Wiley Post--First to Fly Solo Around the World, Discoverer of the Jet Stream

 

Wiley Hardeman Post (November 22, 1898 – August 15, 1935) was an American aviator during the interwar period and the first pilot to fly solo around the world. Known for his work in high-altitude flying, he helped develop one of the first pressure suits and discovered the jet stream. On August 15, 1935, he and American humorist Will Rogers were killed when his aircraft crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow in the Territory of Alaska.

Post's Lockheed Vega aircraft, the Winnie Mae, was on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center from 2003 to 2011. It is now featured in the "Time and Navigation" gallery on the second floor of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.. 

Post was born to parents who cultivated cotton on a farm near Grand Saline, Texas. His father was William Francis and his mother was Mae Quinlan Post, a person of mixed Cherokee heritage. His family moved to Oklahoma when he was five. He was an indifferent student, but managed to complete the sixth grade. By 1920, his family settled on a farm near Maysville, Oklahoma.

In 1913, Post first saw an aircraft in flight at the county fair in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a Curtiss-Wright "Pusher type". The event so inspired him that he immediately enrolled in the Sweeney Automobile and Aviation School in Kansas City. Seven months later, he returned to Oklahoma, and went to work at the Chickasaw and Lawton Construction Company.

During World War I Post wanted to become a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Service (USAS). Joining the training camp at the University of Oklahoma, he learned radio technology. Germany agreed to an armistice before he completed his training. The war ended, and he went to work as a "roughneck" in the Oklahoma oilfields. The work was unsteady, and he turned briefly to armed robbery. He was arrested in 1921 and sent to the Oklahoma State Reformatory, serving more than a year there. He was paroled in summer 1922.

Post's aviation career began at age 26 as a parachutist for a flying circus, Burrell Tibbs and His Texas Topnotch Fliers, and he became well known on the barnstorming circuit. On October 1, 1926, he was badly injured in an oil-rig accident when a piece of metal pierced his left eye. An infection permanently blinded him in it, and he typically wore an eyepatch thereafter. He used the settlement money to buy his first aircraft.

Around this time, Post met fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers when he flew Rogers to a rodeo, and they eventually became close friends. Post was the personal pilot of wealthy Oklahoma oilmen Powell Briscoe and F.C. Hall in 1930, when Hall bought a high-wing, single-engine Lockheed Vega, one of the most famous record-breaking aircraft of the early 1930s. The oilman nicknamed it the Winnie Mae after his daughter, and Post achieved his first national prominence in it by winning the National Air Race Derby, from Los Angeles to Chicago. The fuselage was inscribed "Los Angeles to Chicago 9 hrs. 8 min. 2 sec. August 27, 1930." Adam Charles Williams finished second with a time of 9 hrs. 9 min. 4 sec Post earned a prize of $7,500. The equivalent of $112,053 in 2020. 

In 1930, the record for flying around the world was not held by a fixed-wing aircraft, but by the Graf Zeppelin, piloted by Hugo Eckener in 1929 with a time of 21 days. On June 23, 1931, Post and the Australian navigator Harold Gatty left Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, in the Winnie Mae with a flight plan that would take them around the world, stopping at Harbour Grace, Flintshire, Hanover twice, Berlin, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, Nome (where his propeller had to be repaired), Fairbanks (where the propeller was replaced), Edmonton, and Cleveland before returning to Roosevelt Field.

They arrived back on July 1, after traveling 15,474 miles (24,903 km) in the record time of 8 days and 15 hours and 51 minutes, in the first successful aerial circumnavigation by a single-engined monoplane. The reception they received rivaled Charles Lindbergh's everywhere they went. They had lunch at the White House on July 7, rode in a ticker-tape parade the next day in New York City, and were honored at a banquet given by the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America at the Hotel Astor. After the flight, Post acquired the Winnie Mae from F.C. Hall. He and Gatty published an account of their journey, titled Around the World in Eight Days, with an introduction by Will Rogers.

After the record-setting flight, Post wanted to open his own aeronautical school, but could not raise enough financial support because of doubts many had about his rural background and limited formal education. Motivated by his detractors, he decided to attempt a solo flight around the world and to break his previous speed record. Over the next year, he improved his aircraft by installing an autopilot device and a radio direction finder, that were in their final stages of development by the Sperry Gyroscope Company and the United States Army.

