The Piper J-3 Cub was one of the most popular light aircraft of all time, with many of them still flying today. “Piper Cub” became synonymous with private aviation in the 50s; if you owned your own plane, either it was one, or people thought it was.
The actress Piper Perabo (birth name Piper Lisa Perabo) was named after the actress Piper Laurie (birth name Rosetta Jacobs).
In Little Women, Jo rejects Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, and marries Professor Bhaer. Laurie marries Jo’s sister Amy.
Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt had a bad heart. From the time he was in college, he took daily nitroglycerin pills for his health, a common remedy at the time. Those pills combined with his gallon-a-day coffee habit may help explain the source of his unstoppable energy.
Theodore Roosevelt was Eleanor Roosevelt’s uncle. He gave her away at her marriage to FDR.
The British ambassador, Cecil Spring-Rice, once joked of Theodore Roosevelt’s boundless energy and wide interests, “You must always remember that the President is about six.”
Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, was the first governor of the colony of Maryland.
“The Sot-Weed Factor” was a poem written by Ebeneezer Cooke, who lived in Maryland in the late 1600s. The poem – it’s title today would be translated as “The Tobacco Merchant” – is a satire about live in the colony. John Barth used Cooke as the protagonist of his novel of the same name.
“The Colony” is a city of 36,000 north of Dallas Texas that was originally developed by homebuilder Fox and Jacobs in 1969.
[off game] I was always creeped out by the name. [/off game]
Larry Gelbart wrote the hit comedy play Sly Fox, which was an adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Volpone.
Pat Carroll has played the character Volpone on stage, and voiced Ursula the Sea Witch in the movie The Little Mermaid.
Pat Carroll played Shirley’s mother on one episode of Laverne & Shirley.
Leslie Nielsen once told an interviewer that he had no idea his deadpan delivery of the line “I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley” would become such a meme. People use to just walk up to him in the street unannouced and say it.
Leslie Nielsen was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. His father was a Mountie. His brother Erik became Deputy Prime Minister of Canada. Erik supported Joe Clark in the internecine rivalry that was the Progressive Conservative party at that time, but when Brian Mulroney won the PC leadership over Joe Clark, he chose Erik for high positions to try to reconcile the different wings in the party.
Leslie Nielsen played Capt. John J. Adams in the 1956 sf movie Forbidden Planet. His starship was the C-57D, which oddly enough was also a type of aircraft at the time.
Leslie Nielsen, whose father was a Mountie (already mentioned in a previous post), played one in a couple of episodes of Due South. He told Paul Gross, who played the main character, also a Mountie, that his boot laces were not laced properly.
It has been commented that one of the differences between Americans and Canadians is that American national symbols tend to be military in origin, while Canada’s most recognisable national symbol are the Mounties -
A police force.
The word SHERIFF is derived from two English words circa 1000 AD: 1) Shire, a political subdivision equivalent to American counties. 2) Reeves, a term denoting a trusted noble who assigned by the King to a particular Shire to be his representative in legal matters both criminal and civil. Hence the word; Shire-Reeves or Sheriffs
The word POLICE is derived from the Greek word Polis or city.
J.R.R. Tolkien, born this day in 1892, wrote that the Shire, home of the hobbits in Middle-earth, had a handful of Shire-reeves, but that their principal duty was not law enforcement but gathering in cows which had gotten loose from their pastures.
Christopher Lee is the only cast member of the Lord of the Rings films to have actually personally met J.R.R. Tolkien.