Willie Naulls and Darral Imhoff of the New York Knicks both fouled out during the game that the Philadelphia Warriors’ Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, taught at and eventually served as president of Bowdoin College in Maine.
Franklin Pierce’s first biography was written by his classmate from Bowdoin College, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia is featured prominently in the Oscar-winning film Silver Linings Playbook.
Franklin was the first African-American Peanuts character, introduced in 1968.
Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood made a crucial error in ordering his infantry to attack entrenched U.S. troops without artillery support in the 1864 Battle of Franklin, Tenn.
Saint Barbara is the patron saint of artillerymen, and also of mathematicians.
The Earl of Chesterfield was Samuel Johnson’s patron for the Dictionary. He did nothing to actually support Johnson for the several years it took Johnson to write it, until right at the end, Chesterfield wrote a glowing article praising it. Johnson, outraged at the late attempt to take credit for the Dictionary, unleashed his considerable wrath in a heated letter to Chesterfield.
Samuel Adams beer began with Samuel Adams Boston Lager. The original recipe was developed in 1860 in St. Louis, MO by Louis Koch, who sold under the name Louis Koch Lager until Prohibition, and again until the early 1950s. In 1984, Jim Koch, the sixth-generation, first born son to follow in his family’s brewing footsteps, brewed his first batch of Samuel Adams Boston Lager in his kitchen, using the original family recipe for Louis Koch Lager. In December 1984, Koch along with Harry Rubin and Lorenzo Lamadrid, founded Samuel Adams Beer.
Thomas P. “Boston” Corbett, the Union Army soldier who shot and killed John Wilkes Booth, disappeared after 1888, but circumstantial evidence suggests that he died in the Great Hinckley Fire in 1894.
Dr. Samuel Mudd was arrested for assisting Booth. He was imprisoned at Fort Jefferson, about 70 miles west of Key West in the Dry Tortugas, a scenic and remote setting to visit/tour.
The martini was originally a sweet drink of gin and sweet vermouth. After prohibition, versions with dry vermouth were created, and were referred to as a “dry martini.” This became the most popular type and the name slowly dropped “dry” as the original drink faded away. Vodka was sometimes substituted for the gin, making a vodka martini; nowadays the most popular martini variations tend to be sweet (e.g., appletini, peach martini, etc.) and made with vodka.
Future ***Taxi ***co-stars Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd both appeared as mental patients in Milos Forman’s movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. DeVito played Martini, and Lloyd played Taber.
That movie was filmed in Salem, Oregon, at the Oregon State Mental Hospital.
National Lampoon’s Animal House was largely filmed on campus at the University of Oregon at Eugene, which stood in for Faber College.
Eugene the Jeep was a character in the Popeye comic strip. His being small, able to move between dimensions and ability to solve seemingly impossible problems may have been the origin of the name of the Army’s quarter-ton truck.
In The French Connection 2, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) reveals that he was a teammate of Mickey Mantle in the Yankees’ minor league system.
The French Connection line of the 1972-79 Buffalo Sabres included all French-Canadians: Hall of Famer Gilbert Perreault at center and All-Stars Rick Martin and Rene Robert at left wing and right wing, respectively.
The French Connection star Gene Hackman joined the Marine Corps when he was 16 years old. After a 3-year stint in the Corps, Hackman ended up in New York City where he started his professional acting career.
While establishing his career, Hackman shared an apartment with another aspiring actor, Dustin Hoffman.