In 1933, Post repeated his flight around the world, this time using the auto-pilot and compass in place of his navigator and becoming the first to accomplish the feat alone. He departed from Floyd Bennett Field and continued on to Berlin where repairs were attempted to his autopilot, stopped at Königsberg to replace some forgotten maps, Moscow for more repairs to his autopilot, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk for final repairs to the autopilot, Rukhlovo, Khabarovsk, Flat where his propeller had to be replaced, Fairbanks, Edmonton, and back to Floyd Bennett Field. Fifty thousand people greeted him on his return on July 22 after 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes.

In 1934, with financial support from Frank Phillips of the Phillips Petroleum Company, Post began exploring the limits of high-altitude long-distance flight. The Winnie Mae's cabin could not be pressurized, so he worked with Russell S. Colley of the B.F. Goodrich Company to develop what became the world's first practical pressure suit. Three pressure suits were fabricated for Post. Only the final version was successful. The first suit ruptured during a pressure test. The redesigned second suit used the same helmet as the first but when tested was too tight. They were unable to remove it from Post, so they had to cut him out, destroying the suit. The third suit was redesigned from the previous two.

The body of the suit had three layers: long underwear, an inner black rubber air pressure bladder, and an outer layer made of rubberized parachute fabric. The outer layer was glued to a frame with arm and leg joints that allowed him to operate the flight controls and to walk to and from the aircraft. Attached to the frame were pigskin gloves, rubber boots, and an aluminum-and-plastic diver's helmet.

The helmet had a removable faceplate that could be sealed at a height of 17,000 ft (5,200 m), and could accommodate earphones and a throat microphone. The helmet was cylinder-shaped with a circular window. In the first flight using the suit on September 5, 1934, Post reached an altitude of 40,000 ft (12,000 m) above Chicago. Eventually flying as high as 50,000 ft (15,000 m), he discovered the jet stream and made the first major practical advances in pressurized flight.

Between February 22 and June 15, 1935, Post made four unsuccessful attempts to complete the first high altitude non-stop flight from Los Angeles to New York, all of which failed for various mechanical reasons. The first attempt on February 22 ended 57.5 miles north of Los Angeles at Muroc Field, CA (Now Edwards AFB). This was followed by attempts on March 15 (Cleveland, Ohio; 2,035 miles), April 14 (Lafayette, Indiana; 1,760 miles), and June 15 (Wichita, KS; 1,188 miles).

As the attempts were meant to be the "First Air Mail Stratosphere Flight" over U.S. Air Mail Route #2 (AM-2) from Los Angeles to New York, Post carried a quantity of "cacheted" covers sponsored by Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc on all four flights. When he was killed on August 15, 1935, ending the possibility of any more attempts to complete the AM-2 stratosphere flight, the covers were cancelled in Los Angeles on August 20, 1935, and forwarded to their addressees.

In 1935, Post became interested in surveying a mail-and-passenger air route from the West Coast of the United States to Russia. Short on cash, he built a hybrid using parts salvaged from two different aircraft: the fuselage of an airworthy Lockheed Orion and the wings of a wrecked experimental Lockheed Explorer. The Explorer wing was six feet longer in span than the Orion's original wing, an advantage that extended the range of the hybrid aircraft.

As the Explorer wing did not have retractable landing gear, it lent itself to the fitting of floats for landing in the lakes of Alaska and Siberia. Lockheed refused to make the modifications Post requested, on the grounds that the two designs were incompatible and potentially a dangerous mix, so he made the changes himself.

Post's friend, Will Rogers, visited him often at the airport in Burbank, California, while Pacific Airmotive Ltd. was modifying the aircraft, and asked Post to fly him to Alaska in search of new material for his newspaper column. When the floats Post had ordered were delayed, he used a set designed for a larger aircraft, making the aircraft more nose-heavy than it already was. According to the research of Bryan Sterling, however, the floats were the correct type for the aircraft.

After making a test flight in July, Post and Rogers left Lake Washington, near Seattle, in early August and made several stops in Alaska. While Post piloted the aircraft, Rogers wrote his columns on his typewriter. On August 15, they left Fairbanks for Point Barrow. They were a few miles from there when they became uncertain of their position in bad weather and landed in a lagoon to ask for directions. On takeoff, the engine failed at low altitude, and the aircraft, uncontrollably nose-heavy at low speed, plunged into the lagoon, shearing off the right wing, and ended up inverted in the shallow part. Both Post and Rogers died instantly. Post is buried in Memorial Park Cemetery, section 48, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

In 1936, the Smithsonian Institution acquired the Winnie Mae from Post's widow for $25,000. Two monuments at the crash site commemorate the death of him and Will Rogers and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The nearby Wiley Post–Will Rogers Memorial Airport located in Utqiagvik, Alaska bears their names.

