Despite O. Henry’s less-than-sterling past, the Boy Scouts of America authorized a special collection of his short stories for its young members in 1928; the lead story, naturally, was the classic “The Ransom of Red Chief.”
In The Lone Ranger, Tonto’s horse was usually named Scout. But in the original 1938 serial, it was called White Feller.
On December 8, 1941, Bob Feller enlisted in the Navy, volunteering immediately for combat service, becoming the first Major League Baseball player to do so following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7.
The is only one game in major league baseball history where every batter for one team ended the game with exactly the same batting average he had when the game began: Bob Feller’s opening day no hitter on April 4, 1940. All the players for Chicago White Sox entered the game with a .000 BA and ended it with the same.
Bob Feller was known as “Rapid Robert” because of his blinding fastball. Another speedballing Cleveland pitcher of the next generation, Sam McDowell, was given a nickname that played off of Feller’s: “Sudden Sam.”
[Nitpick alert regarding the previous post: Because you can’t divide by zero, none of the Sox in Feller’s no-hitter actually came into the game with batting averages of .000. Rather, the BAs were undefined. A player who has no at-bats typically has a dash – in the batting average column.]
Union General Irvin McDowell lost the First Battle of Bull Run, and is widely blamed for the Union’s loss at the Second Battle of Bull Run a year later.
The energy drink Red Bull, which has made entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz the second-most-famous person ever to come from Salzburg, Austria, originated as a Thai beverage named Krating Daeng, meaning “red gaur”.
John Bull, a character created by John Arbuthnot in 1712, has long been a symbol of England and of England’s traditional virtues.
In her [excellent] memoir, Little House on the Prairie child star Alison Arngrim referred to actor Richard Bull, who played her good natured quiet father Nels Oleson, as being the most like his TV character of any actor on the show; she described Katharine MacGregor, the actress who played her horrible mother Harriet Oleson, as being at least as over-the-top but much sweeter in real life.
The Elvis Costello song Alison, from his first album, was recorded before he joined with The Attractions. The backing band on the song was called Clover.
Elvis Costello sang “She” on the soundtrack of the Hugh Grant/Julia Roberts romantic comedy Notting Hill.
Abbott and Costello made their movie debut as a team in the 1940 comedy One Night in the Tropics, which was based on the novel ***Love Insurance ***by Charlie Chan creator Earl Derr Biggers.
Frank Costello was a crime boss in the 1950s who was subpoenaed to appear before a congressional committee on crime headed by Estes Kefauver. Costello agreed not to take the Fifth Amendment, on the condition that his face wasn’t shown as the hearings were televised. The networks agreed to the condition, so his testimony was shown in full, with the camera only showing Costello’s hands.
Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas), majority leader of the U.S. Senate, didn’t think much of Estes Kefauver and referred to him as “Cowfever.”
When Elvis Presley first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, he was filmed from the waist up, to hide his suggestive movements on stage.
Presley Marion Rixey was William McKinley’s personal physician and attended McKinley when the president was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Following McKinley’s death, Rixey became new President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal physician.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey showed Pan-American Airlines carrying passengers to outer space.
In reality, Pan-Am went out of business for good in December of 1991.
Well, not entirely: Pan Am - Wikipedia
Stanley Kubrick gave some unused aerial footage of Western forests from The Shining to Ridley Scott, who used it at the end of Blade Runner.
Harrison Ford’s spoken narration was added to Blade Runner at the insistence of the studio, who feared the movie was otherwise too difficult to understand.
South African medium-distance runner Oscar Pistorius, a 2012 London Olympian, is nicknamed “The Blade Runner” for the graphite-composite leg extensions he uses in place of the feet he had amputed in childhood.