Sept 15-Double Cheeseburger, Marco Polo, Oliver Stone, Night Ranger, Tommy Lee Jones, Little Willies

0:19 Hello i'm jeff and welcome to history and factoids about today today's september the 15th. I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce don't be frontin son no seeds on the fun we be up in the drive-thru order for two i got the grape and four number nine lock my shoe we need some chicken up in here in this single gorilla mom is electric salt on the grill dr pepper my brother another for your mother double double supersize and don't forget the fries that's about it. Sorry, I only caught the double cheeseburger. Today is National Double Cheeseburger Day. Not Cheeseburger Day. Now, that's actually coming up on Thursday the 18th. Today is Double Cheeseburger Day. Woo-hoo! 1937 in California. Bob's Big Boy Burgers. Yeah, they get credit for the first double cheeseburger. Pretty much every restaurant that sells burgers are not having deals today.

1:11 They're all waiting for Thursday the 18th before they have their deals. Except for Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen, they're just going to celebrate double cheeseburgers and cheeseburgers all week long, so you might hit that up. You know what? Today might sound like the perfect day to fire up that grill and create your own double cheeseburger. So, what happened in entertainment on September 15th back in 1988? Number one album was Hysteria by Def Leppard. Guns N' Roses had the number one song with Sweet Child O' Mine. Eddie Raven has a number one country song with Joe Knows How to Live.

2:01 He says women were made to love. Money is made to spend. Life is something, buddy. You will never live again. Oh, I've got to admit it. Joe sure knows how to live. The top-selling book was The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy. Top movie was A Fish Called Wanda. Over in London, four thieves, they pull off a really big jewel heist. Well, then they go and try and double-cross each other for it. Stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and John Cleese. The Ford Motor Company, they revolutionized car audio forever today in 1965.

2:46 Started selling their cars with factory-installed 8-track tape players. That's right, if you're too young, you really missed out on 8-track tapes. Now, when you played them, they were a combination of a compact disc and a Rubik's Cube. They were kind of tricky. 1969, it was before a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert. Now, they were backstage in Big Sur, California. Well, Stills, he got into a fist fight with a heckler. Turned into a regular melee. Now, once the fight was broken up and everyone settled down and everything, the guys decided, you know what, we should probably go on stage and play. You know, it is a benefit concert. Yeah, it was. It was a benefit concert for the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. All right, what happened on September the 15th? Now, it was called New York later on, obviously, today, but when the Dutch founded it, they just called it New Amsterdam. 1655, the people of New Amsterdam, they fought in the Peach War. See, the Muncie Indians, they attacked New Amsterdam, killed 40 of the Dutch colonists.

3:43 Why? Well, it was in retaliation for a Muncie woman who was killed while she was out picking peaches. 1821, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, they all declared their independence from Spain. Now, Spain, they were in no position to try and stop them. Nope, so basically what was left? Yep, only Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only Spanish territories left in the Americas. I'm just curious, what would you, if you were a soldier, what would your reaction be if you heard that a bunch of willies were heading your way? In 1916, in World War I, it scared the hell out of a bunch of German soldiers. See, in one of the battles of the Somme, Britain, they used tanks for the first time in world history. Now, their nickname? Yeah, they were called Little Willies. Now, Little Willies, they had a crew of eight, and you could crank it up to about four miles an hour. They were very, very heavily honored, but they really couldn't cross trenches or tracks or anything, and they really weren't effective, but they looked really intimidating. 1928, at St. Mary's Hospital in London, a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming, he was studying influenza. Yep, he was working on the flu. Well, he ended up discovering penicillin. Yeah, one of the greatest discoveries in human history. Sure, it was an accident and he wasn't looking for it, but hey, helped out mankind a lot. 1958 in Bayonne, New Jersey. 48 people were killed when their train crashed off an open drawbridge. Now, after a lengthy investigation, it was ruled that someone should have closed it. 1982, the first issue of the newspaper USA Today was published. I didn't know it, but it's still out there. Yeah, you can get USA Today. You can get it digital or

5:13 in print. 1983, the first Costco opened up. It was in Seattle, Washington. 1997, the domain name Google.com. Yeah, it was registered today. 2014, Barack Obama. He announced that he was sending 3,000 U.S. troops over to Africa. And this was how he said it. He said he wanted to help with the spread of the Ebola virus. That was his words, word for word. So no one could figure out why he wanted to help spread the Ebola virus. Okay. Who was born on September the 15th? Marco Polo. He was born in Venice in 1254. Now he was a merchant and he traded. He would walk up and down. And travel the Silk Road to Asia, getting. His merchandise and that kind of stuff.

5:53 Now he is not the first European to go to China. But he was the first one to write detailed descriptions about it and make maps and all that kind of stuff. And on one of his trips, he met Mongol leader Kublai Khan. Kublai, he was so impressed with Marco that he made him his foreign ambassador. So he sent Marco on diplomatic missions throughout Southeast Asia, Burma, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, all that area and stuff. Now Polo, he was also granted access to all over China. So yeah, he was able to go to places that no white guy had been before. So after Marco had served for Kublai Khan for 17 years, he was asked to escort a Mongol princess to Persia so she could get married. Persia, that's Iran today. So after Polo dropped her off, he just kept going. Decided he wanted to go home to Venice.

