by both sides, but his Wikipedia entry says “one of the few.” Still an impressive feat.
Two movies have been made of Elbert Hubbard’s inspirational essay “A Message to Garcia”, about an act of military initiative and heroism in Cuba in the Spanish-American War. It first appeared in the March 1899 issue of Philistine magazine (a publication which we desperately need today 
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Theodore Roosevelt won fame as colonel of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the “Rough Riders,” during the Spanish-American War. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton. T.R. is the only President to have received both the Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize (for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War).
The Canadian Football League’s Ottawa Rough Riders (not to be confused with the still-extant Saskatchewan Roughriders) were founded as the Ottawa Football Club in 1876, and were known by that name through the 1897 season. After becoming the Rough Riders in 1898, they kept that name until 1925. They opted for Senators that year, but dropped that nickname in 1930, and reclaimed the Rough Riders sobriquet until folding after the 1996 campaign.
The Saskatchewan Roughriders have been in continuous operation since 1910, a record not matched by many professional sports teams in North America.
Unfortunately, they have trouble counting to 12.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad in Canada named their railway stations in a series of names in alphabetical order, going back to A when they reached Z as they built rail lines in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In many cases the settlement nearest the station renamed itself for the station, so there is still a line of alphabetical towns running through the three provinces.
The 1970s’ Grand Funk Railroad took their name from the Grand Trunk Railroad, which ran through the band’s hometown of Flint, Michigan.
Michael Moore featured his economically troubled, crime-ridden hometown of Flint, Mich. in the documentaries Roger and Me and its followup, Pets or Meat.
nm - didn’t realise that two others had posted.
In Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, the partiers at Fezziwig’s in the Christmas Past sequence dance the “Sir Roger de Coverley”, a line dance related to the Virginia Reel. It also figures in William Makepeace Thackeray’s short story “The Bedford-Row Conspiracy” as the musical center piece of a political feast pitting the Whigs against the Torys and in Arnold Bennett’s novel “Leonora” as music considered more suitable for a ball by the older gents to the likes of the Blue Danube Waltz.
The Blue Danube Waltz is traditionally broadcast by Austrian public-law radio and TV stations at midnight as the old year gives way to the new.
The annual Neujahrskonzert (New Year’s Day concert) by the Vienna Philharmonic always ends with the traditional clap-along Austrian composition, “Radetzky March” by Johann Strauss Sr. Since 1899 it has been the official presentation march of the Chilean Army’s Military School of the Liberator Bernardo O’Higgins.
Joseph Radetzky von Radetz (to whom the above-mentioned march is dedicated) was a nobleman of Czech ancestry who gained fame as an Austrian general during the First Italian War of Independence.
By the end of World War I, the heads of the German army were Paul von Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorf. Ludendorf was considered by far the better strategist, but was not allowed to lead the army because he wasn’t a noble. Von Hindenberg, nominally his superior, was not as innovative a general. However, Ludendorf had a reputation of devising brilliant battle plans and then panicking the night before they went into operation. Von Hindenberg would be there to calm him down, making the two a useful team.
Of the Beatles’ ten children, the only one with two parents who are still alive is eight year Beatrice McCartney, daughter of Paul McCartney and his second wive Heather.