Wiley Post Airport, a large FAA designated reliever airport in Oklahoma City, is named after Post. Oklahoma City's major commercial airport is named after Will Rogers, so that both victims of the crash are honored by airports in Oklahoma City. The Will Rogers – Wiley Post Memorial Seaplane Base is a seaplane base located on Lake Washington, at the north end of the Renton Municipal Airport in Renton, Washington.

The U.S. Army Air Forces, later the United States Air Force, named a street after Post on the former Maywood Army Air Forces Specialized Storage Depot, later Cheli Air Force Station. No longer owned by the federal government, Wiley Post Road remains, connecting Bandini Boulevard and Lindbergh Lane in Bell, California.

Post received the Distinguished Flying Cross (1932), the Gold Medal of Belgium (1934), and the International Harmon Trophy (1934). In 1969, he was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame. On December 17, 1970, he was inducted into the First Flight Society's First Flight Shrine, located at the Wright Brothers National Memorial.

In 1997, Post was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum.

In 1979, the United States Postal Service honored Post with two airmail stamps.

In 2004, Post was inducted posthumously into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

For many years, The Wiley Post Commission, based in Oklahoma City, presented the annual Wiley Post Spirit Award to "an individual in general aviation who best exemplifies the innovative and pioneering spirit of Wiley Post".

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Henry Dana, jr--"Two Years Before the Mast"

 

 

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (August 1, 1815 – January 6, 1882) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts, a descendant of a colonial family, who gained renown as the author of the classic American memoir Two Years Before the Mast and as an attorney who successfully represented the U.S. government before the U.S. Supreme Court during the Civil War in the Prize Cases. Both as a writer and as a lawyer, he was a champion of the downtrodden, from seamen to fugitive slaves and freedmen. 

 

Dana was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 1, 1815 into a family that had settled in colonial America in 1640, counting Anne Bradstreet among its ancestors. His father was the poet and critic Richard Henry Dana Sr. As a boy, Dana studied in Cambridgeport under a strict schoolmaster named Samuel Barrett, alongside fellow Cambridge native and future writer James Russell Lowell. Barrett was infamous as a disciplinarian who punished his students for any infraction by flogging. He also often pulled students by their ears and, on one such occasion, nearly pulled Dana's ear off, causing the boy's father to protest enough that the practice was abolished.

In 1825, Dana enrolled in a private school overseen by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Dana later mildly praised as "a very pleasant instructor", though he lacked a "system or discipline enough to ensure regular and vigorous study." In July 1831, Dana enrolled at Harvard College, where in his freshman year his support of a student protest cost him a six-month suspension. In his junior year, he contracted measles, which in his case led to ophthalmia.

This worsening vision inspired him to take a sea voyage. But rather than going on a fashionable Grand Tour of Europe he decided, despite his social standing, to enlist as a merchant seaman.

On August 14, 1834, he departed Boston aboard the brig Pilgrim, captained by Frank Thompson, bound for Alta California, at that time still a part of Mexico. This voyage would bring Dana to a number of settlements in California (including Monterey, San Buenaventura, San Pedro, San Juan Capistrano, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara and San Francisco). After witnessing Thompson's sadistic practices, including a flogging on board the ship, he vowed that he would try to help improve the lot of the common seaman. The Pilgrim collected hides for shipment to Boston, and Dana spent much of his time in California at San Diego's Point Loma curing hides and loading them onto the ship.

Dana's description of his time on Point Loma depicted love and concern for the Hawaiians who worked there alongside him. He may have been predisposed to feel positively toward them by a previous stay in Andover, Massachusetts, among evangelicals who had embraced Hawaiians in New England and sent the first Protestant missionaries to Hawaii.

