FUN FACTS: NOTABLE & QUOTABLE

Life is mostly about the pursuit of knowledge and, therefore, the collection of fun facts. All my fun facts were harvested personally … They started as a physical book purchase from Amazon, then moved to a Kindle download where I bookmarked them by hand; at the conclusion of a book they were transcribed into a Snoopy Moleskine, and finally, they appear here for your personal wonderment.

• The first aircraft built to fly a US president was a Douglas VC-54C Skymaster dubbed the Sacred Cow.
• George Harrison’s “Something” has been covered over 200 times but, it is said, before he consulted with John Lennon, he was singing, “Something in the way she moves attracts me like a pomegranate.”
• Jim Morrison was found dead from China White heroin in the ladies bathroom at the Rock & Roll Circus, a bar in Paris. To prevent the police from discovering him and possibly shutting down the bar, the bar’s henchmen stuffed him into the back of a car, drove him to the flat he shared with his drug-addict girlfriend Pam and shoved him naked into the bathtub, instructing Pam to then call the authorities.
• Arthur Schlesinger, “John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert Kennedy was a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”
• An estimated 60-400 million beaver had lived in North American rivers and stream before the arrival of Europeans, they weighed between twenty-five and seventy-five pounds and could stay underwater for as long as fifteen minutes with one breath
• Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach, he said, “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant, even I want to be Cary Grant.”
• The legendary USC football coach Howard Jones got summer jobs for his football players moving props and scenery of the Fox Studios lot, among those players were John Wayne and his future co-star and wingman Ward Bond.
• President Chester Arthur liked to stay up late drinking, eating and smoking Havana cigars. He cast his ballot in the 1885 presidential election at a little cigar store at 402 Third Avenue in New York City.
• In 1971, Cheech & Chong released a single “Santa & His Old Lady” and on the flipside, the simple and still hilarious bit “Dave.”
• There’s a place of worship near the White House named Saint John’s Chapel and every president since James Madison has prayed there.
• The annual salmon run in the Pacific Northwest in pre-European times yielded somewhere around 300 million fish each year, 1.8 billion pounds.
• John Lennon 1974, “We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the new world and the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.”
• Pink Floyd is a name taken from two blues players, Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.
• President Rutherford B. Hayes had three horses shot out from under him and was wounded four times in the Civil War.
• Paul Revere was a workingman, a Boston silversmith and it took Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem published in 1861 to make him an American icon, “Listen my friends and you will hear about the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
• There could have been as many as ten million native Indians in America at the time of white contract in 1492. By the 1900 census, there were 237,000 Indians.
• Harry Truman liked a brisk morning walk and he was a very precise man, he counted his steps, exactly 120 paces per minute. Those around him called this his, “His regular marching speed” and said, “His every step was like a hammer driving in a nail.”
• Dion is one of only two rock stars on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album (the other is Bob Dylan).
• Ike golfed a lot, so the competing Democrats came up with a bumper sticker that said, “Ben Hogan for president, if we’re gonna have a golfer as president let’s have a good one.”
• Billy the Kid was arrested in New Mexico in 1881 where the judge sentenced him to death or is his words, to hang until he was “dead, dead, dead,” to which Billy replied, “And you can go to hell, hell, hell.”
• Gregg Allman, “I always tried to play every night as if it was the last show … As if the Russians were in Key West and headed this way.”
• In the 1910s there was an upstart baseball league called the Federal League featuring the St. Louis Terriers and the Chicago Whales.