Selma Diamond was a sketch writer for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Her colleague Carl Reiner created The Dick Van Dyke Show, based on his life as a writer for Caesar, and he based Rose Marie’s character, Sally Rogers, on Diamond.
Rose Marie, who turns 90 this August, made her debut playing herself in a Vitaphone musical short that appeared on the bill with The Jazz Singer at its premiere in 1927. According to her, when she approached Al Jolson at the Wintergarden Theater in New York on the night of the premiere and told him, “You were wonderful, Mr. Jolson!”, his reply was, “Get away, you little brat!”
“He didn’t like kids,” she explained.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was originally going to take a more northerly route through the Yellowhead Pass, but the route was shifted south to help protect Canada’s claims to the southern plains. The only problem was that there was no known pass through the Selkirk mountain range. The CPR bet the farm that a pass would be found in time. It was, by Major Rogers, who was paid $5,000 by the CPR, and had Rogers Pass named for him.
Foul! Still in play:
Rose Marie, who turns 90 this August, made her debut playing herself in a Vitaphone musical short that appeared on the bill with The Jazz Singer at its premiere in 1927. According to her, when she approached Al Jolson at the Wintergarden Theater in New York on the night of the premiere and told him, “You were wonderful, Mr. Jolson!”, his reply was, “Get away, you little brat!”
“He didn’t like kids,” she explained.
The full name of Major Rogers, who discovered Rogers Pass in the Selkirk Mountains, was Albert Bowman Rogers. However, he always went by A.B. Rogers and was considered aloof and unapproachable. No-one called him Al.
Excellent save!
Ginger Rogers was a distant cousin of Lucille Ball, according to the latter’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz.
Edward Hughes Ball Hughes, nicknamed “The Golden Ball”, was a wealthy English dandy of the Regency period. Like another well-known dandy, Beau Brummell, Golden Ball at one point fled to France to avoid his creditors.
Criminal conversation is a tort arising from adultery. It is similar to breach of promise, a former tort involving a broken engagement against the betrothed. Edward Hughes Ball Hughes’s sister, Catherine Ball, cheated on her husband and had an affair. Her husband successfully sued the lover for criminal conversation.
Catherine Howard was the fifth wife of King Henry VIII. She was executed for treason for having committed adultery with Thomas Culpeper, a young courtier in Henry’s court. She was the second of his wives who lost her head.
King Henry VIII was the father of three monarchs: Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth I. Elizabeth ruled the longest and is widely considered to have been the most successful ruler of the three.
In one of the “what ifs” of history, there could have been a Henry IX. James I’s elder son was named Henry, in recognition of Henry’s Tudor ancestry (Henry VII was his great-great grandfather). However, Henry died young, possibly of an infected blister, leaving his younger brother Charles as the heir apparent. Charles succeeded to the throne as Charles I, with disastrous consequences.
At age 13, Charles Nelson Reilly was in the audience during the Ringling Brothers Circus tent fire in Hartford, Connecticut on July 6, 1944 that claimed the lives of 168 people. The mother of his neighbor friend had taken the two boys to the show, and the three managed to escape physically unharmed. Charles was saved by an older sister also in attendance, who lowered him from the side of the bleachers, because the bottleneck below made it practically impossible to get out any other way. For the rest of his life, he had a fear of sitting in a large audience despite being a theater actor and director.
Reilly attended The Hartt School of Music in West Hartford, CT. The Hartt School of Music is 2.6 miles from West Hartford’s Hall High School.
HALL RULES 1979
A Confederacy of Dunces, the story of Ignatius J. Reilly, was published with the help of Walker Percy, after the suicide of author John Kennedy Toole.
“Dunce” is derived from John Duns Scotus, one of the most learned of the medieval priest-philosophers. However, his scholastic approach to philosophy fell into disrepute in the humanist philosophy trends leading up to the Renaissance, with humanists tagging more conservative philosophers as “Duns”, which became “Dunce”, a general term for a slow-witted student.
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In 1963, Los Angeles schoolteacher Phyllis Patterson held a very small Renaissance fair as a class activity, in the backyard of her Laurel Canyon home in the Hollywood Hills. On May 11 and 12 of that year, Phyllis and her husband, Ron Patterson, presented the first Renaissance Pleasure Faire as a one-weekend fundraiser for radio station KPFK, which drew some 8,000 people.
According to Wikipedia’s list of regularly-held Renaissance Fairs, there are 54 of them held annually in the United States, and 2 in Canada.
At the Rennaissance Faire held in Tuxedo Square, New York, there was a performer who looked and sounded exactly like young Gilda Radner. To the point of being spooky.
Gilda Radner attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.