Wishing to return home sooner, Dana was reassigned by the ship's owners to a different ship: the Alert. Dana gives the classic account of the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter. He describes terrifying storms and profound beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs, which he calls incomparable. He found the most incredible part of the journey the weeks and weeks it took to negotiate passage against winds and storms—all the while having to race up and down the ice-covered rigging to furl and unfurl sails. At one point he had an infected tooth, and his face swelled up so that he was unable to work for several days, despite the need for all hands. He also describes the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew after the rounding of the Horn. In White-Jacket, Herman Melville wrote, "But if you want the best idea of Cape Horn, get my friend Dana's unmatchable Two Years Before the Mast. But you can read, and so you must have read it. His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle."

On September 22, 1836, Dana arrived back in Massachusetts. He then enrolled at what is now Harvard Law School, then called the Dane Law School after Nathan Dane. He graduated in 1837, and was admitted to the bar in 1840. 

Dana went on to specialize in maritime law. In the October 1839 issue of a magazine, he took a local judge, one of his own instructors in law school, to task for letting off a ship's captain and mate with a slap on the wrist for murdering the ship's cook, beating him to death for not "laying hold" of a piece of equipment. The judge had sentenced the captain to ninety days in jail and the mate to thirty days.

In 1841, Dana published The Seaman's Friend, which became a standard reference on the legal rights and responsibilities of sailors. He defended many common seamen in court.

During his voyages he had kept a diary, and in 1840 (coinciding with his admission to the bar) he published a memoir, Two Years Before the Mast. The term "before the mast" refers to sailors' quarters, which were located in the forecastle (the ship's bow), officers' quarters being near the stern. His writing evinces his later sympathy for the oppressed. With the California Gold Rush later in the decade, Two Years Before the Mast would become highly sought after as one of the few sources of information on California.

Dana became a prominent abolitionist, helping to found the anti-slavery Free Soil Party in 1848 and representing the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston in 1854. He was a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted fugitive slaves.

In 1853, Dana represented William T. G. Morton in Morton's attempt to establish that he discovered the "anaesthetic properties of ether".

In 1859, while the U.S. Senate was considering whether the United States should try to annex the Spanish possession of Cuba, Dana traveled there and visited Havana, a sugar plantation, a bullfight, and various churches, hospitals, schools, and prisons, a trip documented in his book To Cuba and Back.

During the American Civil War, Dana served as a United States Attorney, and, in the Prize Cases, successfully argued before the Supreme Court that the U.S. president had the power under the U.S. Constitution to blockade Confederate ports.

After the end of the Civil War, he resigned his office since he did not approve of President Andrew Johnson's policy of Reconstruction, which was denounced by Radical Republicans as being too moderate in regard to blacks’ civil rights and the punishment of former Confederates, and entered private practice. During 1867–1868, Dana was a member of the Massachusetts legislature and also served as a U.S. counsel in the trial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

On August 24, 1868, Dana wrote a letter to Attorney General William Evarts arguing that the United States should abandon the prosecution because, even though there was no doubt that Davis had committed treason, a jury in Virginia would be unlikely to convict, which "would be most humiliating to the Government and people of this country." A conviction, even "if obtained, will settle nothing in law or natural practice not now settled, and nothing in fact not now history...."

In 1868, Dana ran as an independent candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Essex County, Massachusetts. He lost to incumbent Republican Benjamin Butler and also received fewer votes than Democrat Otis P. Lord.

In 1876, his nomination as minister to Great Britain was defeated in the Senate by political enemies William Beach Lawrence and Benjamin Butler, partly because of a lawsuit for plagiarism brought against him for a legal textbook he had edited, Henry Wheaton's Elements of International Law (8th ed., 1866).^[18] Immediately after the book's publication, Dana had been charged by the editor of two earlier editions, William Beach Lawrence, with infringing his copyright, and was involved in litigation that continued for thirteen years. In such minor matters as arrangement of notes and verification of citations the court found against Dana, but in the main Dana's notes were vastly different from Lawrence's.

In 1877, Dana was one of the counsel for the U.S. federal government, appearing before the Halifax Fisheries Commission, appointed under the Treaty of Washington (1871) to resolve outstanding issues, including fishing rights. The Commission gave an award directing the U.S. to pay $5,500,000 to the British government. Towards the end of his life he went to Europe to devote himself to the preparation of a treatise on international law, but the actual composition of this work was little more than begun when he died in Rome, January 6, 1882.

