Granite from the Maine town of Vinalhaven was used in such structures as the Washington Monument, the Chicago Board of Trade, and New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
Glen Milstead appeared in ten John Waters films, using his stage name of “Divine.”
Damn, 193 pages!
Future astronaut and U.S. senator John Glenn was a Marine Corps fighter ace during the Korean War, where his wingman for a time was Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams.
Ted Williams was given the first name Teddy by his parents, but he later changed his birth certificate so that it read “Theodore”.
Theodore Roosevelt had bad eyesight and a squeaky voice. Legend says that he called for a charge up San Juan Hill several times without his men hearing the command, so he just charged and they followed.
Noted historian David McCullough posited in Mornings on Horseback that the young Theodore Roosevelt’s asthma might have been, at least in part, psychosomatic, as a way to get his very busy father’s undivided attention.
Prison guard Jeff Stuart was in the room when OJ talked to minister Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier. Her swears in an affidavit he heard OJ shout: “I didn’t mean to do it. I’m sorry.” Grier told him he had to “come clean” about the killings, but he didn’t
Mary, Queen of Scots, was the first to spell “Stewart” as “Stuart”. Having been brought up in France, she used French phonetic spelling.
Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, carried on a long correspondence with the French philosopher Voltaire.
Sebastian Cabot is probably best known today for playing the butler, Mr. French, in Family Affair
Sebastian Cabot was an explorer who acted for the English and then the Spanish governments. His father, John Cabot, is credited with discovering “New-Founde-Land” for the English.
Family legend has it that Sir Humphrey Gilbert (half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh and my direct ancestor) discovered Newfoundland. But I think Cabot’s claim is sounder.
But anyway: An unnamed Newfoundland dog is credited for saving Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. During his famous escape from exile on the island of Elba, rough seas knocked Napoleon overboard. A fisherman’s dog jumped into the sea, and kept Napoleon afloat until he could reach safety.
“Able was I ere I saw Elba” is a palindrome.
“A man, a plan, a canal - Panama,” often said to refer to President Theodore Roosevelt, is also a palindrome.
While the Pacific Ocean is west of the isthmus and the Atlantic to the east, you actually travel from west to east when passing through the Panama Canal from the former to the latter (southeast to northwest actually) due to an anomaly in the shape of the isthmus where the canal lies.
Panama was a part of Colombia until just before the US started building the canal, when Phillippe Buneau-Varilla, a French investor in the remnant of the original canal company, helped organize a revolution. Buneau-Varilla signed the treaty with the US allowing the canal to be built, even though his connection with the new government was tenuous at best. He also designed Panama’s flag, though his design was rejected by the new government and never used.
When Congress was considering returning jurisdiction for the Panama Canal to Panama during the Carter Administration, Garry Trudeau devoted several strips of Doonesbury to retelling the strange, sometimes tawdry tale of how the canal was built. Phillippe Buneau-Varilla featured prominently in the strips.
Garry Trudeau was a distant relative of Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. One week, Garry appeared on the cover of the US edition of Time, and Pierre was on the cover of the Canadian edition of Time. So far as is known, that was the only occasion that relatives appeared on the covers of the two editions at the same time.
An episode of the TV drama Lou Grant featured a controversy over a newspaper cartoon obviously modeled on “Doonesbury”. As a nod to the Trudeaus’ connection, the fictional cartoonist was given the surname “Diefenbaker”, after the Canadian Prime Minister (John) who served from 1957 to '63.
U.S. President John F. Kennedy personally disliked Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, whose term overlapped with his, and the two clashed behind the scenes over defense and foreign policy issues: John Diefenbaker - Wikipedia