Thanks; I remembered it as a donation.
Garry Wills earned the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Lincoln at Gettysburg, which describes the historic context of President Lincoln’s great address of November 19, 1863, and compares the speech’s structure to classical Greek funerary oratory.
Henry Ford, Edvard Munch, and William Randolph Hearst were all born in 1863.
Gore Vidal popularized the oft repeated rumor that “Rosebud” from Citizen’s Kane was William Randolph Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s clitoris. Historians now think it’s extremely unlikely that Herman Mankiewicz – the co-screenwriter with Orson Welles and the only one on the production who was friends with Hearst – would have known this and reports of it only surfaced years later.
William “The Thin Man” Powell dated Jean Harlow for two years before her death. Her mother forced him to pay for her funeral, costing $30,000. He had initially refused but did so to avoid negative publicity. For many years Powell made sure fresh flowers were always present at her grave.
William J. Clinton and Kris Kristofferson were both Rhodes Scholars.
Kris Kristofferson experienced his first dose of fame when he appeared in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd” for his achievements in collegiate rugby union, football, and track and field. He and fellow classmates revived the Claremont Colleges Rugby Club in 1958, which has remained a Southern California rugby dynasty.
Andy Griffith came to stardom for his role in the film A Face in the Crowd, as a surly drunken drifter who gets a radio singing and talk show and eventually becomes a TV star and Presidential campaign adviser. He eventually destroys his career with a drunken rant on-air about the stupidity of his audience. The character is thought to have been based on Arthur Godfrey, who was reputed, and eventually known, to be the opposite of his warm, folksy persona in real life.
Rob Ford, Mayor of Toronto, has admitted to smoking crack, but has explained it away by saying he did it while in one of his drunken stupors.
Ontario law makes no provision for the removal from office of even the most catastrophically failed mayor, but the Toronto City Council has taken away most of Mayor Rob Ford’s official duties.
LA/Ontario International Airport carries most of the freight between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and the rest of the US. It is the 15th largest airport by cargo volume in the US. The name comes from the home province of the real estate developers who founded the Ontario Model Colony development that became the city of Ontario, CA.
Lawyers in Ontario are governed by the Law Society of Upper Canada.
Upper Canada ceased to exist in 1841, but the lawyers of the Province have not seen any need to update the name of the Law Society.
Vern Law, the ace of the World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates pitching staff was a Deacon of the LDS church. He and his wife VaNita had six children: Veldon, Veryl, Vaughn, Varlin, VaLynda, and major league infielder Vance.
Off-Game:
Why did they change the name back and forth? 
On-Game:
A deacon is the lowest of the three orders of the Anglican church.
There is a myth that “Thailand” means “Land of the Free,” but this is not true. Various Thai or Tai ethnicities can be found throughout much of mainland Southeast Asia, notably Vietnam and Laos and even up into southern China, speaking various dialects of Thai and having similar customs. Back at the time in question, there was a movement to have a sort of Thai Land that could ideally serve as a homeland to these Thai or Tai peoples. The Siamese in present-day Thailand had become the most powerful of these groups. Where the word “Siam” itself came from is a bit murky. Some even suggest it was an old Khmer word for “slave” and that it referred to the Siamese Thais because of all the captives taken in some ancient war or other between the Khmers and Siamese. (I’ve personally seen the stone relief of the account of this war carved into the walls of Angkor Wat.) It also may have its roots in the Sanskrit for “dark” or “brown.” Seems the faction wanting “Thailand” got kicked out at the end of WWII for supporting the Japanese, but the change still gained currency. It’s a bit more complicated than this, but that’s the basic story.
In play: Richard Deacon, whose biggest claim to fame was playing the bald Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show, usually played imperious authority-figure types but in private life was a bookish man and a renowned gourmet chef.
Just a reminder that what’s in play is the bolded part above, not my answer about Siam/Thailand to Northern Piper.
Interesting - thanks!
On-game:
Lucy Van Pelt had two brothers: Linus and Re-run. Lucy was upset when her second brother was born, because she had wanted a sister and all she got was another brother, a re-run.
The child actor who provided the voice of Linus Van Pelt in the Peanuts Christmas special could not remember his lines, so his climactic recitation of the story of the birth of the baby Jesus was cobbled together from many different takes.
It’s probably staring me right in the face, but I can’t see the connection between these two.
“Van” 
<Off-Game Comment>
What I don’t get is why, for a voice character for an animated show, the actor has to fully memorize their lines. Don’t they have accesst o the script to at least refer to it if not simply read it?
</Off-Game Comment>