Both the ZZTop song “LaGrange” and the musical ***The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas *** were inspired by the Chicken Ranch, one of Texas’ most popular bordellos.
Playwright Larry L. King hated the movie version of Whorehouse, largely because of the casting. He thought Willie Nelson would be an ideal sheriff, while Burt Reynolds was too young and good looking for the role.
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was the highest-grossing live-action musical film of the 1980s.
Dolly Parton, who wrote “I Will Always Love You”, later a massive hit for Whitney Houston, sang it in the film version of TBLWIT.
The SoHo neighborhood in NYC gets its name for being South of Houston Street. In NYC, “Houston Street” is pronounced “How-stun”; it is not named for the Texas Senator but rather for William Houstoun of Georgia.
Texas governor Sam Houston resigned from his post in 1860, rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Confederate States of America, which Texas had joined against his wishes.
Sam Houston died in 1863 in Huntsville, Texas, where a 67-foot-tall memorial statue of him now stands beside I-45.
The NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama grew from the US Army’s missile development center at Redstone Arsenal, originally built in wartime as a chemical weapons factory. Immediately after the war, Wernher von Braun and most of his team were sent there to kick-start the US missile-weapons program, resulting in the V2-based Redstone booster that sent the first 2 Mercury astronauts into space.
Huntsville, Texas, once had a Samuel W. Houston Elementary. The school was named for Samuel Walker Houston, a pioneer African-American educator who was the son of Joshua Houston, one of “the” Sam Houston’s slaves.
Harriet Tubman suffered from narcolepsy, resulting from severe beatings while still a slave.
I was gonna say…: Lucy Webb Hayes - Wikipedia
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The U.S. Navy has had two warships named after Sam Houston: a schooner during the Civil War, and an Ethan Allen-class fleet ballistic missile submarine decommissioned in 1991.
D’oh! ETA: No U.S. Navy warship has ever, alas, been named after Harriet Tubman.
The Sooner Schooner, a replica Conestoga wagon (or “Prairire schooner”, with a large area of canvas high on a moving vehicle) is the official mascot of the University of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is one of only two states whose capital cities’ name includes the state name. The other is Indianapolis, Indiana.
Conspiracists have claimed that Jim Jones was a rogue CIA operative and Jonestown a front for a CIA training camp (and-or prison and-or secret base) at least since the late 1970s, ‘evidence’ being the amount of traveling Jones did in Brazil and other countries when he was a penniless preacher years before and his comments about Richard Dywer during the psychotic monologue during the deaths. Other conspiracist claims about Jonestown is that most of the bodies were of people killed by the CIA as a cover-up rather than suicide.
(Psst! I got Ninja-ed by ElvisL1ves and had to change my post.)
Indiana Jones was the nickname used by Henry Jones, Jr. for his adventures.
R. Dean Taylor, who sang the campy Seventies classic “Indiana Wants Me,” was one of four people who shared co-writing credit for the Supremes’ #1 hit “Love Child.”
Howard Dean MD was with a patient when he got the call that the Governor of Vermont, Dick Snelling, had died and that he was now the Governor.
Madeline Kunin, a Swiss native who served as Governor of Vermont between Dick Snelling’s two terms, is the only woman to hold that office and is the first Jewish woman to be elected Governor in any state.
Zachary Taylor never voted prior to the election of 1848 when he was elected to the office of president.
During a 1992 appearance on the Today Show, Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot was asked by a telephone caller if he had ever wished to mind meld with Howard Stern 's penis.