Richard “Dick” Celeste was director of the Peace Corps under President Jimmy Carter before being elected Governor of Ohio, serving 1983-91. He was later Ambassador to India under President Bill Clinton.
Nell Carter was a Tony award winner as well as a TV actress known for her role on the sitcom Gimme a Break. She was 4’11’’ tall.
Gimme a Break! gave Joey Lawrence his first big role as Joey Donovan, he went on to coin the awful catchphrase “Whoa” when he was on Blossom with Mayim Bialik.
Keanu Reeves, as Thomas Anderson/Neo in The Matrix, exclaimed “Whoa!” several times when he saw something especially mind-blowing.
Keanu Reeves Bill and Ted costar, Alex Winter, portrayed Dr. John Polidori in the movie Haunted Summer. Polidori was, in real life, the companion of Lord Byron who wrote the horror novella The Vampyre, one of the first vampire stories in English.
Keanu Reeves, who has some Hawaiian ancestry, was named after his uncle, Henry Keanu Reeves. “Keanu” is a derivation of Reeves’ great-great-uncle Keaweaheulu, whose name means “the soft breeze raising” in Hawaiian.
Henry Reeve was a Brigadier General in the Cuban Liberation Army from 1869 to his death in battle against the Spanish in 1876. He was honored by Cuba in 1976 with his portrait on a postage stamp.
President Gerald R. Ford signed an executive order in 1976, posthumously promoting George Washington to the rank of “General of the Armies of the United States,” and specifying that he would always remain the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer.
Gerald Ford turned down offers to play for the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions to coach football and boxing at Yale, in the hopes that coaching would help his chances of acceptance to law school there.
The two law schools in the Cleveland, Ohio area are Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. The latter is part of Cleveland State University.
Case Western Reserve was formed by the merger of two institutions: Case Institute of Technology (founded in the 1880s) and Western Reserve College (founded in the 1820s, when the area was only a few years removed from frontier and Indian Territory). In the early 21st century there was a move to emphasize Case over the rest of the name both in print and spoken references, but it met with very heated resistance.
The first movie western, The Great Train Robbery was actually filmed in New Jersey. One of its actors, Broncho Billy Anderson, later became one of the first western stars.
Bronco Billy was a 1980 modern day western starring Clint Eastwood and was one of six that co-starred his longtime girlfriend Sandra Locke. Their romantic breakup led to a very long and much publicized series of palimony suits by her against him that were ultimately settled out court in 1999.
The word “palimony” was coined by celebrity divorce attorney Marvin Mitchelson in 1977 when his client Michelle Triola Marvin filed an unsuccessful suit against the actor Lee Marvin.
Until 1968, the Senate of Canada acted as the divorce court for Quebec and Newfoundland.
When, in 1998-99, Bill Clinton became the second U.S. President impeached by the House and tried by the Senate, commemorative pens were made for every senator that included the typo “Untied States Senate.”
Gerald Ford was the second US president to die on Boxing Day (December 26), after Harry Truman.
Dr. Joyce Brothers, a popular TV psychologist (Mel Brooks kidded her image in High Anxiety) in the 1950s and 60s got her start in TV as a contestant in The $64,000 Question, where she won the top prize. Her topic was “boxing,” something she knew nothing about when the auditioned for the show. The producers suggested it, and she went to read every reference book on the sport she could find. Despite the quiz show scandals, Brothers was cleared of any wrongdoing; she had not been told any of the questions.
The Mel Brooks movie High Anxiety was a spoof of Alfred Hitchcock movies, particularly Psycho, Vertigo and The Birds. Brooks wrote, directed and starred in the movie, and also sang the title song.
The Mel Brooks Broadway musical adaption of his movie The Producers was nominated for 15 and won 12 of the 2001 Tony Awards, becoming one of the few musicals to win in every category for which it was nominated — it received two nominations for leading actor and three for featured actor.In 2009, the Broadway production of Billy Elliot the Musical received 15 nominations, tying with The Producers for the most nominations received by a show.