Byron “Whizzer” White was a prominent Kennedy supporter in Colorado during the 1960 campaign and worked in the U.S. Justice Department before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Due to diversion and containment of virtually its entire flow, the mighty Colorado River essentially no longer reaches the ocean. The former delta, on the Sea of Cortez separating the main part of Mexico from Baja California, is now mostly small wetlands and brackish mudflats.
John Henry “Doc” Holliday of OK Corral fame died from tuberculosis in the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado on November 8, 1887.
On May 29, 2010, the Philadelphia Phillies’ Roy (“Doc”) Halladay pitched the 20th perfect game in MLB history. Later that season in his postseason debut, Halladay pitched a no-hitter, the second-ever in MLB postseason history.
However in the NLCS against the San Francisco Giants, the Phillies ace was beaten twice by the eventual World Series champions. In game 1 of the NLCS, SF Giant Cody Ross hit two home runs off of Halladay, the first being the first postseason run off Halladay in 11 innings.
“Cody Ross”, spelled backwards, pretty much spells “Sorry Doc.”
Go Giants.
Doc was the only one of Disney’s Seven Dwarfs not to have an adjective for a name. The others were Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and Dopey.
Back to the real Doc Holliday: he was actually a dentist, not a medical doctor, and for a few months he had a practice in Atlanta, GA. Holliday’s cousin by marriage was Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone With the Wind.
Margaret Mitchell had a great appreciation of erotica and books about sex beginning in her twenties, and bought and read many of them.
In the film Brewster McCloud, the character portrayed by Margaret Hamilton is murdered in the opening scene. The camera pans down her body and it’s revealed she was wearing ruby slippers.
Statues of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, bitter political rivals in the early republic, sit side by side on the front steps of the Cuyahoga County Old Courthouse.
Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, cousins but deadly rivals for power, are entombed side by side in Westminster Abbey.
Mary, Queen of Scots, was not beheaded with a single strike. The first blow missed her neck and struck the back of her head. The second blow severed the neck, except for a small bit of sinew, which the executioner cut through using the axe. Afterward, he held her head aloft and declared, “God save the Queen.” At that moment, the auburn tresses in his hand turned out to be a wig and the head fell to the ground, revealing that Mary had very short, grey hair. A small dog owned by the queen, a Skye terrier, is said to have been hiding among her skirts, unseen by the spectators. Following the beheading, it refused to be parted from its owner’s body and was covered in her blood, until it was forcibly taken away and washed.
The last words of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, before her own beheading for adultery (which, being against the King, made it treason), were reportedly “I die the Queen of England, but I had rather die Mrs. Thomas Culpeper”. Culpeper got the axe too, of course.
“A Fifth of Beethoven,” a disco instrumental recorded by Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band, was adapted by Murphy from the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The “Fifth” in the song’s title has a double meaning, referencing both a liquid measure approximately equal to one-fifth of a gallon, a popular size for bottles containing hard liquor, as well as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from which the song was adapted.
In the early 70s, Loudon Wainwright III coined the term “The New Bob Dylan Club” for those musicians who were saddled with that title. Those who were included were Wainwright, Bruce Springsteen, John Prine, and Eliot Murphy.
Loudonville, NY is in the town of Colonie (rhymes with CALL-a-KNEE) and is named after John Campbell, the 4th Earl of Loudoun.
ETA: oh yeah, it’s not too far from Schenectady, too.
“The Campbells Are Coming” is the piping war march of Clan Campbell.
Singer Glen Campbell was born in Arkansas. He performed the National Anthem at the 1980 Republican National Convention.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell cuckolded his friend John Steinbeck (novelist), effectively ending Steinbeck’s first marriage.
Before he appears as Charles Foster Kane’s best friend, Jed Leland, in Citizen Kane (1941), Joseph Cotten appears as one of the reporters in the March of Time parody sequence early in the film. He is seated in the back of the projection room, in the last row at the far left, and is only clearly visible in one shot, but his voice along with that of Everett Sloane’s (who plays Bernstein) can often be heard in the darkness on the soundtrack.
When Orson Welles was directing Touch of Evil, Joseph Cotton visited the set. Welles had him made up and he appeared as the coroner. The movie also featured Marlene Dietrich and Zsa Zsa Gabor; the studio executives didn’t realize Dietrich was involved until they saw the film.
Actually, I live in Schenectady and work in Loudonville. 