Tennessee Ernie Ford appeared on I Love Lucy as Lucy’s cousin, Ernie.
Cotton Candy was invented in Nashville, Tennessee in 1897.
Eli Whitney’s cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry and made it tremendously profitable, but it also had the unforseen consequence of vastly multiplying the growth of slavery in the United States.
From the Eli Whitney Museum website:
Whitney (who died in 1825) could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society for the worse. The most significant of these was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor. In 1790 there were six slave states; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860 approximately one in three Southerners was a slave.
MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston TX is one of the world’s premier cancer treatment centers. The hospital is named after Monroe Dunaway Anderson (1873-1939). Anderson made his fortune in “King Cotton”, and his company, Anderson, Clayton and Co, grew to be the world’s largest merchant in cotton goods at that time. In 1936 the foundation bearing his name was created and, after Anderson’s death in 1939, it donated a large sum to the University of Texas for its new hospital for cancer research when the university agreed to locating the hospital in Houston and naming it after Anderson.
Former New York Knicks shooting guard Allan Houston was a halfway decent player in his prime (although hardly a superstar) and, today, is known mostly for the insane $20M a year contract extension the Knicks gave him in 2001. From that point on, Houston’s career was riddled with devastating injuries that kept him off the court for much of 2003-04 and most of 2004-05. Worse, his contract made him virtually untradeable.
His situation gave name to the “Allan Houston Rule”, in which the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement permitted each team to wave one player prior to the 2005-06 season and not have him count against the luxury tax (though he’d still count under the salary cap). Everyone called it the Allan Houston Rule expecting that the Knicks would use it on Houston, but they used it on Jerome Williams instead.
Houston Street in New York City is named for William Houstoun, a Georgia delegate to the Continental Congress. Over the course of time, the spelling was changed, but the street is still pronounced “House-ton.”
The first word spoken from the moon on July 20, 1969 was “Houston.”
The three Kryptonian criminals in Superman II– General Zod, Ursa and Nod-- first made contact with human beings by finding a joint US/USSR lunar mission and killing the poor unfortunate souls who took part in the landing.
Because they radioed back to their headquarters in Houston, General Zod was under the mistaken impression that Houston was the name of the planet, until a news reporter later corrected him.
General Zod [landing on a lake]: “So this is Planet Houston.” [feels the water] “What a strange surface.”
After Cain killed his brother Abel, he was banished to the land of Nod, East of Eden.
“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” is a children’s poem written by American writer and poet Eugene Field in 1889. The original title was Dutch Lullaby.
Toward the end of his lifetime, Albert Einstein was working on his Unified Field Equations, uniting the four forces into the universe. He didn’t succeed, and was considered a dead end partly because Einstein didn’t like quantum theory, but physicists today see he may have had the right general concepts and are working on a different type of unified theory.
Eddie Albert of Green Acres fame was an active participant in the battle of Tarawa in November 1943, one of the bloodiest battles of World War II and in the history of the US Marine Corps. Albert was credited with rescuing up to 70 wounded Marines while under enemy fire. He was awarded the Bronze Star with a combat V. He did not speak about this publicly until it was mentioned in several television documentaries about the battle in the 1990s.
There have been two U.S. Navy warships named USS Tarawa, after the bloody World War II battle, one of the Marine Corps’s finest hours. The first was decommissioned in 1960, and the second in 2009.
Tarawa was the capital of the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The atoll is now the site of the capital of Kiribati, the independent nation formed from the Gilbert Islands. The Ellice Islands are now the country of Tuvalu.
Tuvalu’s only exports are coconuts, postage stamps and sea slugs.
Self-adhesive postage stamps are a God-send. Remember the old days when you had to lick each one? Yuk.
Self-adhesive stamps debuted in the tropical countries such as Sierra Leone and Tonga in the 1960s - humid climates made the old style stamps stick together. The US Postal Service first tried self-adhesives in 1974 but those stamps became easily discolored due to the poor adhesive used. It wasn’t until 1989, 15 years later, that the USPS issued another s-a stamp, and it wasn’t until the 1990s when s-a stamp usage became widespread in the USA.
Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Western ***Unforgiven ***was dedicated to ***Dirty Harry ***director Don Siegel and “spaghetti Western” director Sergio Leone.
Sergio Franchi’s rendition of the song “Volare” was used in commercials for the Plymouth Volare during the 1970’s. (My Aunt Karen bought one of those cars, and it was a lemon – even Chrysler’s “Man in Detroit team” couldn’t diagnose just why it appeared to have been built as an impossible-to-ace final exam for a course in auto mechanics.)
Walter Chrysler was Time Magazine’s second ever “Man of the Year.”
The Republican National Convention met in Detroit, home of Chrysler, in 1980. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush emerged as the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees, but only after Reagan had offered the Vice Presidency to former President Gerald R. Ford, with a promise that he could hold a newly-empowered version of the #2 post.