At least while Louis Freeh was Director of the FBI, all FBI trainees visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington to learn about the dangers of hate and power displacing tolerance and liberty.
Despite agreeing to help the FBI apprehend Dillinger, Ana Cumpănaș was deported to her native Romania in 1936. She was also paid only half of the $10,000 reward she had been promised.
Joe Namath was the first professional football player to earn an annual salary of at least $400,000 when he signed as a rookie with the AFL’s NY Jets in 1965.
Namath’s nickname was “Broadway Joe.”
The Broadway Melody was the first musical to win the Oscar as Best Picture.
Oscar winning song “Lullabye of Broadway” was staged as a musical number by Busby Berkeley, climaxing when, while dancing, a woman fell to her death (in the musical, not in real life).
Woody Guthrie once said, “To a child who doesn’t want to go to sleep, a lullabye is propaganda.”
The traditional English lullaby “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” takes its tune from the anonymous French lullaby “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman”, whose earliest known date is 1761. It is often, though almost certainly falsely, attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who did compose variations on the theme in 1781 (K. 265).
Arlo Guthrie sang City of New Orleans back in 1972. Classic song.
The train The City of New Orleans runs from Chicago to New Orleans in 19 hours and 30 minutes, stopping in (among other places) Cairo IL, Memphis TN, and Jackson MS.
The Battle of New Orleans, in which Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British army, was actually fought after the countries had agreed to a peace treaty. The news had not yet crossed the Atlantic.
The term “Pyrrhic victory” – a victory with such a devastating cost that it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately lead to defeat – is named after King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War.
Epirus lies in the region occupied by present-day Greece and Albania.
Albania declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912. It was invaded by both Italy and Germany, separately, during World War II. Liberated in 1944, it became a socialist republic; the socialist republic was dissolved in 1991 and it is now a unitary parliamentary republic.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular at the height of its power under the reign ofSuleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most powerful states in the world – a multinational, multilingual empire that stretched from the southern borders of theHoly Roman Empireto the outskirts ofVienna,Royal Hungary(modernSlovakia) and thePolish–Lithuanian Commonwealthin the north toYemenandEritreain the south; fromAlgeriain the west toAzerbaijanin the east;controlling much of southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.
Former heavyweight champion Jack Sharkey was not Irish, as his name would suggest, but of Lithuanian descent-. his real name was Joseph Zukauskas. He named himself after “Sailor Tom” Sharkey, to attract Irish-American fans.
Popeye was a character in the comic strip Thimble Theatre, created by E. C. Segar.
The protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road is nicknamed “Easy,” after his initials E.C., which stand for Evelyn Cyril. His last name is Gordon.
For decades, Jesse White played the Maytag Repairman in TV commercials. When White finally retired, he was replaced by Gordon Jump (best known for “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”)
Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the wild turkey the national symbol of the United States, since it is both intelligent and crafty in outwitting its enemies. Modern-day domesticated turkeys, on the other hand, are noted for their lack of intelligence.