March 26, 2024: Answers
Hey, everyone.
Here’s the key for yesterday’s list.
1. Though it was founded two decades earlier, the Republican Party didn’t adopt the elephant as their enduring symbol until shortly after it was used to represent them in an 1874 Thomas Nast political cartoon – published in Harper’s Weekly - satirizing the rumors that what then-sitting president was planning to seek re-election for an unprecedented third term?
· Ulysses S. Grant – Titled ‘The Third-Term Panic,’ Nast’s now iconic sketch features a donkey, wearing the skin of a lion, whipping up a menagerie of animals into a frenzy. They’re not all labeled, but the ones that are each represented a different interest group of the day:
The Unicorn – The New York Times
The Giraffe – The New York Tribune
The Owl – The New York World
The Fox – The Democratic Party
The Elephant – The Republican Vote
The Disguised Donkey, meanwhile, represented the very pro-Democratic New York Herald, who were responsible for creating and spreading the unfounded rumor that Republican president U.S. Grant was getting set to run for a third time. The caption below the image reads:
‘An ass, having put on the lion's skin, turned about in the forest, and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met in his wanderings’ - Shakespeare or Bacon / Th. Nast.
The cartoon itself, via the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004682001/
Nast would go on to use the elephant as a representation of the republicans in his Harper’s cartoons for years afterward, and even though the donkey had long been associated with the democratic party*, Nast’s work ultimately helped to turn it into the de facto mascot it is today.
Nast is also credited with creating the modern depiction of Santa Claus, specifically in an 1862 Harper’s cartoon called ‘Santa Claus in Camp.’ It was based on the description of the big man given in A Visit from St. Nicholas, better known today as ‘Twas the Night before Christmas.
*The Donkey first became a symbol of the Democratic Party in 1828, when it was used in satirical cartoons to represent candidate Andrew ‘Jackass’ Jackson. Biting, yes, but it backfired. He ended up leaning into it, and from then on, often incorporated donkeys into his campaign posters.
2. For the live recording of her legendary 1961 performance at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall, what beloved Golden Age actress and singer became, on May 29, 1962, the first woman to ever win the Grammy Award for Album of the Year?
· Judy Garland – Toward the end of the show, the former child superstar - performing at Carnegie Hall for the first time in her career - called her three kids up onto the stage with her. The youngest of the three, Lorna Luft, reflected on that memorable night in a 2003 retrospective sponsored by the Library of Congress. Some highlights:
‘Everyone who was anyone in New York and on Broadway was there that night and many other celebrities had flown in from Los Angeles.’
‘But when I tell people I don’t remember, they seem disappointed—or they don’t believe me. “Surely,” they say, “you must remember seeing legendary stars like Lauren Bacall and Debbie Reynolds, Spencer Tracy and Henry Fonda, Carol Channing and Ethel Merman, Benny Goodman and Harold Arlen, Tony Perkins and Roddy McDowall, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, and Richard Burton. How could you forget seeing Burton?” Well, because I was eight ...’
‘The morning after the concert, the phone never stopped ringing. There were people bustling in and out of our suite at the Stanhope, which was filled with flowers—more flowers than I had ever seen in one place at one time—and the baskets and bouquets kept arriving. My mother was sitting in the bedroom, surrounded by an enormous mountain of congratulatory telegrams. She brushed away a pile of them to make room for me on the bed and reached her arms out to me.’
‘Wasn’t that something?” she said, pulling me close. “Wasn’t that something?” “Yes,” I replied, “it was.”
‘It really was.’
The full article, on Carnegie Hall’s official site: https://www.carnegiehall.org/Explore/Articles/2022/12/08/Remembering-Judy-Garland-at-Carnegie-Hall
The album - titled simply Judy at Carnegie Hall - went on to win her three other Grammys: Best Female Vocal Performance, Best Engineered Album, and Best Album Cover. It was on the Billboard 200 Chart for 73 straight weeks in 1961-1962, 13 of which were spent at #1.
3. Based on the alleged experiences of 20th century paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, what Warner Brothers-owned and distributed ‘Universe’ is, with $2.1 billion earned at the box office as of 2024, the highest grossing horror film franchise of all time?