His son, Richard Henry Dana III, married Edith Longfellow, daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Additional biographical information and insights into the life of Richard Henry Dana Jr. are in the "Introductory Note" to the Harvard Classics edition of Two Years Before the Mast, edited by Charles W. Eliot, L.L.D., and published by P.F. Collier & Son in 1909. Here is an excerpt:

Richard Henry Dana, the second of that name, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 1, 1815. He came of a stock that had resided there since the days of the early settlements; his grandfather, Francis Dana, had been the first American minister to Russia and later became chief justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts; his father was distinguished as a man of letters. He entered Harvard College in 1831; but near the beginning of his third year an attack of measles left his eyesight so weak that study was impossible. Tired of the tedium of a slow convalescence, he decided on a sea voyage; and choosing to go as a sailor rather than a passenger, he shipped from Boston on August 14, 1834, on the brig Pilgrim, bound for the coast of California. His experiences for the next two years form the subject of the present volume.

In the December following his return to Boston in 1836, Dana re-entered Harvard, the hero of his fellow students, graduating the following June. He next took up the study of law, at the same time teaching elocution in the College, and in 1840 he opened an office in Boston. While in law school he had written the narrative of his voyage, which he now published; and in the following year, 1841, issued The Seaman's Friend. Both books were republished in England and brought him an immediate reputation.

After several years of practicing law, during which he dealt largely with cases involving the rights of seamen, he began to take part in politics as an active member of the Free Soil Party. The Free Soil Party was founded in 1847–48 in opposition to the extension of slavery into the western U.S. territories newly acquired from Mexico.

During the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act he served as counsel on behalf of the fugitives Shadrach Minkins, Thomas Sims, and Anthony Burns, and on one occasion suffered a serious assault as a consequence of his zeal. His prominence in these cases, along with his fame as a writer, brought him much social recognition on his visit to England in 1856. Three years later, his health gave way from overwork, and he set out on a voyage round the world, revisiting California, where he made the observations that appear in the postscript to this book. The postscript is titled, "Twenty-Four Years After."

On his return, Dana was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as United States Attorney for Massachusetts. In his argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Prize Cases, which upheld Lincoln's blockade of Southern ports, he greatly increased an already brilliant legal reputation. He spoke out in favor of African-American voting, education, property, and firearms ownership, stating:

We have got to choose between two results. With these four millions of Negroes, either you must have four millions of disfranchised, disarmed, untaught, landless, thriftless, non-producing, non-consuming, degraded men, or else you must have four millions of land-holding, industrious, arms-bearing, and voting population. Choose between the two! Which will you have?^[21]

His sentiments were echoed by future U.S. President James A. Garfield in his speeches, who agreed with Dana's message.    Wikipedia

 

Alex Trebek--Who Is the The Consummate Game Show Host?

 

George Alexander Trebek OC (/trəˈbɛk/; July 22, 1940 – November 8, 2020) was a Canadian-American game show host and television personality. He was best known for hosting the syndicated general knowledge quiz game show Jeopardy! for 37 seasons from its revival in 1984 until his death in 2020. Trebek also hosted a number of other game shows, including The Wizard of Odds, Double Dare, High Rollers, Battlestars, Classic Concentration, and To Tell the Truth. He also made appearances, usually as himself, in numerous films and television series.

A native of Canada, Trebek became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1998. For his work on Jeopardy!, Trebek received the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host eight times. He died on November 8, 2020, at the age of 80, after a 20-month battle with stage IV pancreatic cancer. At the time of his death, Trebek had been contracted to host Jeopardy! until 2022.

Trebek was born on July 22, 1940, in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, the son of George Edward Trebek (born Terebeychuk, Ukrainian: Теребейчу́к), a chef who had emigrated from Ukraine as a child, and Lucille Marie Lagacé (April 14, 1921 – 2016), a Franco-Ontarian. Trebek had roots in Renfrew County, Ontario, where his maternal grandmother was born in Mount St. Patrick near Renfrew. Trebek grew up in a bilingual French-English household. He was almost expelled from the boarding school that his parents sent him to. Shortly after, Trebek attended a military college in Quebec but dropped out when he was asked to cut his hair. Trebek's first job at age 13 was as a bellhop at the hotel where his father worked as a chef. Trebek attended Sudbury High School (now Sudbury Secondary School) and then attended the University of Ottawa. He graduated from the University of Ottawa with a degree in philosophy in 1961. While a university student, Trebek was a member of the English Debating Society. At the time, he was interested in a broadcast news career.

