When she was five and playing in the yard of her family’s home in Upper Darby, Penn., Tina Fey was attacked by a stranger who cut her face, leaving a scar which remains to this day.
Willie Nelson’s concept album ***Red Headed Stranger ***was eventually made into an unsuccessful movie in which Nelson starred as a vengeful preacher and Morgan Fairchild appeared as Nelson’s unfaithful wife.
The Phantom Stranger is a DC comic book character who specializes in the occult. He is one of the few long-running comic book characters whose origin and real name have never been established.
The F-4 Phantom fighter jet was flown extensively by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War.
Decades ago, military aviators would sometimes refer to an unidentified flying object or an optical illusion in the sky as a “foo fighter,” which inspired the name of Dave Grohl’s band.
Steve Earle’s album Shut Up and Die Like an Aviator takes its name from an apocryphal story in Tom Wolfe’s book The Right Stuff about a gruff order given by a Korean War US Navy fighter squadron commander to a new pilot who was blocking the radio channel screaming about how he’d been hit.
American fighter ace Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington commanded the US Marine Squadron VMF-214, the “Black Sheep” Squadron of Marine aviators flying the Vought F4U Corsair. But back when Boyington got his initial commission as a second lieutenant he first was an artillery officer.
One of the bits of evidence that led the the belief that Alfred Dreyfus was a spy was that the spy’s letters indicated he was posted to three different areas of the military in three months (common practice at the time). This included the artillery. However, the investigators inferred a posting to the artillery by the use of terms that no one in the artillery would ever use (much like no one from San Francisco would call his home city “Frisco.”). Thus the evidence leading to Dreyfus actually cleared him.
Both Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her husband, Brad Hall, appeared as part of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” cast in early 1980s. They are the only husband/wife team to do so.
Saturday Night, by the Bay City Rollers ("S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night!") became the first Billboard #1 hit of the US Bicentennial year of 1976. It also reached #1 in Canada in early 1976. The Bay City Rollers had several hits worldwide, but in the US this song was their only enduring hit.
The City of Cleveland, Ohio was founded in 1796. Michael R. White was mayor at the time of its bicentennial celebrations, which included a free concert by the Cleveland Orchestra on Public Square, the principal open space downtown.
Ronald Reagan played Hall of Famer pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander in the movie The Winning Team.
Ronald Regan’s famous nickname, “The Great Communicator,” was not earned but was requested. Reagan asked for it during his farewell address in 1989.
Ronald Reagan served as a lifeguard in his Illinois youth and was credited with saving several people from drowning.
When young Clint Eastwood was in the Amy, he was the only man in his outfit NOT sent off to combat in Korea. A day before he would have shipped out, he was reassigned as the base lifeguard and swim instructor.
Clint Walker, who almost single-handedly started the Western craze on TV in the 1950s as Cheyenne Bodie in Cheyenne (1955), was born and raised in Illinois despite what some people think is his Southern accent.
George Walker Bush was a cheerleader, fraternity president, rugby player and self-described average student at Yale University.
The Galapagos tortoise “Lonesome George” (the rarest tortoise on earth) was named after George Gobel, who went by the same nickname.
Lonesome George Gobel became the permanent occupant of the lower left square on the TV game show Hollywood Squares, following the death of that square’s previous occupant, Cliff “Charley Weaver” Arquette.
Paul Lynde occupied the center square full time, while Rose Marie sat in the upper middle square and Wally Cox held the upper left square.
Asked to share his favorite joke on the “Donny and Marie” show in the mid-1970’s, Paul Lynde obliged with “my pet rock… (pause to collect himself after uncontrollable premature laughter), my pet rock… (again as before), MY PET ROCK…(still), …had (again, but for the last time), …PEBBLES!”