· The Conjuring Universe (8 movies) – The next highest grossing horror franchises, rounded up, as of 2024:
Alien (8 movies): ~$1.7 billion
Resident Evil (10): ~$1.3 billion
It (2): ~$1.2 billion
Saw (9): ~$1 billion
Hannibal (5): ~$924 million
Scream (6): ~$906 million
Paranormal Activity (7): ~$890 million
Halloween (13): ~$877 million
4. Officially known as the GOPPPL, the first ever fantasy football league was originally created, at a New York City hotel in 1963, by the minority owner of what iconic NFL franchise, based in California from 1960-2020?
· Las Vegas (Oakland) Raiders – The original rules for what would later become known as the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League, founded by Raiders minority owner Bill Winkenbach - together with a sports writer from the Oakland Tribune, as well as a team employee - was formatted very much like the modern ESPN or Yahoo fantasy leagues of our era, only with more roster spots. Each team featured:
2 Quarterbacks
4 Halfbacks
2 Fullbacks
4 Wide Receivers/Tight Ends
2 Return Specialists
2 Defensive Backs/Linebackers
2 Defensive Linemen
According to the league’s official history, Raiders quarterback George Blanda* was the first pick in the inaugural draft, which was held in Winkenbach’s Oakland home just before the start of the 1963 season.
It remained a casual game played amongst a small group of Raiders team employees and journalists until 1969, when Andy Mousalimas, an original member of the GOPPPL, introduced the game to the clientele of Kings X, an Oakland sports bar he’d been a regular at for years. From there, the phenomenon spread by word of mouth, and by 1990, major newspapers like the LA Times and Miami Herald were running their own weekly fantasy football competitions similar to those of Draft Kings and FanDuel in our era, where readers would call a toll-free number to draft their lineup.
CBS, ESPN, and Yahoo all launched their first online fantasy football platforms around the same time in 1997-1998, but the NFL itself was pretty slow to profit from the craze. They didn’t sponsor their own format until 2010.
Part of Winkenbach’s reasoning for wanting to create a made-up league was how bad his team was in the actual NFL. The Raiders finished 1-13 that year, with their only win coming on the last day of the season, against the 3-9 Boston Patriots.
*Blanda holds the likely untouchable NFL record for most total seasons played, with 26.
5. Owned by the Campbell’s Soup Company since 1962, what beloved Pepperidge Farm snack food was originally developed, in 1958, as, essentially, a birthday gift for the wife of their Swiss-born creator Oscar J. Kambly?
· Goldfish Crackers – There’s not a whole lot of available detail about how exactly they were created, but the story goes that, in 1958, the Swiss snack manufacturer Kambly SA released the ‘Goldfischli,’ or Goldfish, specifically to commemorate the birthday of its namesake founder’s wife, who was a Pisces. A fish, of course, is the astrological symbol for the Pisces.
Pepperidge Farm’s pioneering creator Margaret Rudkin first became aware of the crackers in 1961 while on vacation to Switzerland, and was so taken with them that she soon after got in touch with Kambly’s reps, and worked out a licensing agreement that remains in place today.
The five original Campbell’s/Pepperidge Farm flavors, debuted in 1962:
Original (lightly salted)
Cheese
Barbecue
Pizza
Smoky
The signature Goldfish flavor in our era, Cheddar Cheese, wasn’t introduced until 1966.
Kambly still makes and sells their own style of Goldfish in our era, although you probably won’t be able to find them at many American grocery stores. They do, however, sell them on their company site, if you’re interested.
6. Opened to the public in June of 1959, the very first Disneyland roller coaster – which still sits, in our era, on the border between Tomorrowland and Fantasyland - was both modeled on and named for what imposing 14,692-foot-tall Alpine mountain?
· Matterhorn – It was the brainchild of Walt Disney himself, who, while on an extended vacation in Switzerland during filming of the 1959 adventure movie Third Man on the Mountain, spotted a postcard featuring the iconic Alpine peak, and had an epiphany. He sent it back to architect – or ‘Imagineer’ – Vic Greene with the message:
‘Vic. Build This. Walt.’
The American Bridge Company - who’d previously designed the famous Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco - ultimately went on to create the innovative structure for the coaster, which was the first to ever be made from processed steel, rather than wood.
At a height of 147 feet, it’s built to almost exactly 1/100th scale of the actual Swiss/Italian Matterhorn.
Have a great rest of your week, everybody.
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