Army soldiers used flamethrowers to clear huge snowdrifts from Washington, D.C. streets the night before the January 20, 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.
The LCM-8 river boat and landing craft used by the US Navy and Army in Vietnam had several variants. The one with mounted flamethrowers was, inevitably, called the Zippo boat.
In 1943 a letter to the Zippo lighter company’s George Blaisdell from General Dwight D. Eisenhower read, “It’s the only lighter I’ve got that will light at all times.”
The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is both a current U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and was a large military starship on the Fox science fiction series Space: Above and Beyond.
When Reggie Dwight was trying out a stage name, he took it from two UK magicians: Elton Dean, saxophonist for Soft Machine, and Long John Baldry, an early UK blues pioneer and the self-styled King of Rock and Roll
Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Transcontinental Motor Convoy of 1919 set out for California from Washington, DC, on July 7, 1919. Sixty-two days later the convoy reached San Francisco, having covered 3,251 miles and averaging 58 miles a day at an average speed of 6 miles an hour. The official report of the War Department, chronicling the 230 motor accidents of the convoy, concluded that the existing roads in the United States were “absolutely incapable of meeting the present day traffic requirements.”
From the 28-year old Eisenhower’s own report summary,
Ringo Starr is the oldest Beatle, with a birthdate of July 7, 1940. George Harrison was the youngest, born February 25, 1943.
In April 1934, Adolf Hitler gave the order to Ferdinand Porsche to develop a Volkswagen (literally, “people’s car”). This was to become the VW Beetle. The epithet Volks- literally, “people’s-” had been previously applied to other Nazi sponsored consumer goods such as the Volksempfänger (“people’s radio”). There followed, in May 1934, a meeting at Berlin’s Kaiserhof Hotel at which Chancellor Hitler provided Porsche with more details, insisting on a basic vehicle, capable of transporting two adults and three children at 100 km/h (62 mph) while not using more than 7 litres of fuel per 100 km (22 mpg US/27 mpg UK). The engine had to be powerful enough for rapid sustained cruising on Germany’s new Autobahnen. Everything had to be designed to ensure worn out parts could be quickly and inexpensively exchanged. The engine had to be air-cooled because, as Hitler explained, not every country doctor had his own garage. The “People’s Car” would be available to citizens of the Third Reich through a savings scheme, or Sparkarte (savings booklet), at 990 Reichsmark, about the price of a small motorcycle. (The average weekly income was then around 32RM.)
Nazi German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler gave the eulogy at the Berlin state funeral of senior SS official Reinhard Heydrich, “the Butcher of Prague,” slain by Czech partisans with British support, but privately criticized Heydrich for risking his own safety with insufficient security.
The Second Defenestration of Prague was the event that initiated the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. Four Catholic Lords Regent were forced to window-dive from the Bohemian Chancellery by members of the dissolved assembly of the three main Protestant estates who had convinced King Matthias to cease building Catholic churches on royal land. All survived the 70-foot fall, the Catholics maintaining they had been saved by angels, the Protestants maintaining that falling in a pile of horse dung had done it. Philip Fabricius was later ennobled by the emperor and granted the title Baron von Hohenfall (literally “Baron of Highfall”).
Prague is on the Vitava River, which is the longest river in the Czech Republic. The Vitava River is crossed by 18 bridges as it runs through Prague. The Vitava River is 270 miles long and drains at Mělník, Czech Republic into the Elbe, which is a 680 mile long river that drains into the North Sea.
The French language has two separate words for “river.”
“Rivière” means a river which drains into a lake or another river.
“Fleuve” means a river which drains into the ocean.
French Socialist Prime Minister Leon Blum, who served for about a year and a half between the World Wars, is one of the leaders profiled by British parliamentarian and historian Roy Jenkins in his 1974 political essay collection Nine Men of Power. Jenkins argues that Blum was a good man and had his heart in the right place, but was stymied by the dysfunctional French political system of the day.
In 1978, heavyweight boxer Leon Spinks won the undisputed world heavyweight championship when he beat Muhammad Ali in what was considered one of the biggest upsets in boxing history.
Ali was the first male to accept Islam after Muhammed, and the fourth Caliph. Upon his death by assassination at prayer, Islam began to split into the Sunni and Shiite lines.
Indonesia is the country with the world’s largest population of Islamic adherents.
The country of East Timor broke away from Indonesia in 1985, voted in favor of a referendum for independence in 1999, and officially became the first new nation of the 21st century when they joined the UN in 2002.
President Bill Clinton and his family celebrated the New Year changeover from Dec. 31, 1999 to Jan. 1, 2000 with a nighttime ceremony and fireworks on the south lawn of the White House.
NM - ninja’d.
The South Lawn provides space for Marine One to land within just a few dozen feet of both the Executive Mansion and the Oval Office.