The world’s oldest continuously operated airport is College Park Airport in Maryland, just inside the Beltway. It was established in August 1909 by the United States Army Signal Corps to serve as a training location for Wilbur Wright to instruct two military officers to fly in the government’s first aeroplane. Along with Washington Executive/Hyde Field and Potomac Airfield, it is one of the “DC-3”, general aviation airports that lie inside the Washington Flight Restricted Zone where operations require special air traffic control procedures.
Apparently there are different meanings of “first”.
Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad, resposible for 13 shootings and ten deaths in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area, He was sentenced to death in September of 2003, and received a lethal injection on November 10, 2009. His underaged partner, Lee Malvo, was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
The town of Parole, Maryland, on the western edge of Annapolis, is so named because it was the site of a parole camp, where Union and Confederate prisoners were exchanged on the condition that they were under parole - they had to swear they would not take up arms again unless they were formally exchanged. The practice of having an army guard its *own *POW’s seems to be unique in history to the US Civil War.
Spiro Agnew, a Republican, was Governor of Maryland before being elected Vice President of the United States in 1968. He is the only person of Greek extraction to be elected to either of the top two Federal offices.
THE GREEK TYCOON was a 1978 film in which a Massachusetts senator who becomes president, appoints his brother Attorney General, and is assassinated is survived by an elegant young First Lady who marries the title character, a Greek shipping billionaire with a famous opera singer mistress. Its credits include the standard disclaimer “The characters in this film are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental”.
Jacqueline Kennedy, who lived in the White House from 1961-63, initially disliked the phrase “First Lady,” telling a friend, “It makes me sound like a saddlehorse.”
The White House’s original name “Executive Mansion” was used in official contexts until President Theodore Roosevelt established the formal name by having “White House–Washington” engraved on the stationery in 1901.
Theodore Roosevelt’s mother, Martha Bulloch, was born in Connecticut but raised by slaveowning parents in what is now metro-Atlanta but was then the small town of Roswell (named for her father’s business partner) in a mansion that still stands. She famously died the same day as her daughter-in-law Alice- February 14, 1884.
The Charter Oak is commemmorated on the Connecticut State Quarter. It was an unusually large white oak tree on Wyllys Hyll in Hartford. According to local legend, Connecticut’s Royal Charter of 1662 was hidden within the hollow of the tree. That charter, issued by King Charles II in 1662, had granted the Connecticut Colony an unusual degree of autonomy. In 1686, Charles’ successor King James II consolidated several colonies into the Dominion of New England in part to take firmer control over them. James sent Sir Edmund Andros to Hartford in 1687 to be the governor-general and confiscate the Connecticut charter. The Museum of Connecticut History (a subdivision of the Connecticut State Library) credits the idea that Andros never got the original charter, and displays a parchment that it regards as the original.
The Charter Oak has been a symbol of American independence since the 17th century. It finally blew down during a storm on 21 August 1856. The desk of the Governor of Connecticut, as well as the chairs for the Speaker of the House of Representatives and President of the Senate in the state capitol were made from wood salvaged from the Charter Oak. Scions of the tree still grow in Hartford. One scion, at the intersection of Pine Street and Bolton Hill Road in Cornwall, CT is marked by this historical marker.
King Charles II was once asked by his brother James why he’d go out walking amongst the common people. Wasn’t he afraid for his safety? The king responded that no one would ever assassinate him, because then James would become king.
James did ascend to the throne as James II, and was deposed by William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution.
Charles I had three sons who lived to adulthood. His third son, Henry, duke of Gloucester, younger brother of Charles II and James II, died of smallpox shortly after the Restoration.
The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic was believed to have begun in the spring of 1837 when a deckhand became ill aboard an American Fur Company steamboat, the S.S. St. Peter. The epidemic ended in 1838. In July, 1837 the Mandan tribe numbered around 2,000. By October of that year, their numbers had been reduced to 138 survivors.
Flash in the Pan, a group that had a minor hit with “Hey St. Peter” in 1977 was made up of Henry Vanda and George Young, who were both former members of the Easybeats (“Friday on My Mind”). George turned to producing, guiding his younger brother Angus to stardom.
According to James Cagney’s autobiography Cagney by Cagney, a Mafia plan to murder him by dropping a several-hundred-pound klieg light on top of him was stopped at the insistence of George Raft. Cagney at that time was president of the Screen Actors Guild and was determined not to let the mob infiltrate the industry. Raft used his mob connections to cancel the hit.
The pilot for the detective series *Cagney & Lacey *starred Loretta Swit as Cagney, best known as Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan from MASH. She was contractually unavailable to do the series and was replaced by Sharon Gless, who later married the show’s producer, Barney Rosenzweig.
In 2001 Sharon Stone’s then husband, Phil Bronstein, was given a private tour of the Los Angeles zoo for his birthday during which a komodo dragon attacked and seriously injured his bare foot. Bronstein had to have surgery to reconnect several tendons and save his crushed big toe followed by weeks of recuperation and physical therapy. Stone and Bronstein have since divorced; he received custody of their son Roan and of his foot.
Perhaps the best-remembered routine by the radio comedy team Bob and Ray featured Bob Elliott as a world-renowned Komodo Dragon expert and Ray Goulding as a clueless interviewer. Their character known as “The Worst Person in the World” (a reference to New York magazine theatre critic John Simon, who gave their stage show a negative review) was, many years later, appropriated by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.