In 1973, Trebek moved to the United States and worked for NBC as host of a new game show, The Wizard of Odds. A year later Trebek hosted the popular Merrill Heatter-Bob Quigley game show High Rollers, which had two incarnations on NBC (1974–76 and 1978–80) and an accompanying syndicated season (1975–76). In between stints as host of High Rollers, Trebek hosted the short-lived CBS game show Double Dare (not to be confused with the 1986 Nickelodeon game show of the same name). Double Dare turned out to be Trebek's only game show with the CBS network (he returned there in 1994 to host the Pillsbury Bake-Off until 1998), and the first show he hosted for what was then Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions, as well as the second season of the syndicated series The $128,000 Question, which was recorded in Toronto.

Since the second incarnation of High Rollers premiered while The $128,000 Question was still airing and taping episodes, Trebek became one of two hosts to emcee shows in both the United States and Canada, joining Jim Perry, who was hosting Definition and Headline Hunters in Canada and Card Sharks, which coincidentally premiered the same day as High Rollers in 1978 in the United States. Trebek's francophone side was put on display in 1978, in a special bilingual edition of Reach for the Top and its Radio-Canada equivalent, Génies en herbe. In this show, Trebek alternated smoothly between French and English throughout.

Like other hosts of the day, Trebek made several guest appearances as a panelist or player on other shows. One of his guest appearances was on a special week of NBC's Card Sharks in 1980. Trebek and several other game show hosts (Allen Ludden, Bill Cullen, Wink Martindale, Jack Clark, Tom Kennedy, Gene Rayburn, and Jim Lange) competed in a week-long round-robin tournament for charity. Trebek won the tournament, defeating Cullen in the finals. Trebek also appeared as a celebrity teammate on the NBC game show The Magnificent Marble Machine in 1975, and the Tom Kennedy-hosted NBC word game To Say the Least in 1978. Both of those shows were produced by Merrill Heatter-Bob Quigley Productions, which also produced High Rollers, the show Trebek was hosting during both of those guest appearances. Trebek also was a contestant on Celebrity Bowling in 1976, teamed with Jim McKrell.^[ The duo won their match against Dick Gautier and Scatman Crothers.

After High Rollers was cancelled in 1980, Trebek moved on to Battlestars for NBC. The series debuted in October 1981 and was cancelled in April 1982 after only six months on the air. In September 1981, Trebek took the helm of the syndicated Pitfall, which taped in Vancouver and forced him to commute, as Trebek had done while hosting High Rollers and The $128,000 Question in 1978. Pitfall was cancelled after its production company, Catalena Productions, went bankrupt. As a result, Trebek was never paid for that series. After both series ended, he hosted a revival of Battlestars called The New Battlestars that ended after 13 weeks, then shot a series of pilots for other series for producer Merrill Heatter, for whom he had worked hosting High Rollers and Battlestars, and Merv Griffin. The Heatter pilots were Malcolm, an NBC-ordered pilot featuring Trebek with an animated character as his co-host, and Lucky Numbers, an attempt at a revival of High Rollers that failed to sell. For Griffin, (who was ultimately encouraged to hire Trebek by Lucille Ball) he shot two pilots for a revival of Jeopardy! when original host Art Fleming (a friend of Trebek's) declined to return to the role owing to creative differences. This revival sold, and Trebek began hosting it in 1984 and remained the host until his death in 2020. His final episode hosting Jeopardy! was to air on Christmas Day 2020; however, Sony announced on November 23, 2020, that the air dates of Trebek's final week would be postponed, with episodes scheduled for the week of December 21–25 being postponed to January 4–8, 2021, due to the delay caused by the cancellation of most November production dates and pre-emptions caused by holiday week specials and shorts.

Following Trebek's death, a series of guest hosts filled in for Trebek for the remainder of season 37 of Jeopardy! (his final season). On July 27, 2022, it was announced that Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings would succeed Trebek as the permanent hosts of Jeopardy! after alternating in multi-week stints for the remainder of the show's 38th season after Mike Richards (the show's then-executive producer who briefly succeeded Trebek as host of the program) was let go after taping a week's worth of episodes after various controversies came to light.

In 1987, while still hosting Jeopardy!, Trebek returned to daytime television as host of NBC's Classic Concentration, his second show for Mark Goodson. Trebek hosted both shows simultaneously until September 20, 1991, when Classic Concentration aired its final first-run episode (NBC would air repeats until 1993). In 1991, he made broadcast history by becoming the first person to host three American game shows at the same time, earning this distinction on February 4, 1991, when Trebek took over from Lynn Swann as host of NBC's To Tell the Truth for Goodson-Todman, which Trebek hosted until the end of the series' run on May 31, 1991.

