The Lied Jungle located in Omaha is the world’s largest indoor rain forest.
The Coen Brothers’s The Man Who Wasn’t There featured Tony Shalhoub as Freddy Riedenschneider, an expensive defense lawyer. The last name was an homage to the character of Doc Riedenschneider in The Asphalt Jungle.
The Clifton Webb film The Man Who Never Was depicted WW2 Operation Mincemeat, in which a cadaver was given an RAF uniform and a briefcase full of falsified intelligence about a forthcoming Allied invasion, and set loose where the enemy would find it. As a result, for weeks after the Sicily landings, the Germans believed them to be a feint covering the real invasions of Sardinia and Greece.
Clifton Webb played Frank Gilbreth, the father of twelve children, in the 1950 movie Cheaper by the Dozen.
Sitcom actor Clifton (Amen) Davis wrote the Jackson 5’s big hit “Never Can Say Goodbye.”
Jester Hairston, who played Rolly Forbes on “Amen” (and had previously acted with Clifton Davis on “That’s My Mama”) was far more influential as a choir director and one of the 20th century’s leading composers of spirituals. He wrote “Amen”, a hit for The Impressions, and the Christmas song “Mary’s Boy Child”.
Sam Hairston, whose baseball career was primarily spent in the Negro Leagues, did manage to spend part of the 1951 season with the Chicago White Sox. His sons Jerry and Johnny became Major League Baseball players, as have Jerry’s sons Scott and Jerry, Jr. The Hairstons are one of three three-generation families in MLB annals.
There are actually 3 other 3-generation MLB families: The Boones (Ray, Bob, and Aaron and Bret), the Bells (Gus, Buddy, and David and Mike), and the Colemans (Joe Sr., Joe Jr., and Casey).
Singer Pat Boone is the great-great-great-great grandson of the American pioneer Daniel Boone and a cousin of two stars of western television series: Richard Boone of CBS’s Have Gun, Will Travel and Randy Boone, of NBC’s The Virginian and CBS’s Cimarron Strip.
When the Daniel Boone TV series was released in France, the distributors felt compelled to rename the lead actor “Fier Parker” because fier means “proud” in French whilst Fess sounds like fesse, the French word for “buttock”.
Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) were the two engineers aboard the USCSS Nostromo in the Ridley Scott-directed sf/horror movie Alien.
In railroad terminilogy, a “hoghead” or “hogger” is a railroad engineer (locomotives are nicknamed “hogs”), and an engineer trainee is a “piglet.”
Before experimenting with nitroglycerine, the Central Pacific Railroad’s blasting tunnels through the granite walls of the Sierra Nevada progressed at between 12 and 16 inches per day, working around the clock.
Some people believe that Bruno Hauptmann may have been railroaded to the gallows in the Lindbergh kidnapping case.
Dr. Alexis Carrel worked with Charles Lindbergh in the mid-1930s to create the “perfusion pump,” which allowed living organs to exist outside of the body during surgery. The advance is said to have been a crucial step in the development of open-heart surgery and organ transplants, and to have laid the groundwork for the artificial heart, which became a reality decades later. Some critics of Lindbergh claimed that Carrel overstated Lindbergh’s role to gain media attention, but other sources say Lindbergh played an important role in developing the device. Both Lindbergh (then 36 years old) and Carrel appeared on the cover of Time magazine on June 13, 1938.
Adolf Hitler notoriously won the 1938 Time Person of the Year award. (Incidentally, I myself am a co-winner of the 2006 award).
In May, 2006, the Kentucky Derby was decisively won by Barbaro. Two weeks later, in the Preakness Stakes, Barbaro broke his right rear leg. He underwent several surgeries that failed and he eventually had to be put down in January 2007.
Survivor won the first Preakness Stakes, in 1873.
In 1873, John Henry, a black railroad worker whose almost mythical strength made him a legend in his lifetime, died while working on the construction of the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia. A symbol to his fellow workers of the supremacy of man over machine, he probably was the inspiration for a ballad that gained quick popularity throughout the country.
Out of game:
Yeah, someone should edit the Wikipedia article on Sam Hairston. I’ve watched enough Cubs games the last couple of seasons to have heard the Coleman lineage mentioned on several occasions.
In play: Big Bend National Park, located in Texas, contains the spot where the Northern Tufted Flycatcher (a Central American species) was first spotted in the wild in the USA.