Jack Ruby who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, Oswald, who killed John F. Kennedy, all died between 1963 and 1967 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas, its oldest opening in 1894.
Writer Truman Capote taught himself to read and write.
English actor Lawrence Olivier was the first to direct himself into winning a Best Actor Academy Award for Hamlet in 1949, being paid $50.000 for the role.
During World War I, Charles De Gualle was a German Prisoner of War trying unsuccessfully to escape 5 times, I imagine his 6’5 frame, pretty hard to miss.
Cary Grant was a legendary cheapskate never getting over those early years of being broke, even cutting off buttons from his old shirts.
On the very day he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln told his bodyguard, John Frederick Parker, he had a dream that he’d be assassinated. Of all nights, Fred decided to step out during the play for a quick drink at the Star Saloon next door to Ford’s Theatre, the same one John Wilkes Booth was at moments before he shot Abe left wide open by the man who might have saved his life.
The United State’s first case of Temporary Insanity was tried in 1859 by Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s future Secretary of War, defending Daniel Sickles who shot and killed Philip Barton Key in cold blood in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square Park for having an affair with his wife, Teresa, one could call, a canoodle that went too far.
The artist, Jackson Pollock, often used cigarettes to paint with rather than brushes.
The late, great gourmand, Anthony Bourdain said, the most disgusting thing he ever ate which included bat and seal, was a Chicken McNugget.
Richard Nixon, when president, ate cottage cheese with ketchup everyday for lunch.
Wonder what Anthony would say about that.
On February 25, 1983, playwright Tennessee Williams was found dead in his suite at the Hotel Elysee in New York City after choking on a bottle cap.
He was 71.
Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was the first best seller by an African American women selling over one million copies, translated into seventeen languages and has never been out of print.
…caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou
In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential medal of Freedom.