In 1994, Trebek returned to the CBS network for the first time since hosting Double Dare to host the Pillsbury Bake-Off, which he hosted until 1998. Trebek and Pat Sajak, host of Wheel of Fortune, traded places on April Fools' Day 1997. Pat Sajak hosted Jeopardy! and Trebek hosted Wheel of Fortune with Sajak's wife, Lesly, as Trebek's co-host. Sajak and Wheel of Fortune co-host Vanna White played contestants at the wheel, with winnings going toward charities. Trebek appeared on Celebrity Poker Showdown in 2005 and came in second place in his qualifying game, losing to Cheryl Hines.

On June 24, 2018, Trebek returned as a panelist on the ABC revival of To Tell the Truth. He hosted a Jeopardy! primetime special event titled The Greatest of All Time on ABC in January 2020, pitting the highest money winners in the show's history, Brad Rutter, Ken Jennings, and James Holzhauer, against each other.

Trebek was a longtime philanthropist and activist. He was active with multiple charities, including World Vision Canada, United Service Organizations, and the United Negro College Fund. For World Vision, Trebek travelled to many developing countries with World Vision projects, taping reports on the group's efforts on behalf of children around the world. He and the Jeopardy! crew became involved with the United Service Organizations in 1995, appearing on several military bases throughout the world, both in an attempt to find contestants and as a morale booster for the troops. While genuinely supportive of the cause throughout his life, Trebek has said that he believes he initially got involved with the UNCF in the 1980s because — due to the afro, mustache and "very dark tan" that he sported at the time — he was often confused for being a Black man and so was invited to take part in the organization's telethons.

Trebek also donated 74 acres (30 hectares) of open land in the Hollywood Hills to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in 1998. He was later awarded one of the American Foundation for the Blind's six yearly Access Awards for his role in accommodating Jeopardy! champion Eddie Timanus. Trebek hosted the annual The Great Canadian Geography Challenge in Canada. He hosted the National Geographic Bee in the United States for 25 years, stepping down in 2013. He also served on the advisory board of U.S. English, an organization that supports making English the official language of the United States.

In 2016, Trebek donated $5 million to the University of Ottawa to fund the Alex Trebek Forum for Dialogue, the objective of which is "to expose students to a wide range of diverse views, through speeches, public panels, events and lectures by University of Ottawa researchers, senior government officials and guests speakers from around the world." His gifts to the university, which at the time totaled $7.5 million, also fund a Distinguished Speaker Series, which has included a presentation by Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee, introduced by Trebek. In 2017, he funded the Alex Trebek Leadership Award at the University of Ottawa, an annual $10,000 award to a summa cum laude graduate who has also demonstrated community leadership. By October 2020, Trebek's contributions to the University of Ottawa totalled around $10 million.

In March 2020, Trebek donated $100,000 to Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter in Los Angeles.

Trebek owned his own wardrobe, consisting of dozens of outfits and hundreds of neckties. In February 2021, Trebek's son, Matthew, donated the wardrobe to The Doe Fund, in keeping with a statement Trebek had made on his last day of taping.

On August 19, 2021, prior to the start of Jeopardy! season 38 taping, Sony Pictures Studios sound stage Studio 10 was officially renamed as "The Alex Trebek Stage"  Wikipedia

 

Elizabeth Berridge--Constanze Mozart in Amadeus

 

Berridge was born in New Rochelle, New York, the daughter of George Berridge, a lawyer, and Mary L. Berridge (née Robinson), a social worker. The family settled in Larchmont, New York, where she attended Chatsworth Elementary School. There she began to perform and sing. Due to her acting commitments, she earned her diploma through an independent-study program at Mamaroneck High School.

Berridge was called in to audition for the part of Constanze Mozart after filming had already commenced in Prague on Amadeus. Meg Tilly, who was originally given the role, injured her leg in a soccer game and had to withdraw from the film. Two actresses were flown to Prague, and after a week's auditions, Berridge was given the part (supposedly because the other actress, Diane Franklin, was "too pretty" to play the part of a landlady's daughter). Berridge and the other cast members remained in Prague for six months to complete the filming.  Wikipedia

 

A diminutive brunette with a wide range, but most often cast in somewhat sullen comic roles, Elizabeth Berridge began acting right out of high school in the feature film "Natural Enemies" (1979) and on the NBC daytime drama "Texas." She first received wide notice as the slightly flighty Costanze Mozart opposite Tom Hulce in Milos Forman's Oscar-winning "Amadeus" (1984). Berridge has since appeared in such features as "Five Corners" (1986) and "Small Talk" (1985), but has become better known for her TV work.

Berridge made her TV series debut as the bumbling maid serving a senator's family in the Norman Lear-produced "The Powers That Be" (NBC, 1992-93). She had greater series success as Eggers, the tomboyish cop, on "The John Larroquette Show" (NBC, 1993-96). Berridge has also appeared in several TV-movies, notably "Silence of the Heart" (CBS, 1984) and the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" production "Home Fires Burning" (CBS, 1989).

Due to her immediate entry into TV and film, Berridge did not begin to act on stage until 1984. Within two years, she had earned a Drama Desk nomination Desk Award for her work in three off-Broadway plays: ""Briar Patch," "Cruise Control" and "Wrestlers." Her first Southern California stage work, the lead in "Lulu" at the La Jolla Playhouse resulted in a 1989 DRAMA-LOGUE Award as Best Lead Actress.  Turner Classic Movies

 

T.S.Eliot--Nobel Laureate in Literature

 

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.

Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from 1914 to 1915, which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish. It was followed by The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He was also known for seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.

Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. In his memoir about Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living." Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student literary magazine. He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. His interest in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard.

Eliot lived in St. Louis, Missouri, for the first 16 years of his life at the house on Locust Street where he was born. After going away to school in 1905, he returned to St. Louis only for vacations and visits. Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a friend that "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world."

Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer who later published The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective program similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year. Because of his year at Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of Arts after three years instead of the usual four. Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American writer and critic.

After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier. From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. Whilst a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.

Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's fledgling career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Eliot "was seeing as little of Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared [...] It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere." In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck College, University of London.

In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", but failed to return for the viva voce examination.  Wikipedia

cf., Wikipedia for articles on individual Eliot works

 

 

 

President Franklin Pierce--Second Worst U.S. President Ever?

 

Franklin Pierce (November 23, 1804 – October 8, 1869) was an American politician who served as the 14th president of the United States from 1853 to 1857. A northern Democrat who believed that the abolitionist movement was a fundamental threat to the nation's unity, he alienated anti-slavery groups by signing the Kansas–Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. Conflict between North and South continued after Pierce's presidency, and, after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the Southern states seceded, resulting in the American Civil War.

Pierce was born in New Hampshire, the son of state governor Benjamin Pierce. He served in the House of Representatives from 1833 until his election to the Senate, where he served from 1837 until his resignation in 1842. His private law practice was a success, and he was appointed New Hampshire's U.S. Attorney in 1845. Pierce took part in the Mexican–American War as a brigadier general in the United States Army. Democrats saw him as a compromise candidate uniting Northern and Southern interests, and nominated him for president on the 49th ballot at the 1852 Democratic National Convention. He and running mate William R. King easily defeated the Whig Party ticket of Winfield Scott and William A. Graham in the 1852 presidential election.

As president, Pierce attempted to enforce neutral standards for civil service while also satisfying the Democratic Party's diverse elements with patronage, an effort that largely failed and turned many in his party against him. He was a Young America expansionist who signed the Gadsden Purchase of land from Mexico and led a failed attempt to acquire Cuba from Spain. He signed trade treaties with Britain and Japan and his Cabinet reformed its departments and improved accountability, but political strife during his presidency overshadowed these successes. His popularity declined sharply in the Northern states after he supported the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, while many Southern whites continued to support him. The act's passage led to violent conflict over the expansion of slavery in the American West. Pierce's administration was further damaged when several of his diplomats issued the Ostend Manifesto calling for the annexation of Cuba, a document that was roundly criticized. He fully expected the Democrats to renominate him in the 1856 presidential election, but they abandoned him and his bid failed. His reputation in the North suffered further during the American Civil War as he became a vocal critic of President Lincoln.

Pierce was popular and outgoing, but his family life was difficult; his three children died young and his wife, Jane Pierce, suffered from illness and depression for much of her life. Their last surviving son was killed in a train accident while the family was traveling, shortly before Pierce's inauguration. A heavy drinker for much of his life, Pierce died in 1869 of cirrhosis.  Wikipedia