6:51 He'd been gone for 24 years. When he got back, he found out that Venice was actually at war with Genoa. You remember, Italy didn't become one country until 1861, so back then they were just a bunch of different kingdoms. So Marco, he decided, well, I'm here. I guess I'll fight for Venice. Well, he was immediately captured and spent the next three years in prison. So while he was in there, he told his cellmate all the adventures he had done while he was over there in China and all that kind of stuff. Then when the war was over and Marco was freed, he became a very, very rich guy. Remember, as a merchant, he still had all those connections over to China and Asia. Yep, so he was rich. He married and had three daughters. Now his cellmate, he actually took all those stories that Marco Polo told him and he wrote them into a book. Ended up being one of the best-selling books in history, simply titled Marco Polo. So everybody came out a winner. Marco, he died in 1324 at 70 years old. Now, I did look it up. Now, the swimming pool game, Marco Polo, it started in the 1960s, but no one knows who started it. William Ayrtaft, he was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1857, started out as a judge, and then he was the first U.S. governor of Cuba. Then he was secretary of war, then the 27th president of the United States.

8:01 He served from 1909 to 1913. Now, he was a big guy, but he never did get stuck in the White House bathtub. That was just a rumor. But he did have an oversized bathtub installed in the White House. He was the first president to throw out the first pitch of a baseball game. Now, after he was president in 1921, he was appointed chief justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. He served on that until 1930 when he died from heart disease at 72 years old. He was married and they had three children. Writer Agatha Christie. She was born in Torquay, England in 1890. She is the best-selling and most translated author of all time. She sold over 2 billion books. Now, she wrote all genres, but her 66 detective books, those are her most popular. She wrote a play. Yeah, it's called The Mousetrap. It is the world's longest-running play. It's been performed on the West End of London since 1952. She had a daughter from her first husband, married her second husband in 1930. They were together until he died in 19... They were together until she died in 1976 at 85 years old from natural causes.

9:00 From the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore From the queen of glowing mountains to the South Bell by the shore She's mighty tall and handsome and known quite well by all She's. The combination on the Wabash Cannonball. The original king of country music, Roy Acuff. Roy, he gets credit for moving country music from hoedown music to country music that became popular. He was a fiddler and a singer. Now, Roy, he was born in Maynardsville, Tennessee in 1903. Some of his classic songs are Blue Eyes, Crying in the Rain, Wabash Cannonball, I Saw the Light. Now, they didn't have charts back then, so we don't know exactly how big his hits were, but according to history, yeah, he was mega, mega popular. Got married in 1936. His wife died in 1981 and they had two children. Roy, he performed right up until he died in 1992 from heart failure. 89 years old. Actress Faye Ray. She was born in Cardston, Canada in 1936.

10:00 1907. She is most known for the 1933 movie King Kong. That's when the Big Eight carried her to the top of the Empire State Building. Faye, she was Hollywood's first scream queen. So after that, she pretty much did horror films and she ended up acting for over 60 years by doing all those low budget horror films in the 30s. Yeah, she was pretty much typecast. She had one child from her first husband, two children from her second husband. He died after 13 years of marriage. She married her third husband. He died after 20 years of marriage. Faye, she died in 2004. 96 years old. Natural causes. Filmmaker Oliver Stone is 80. He was born in New York City. He joined the Army after high school. Now, he requested to be sent to Vietnam. So the Army said, okay. So he fought in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor, two Purple Hearts, and six other awards for heroics over there fighting. Came home, graduated from New York University with a degree in film. Now, his movies have been nominated for 34 Academy Awards. They've won nine. He's won two Best Director Oscars for Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Some of his other movies that might remember are Wall Street, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Any Given Sunday. He had two sons from his second wife. Then he has a daughter from his third wife. With his third wife, I guess you should say.

11:12 Actor Tommy Lee Jones, he's also 80. He's won a Sansaba, Texas Oscar. Now, after playing football at Harvard, he got famous for the movie Co-Miner's Daughter, and he won an Oscar for The Fugitive, and nominated for Oscars for JFK, The Valley of Ila, and Lincoln. Tommy, he had two kids from his second wife, and he married his third wife in 2001. And mama's worried that you won't. Sister Christian, there's so much in life. Don't you give it up before your. Time is done.

11:54 That was Kelly Kagey singing for the band Night Ranger. Kelly's 74. He was born in Glendale, California. Helped form Night Ranger in 1979. Night Ranger's out on tour if you want to check him out. They'll be out there until Thanksgiving. Kelly, he's their drummer, but he does sing lead on Sister Christian and Sentimental Street. He had two children from his first wife, and then he divorced two more times. Actress Wendy Jo Sperber. She was born in Los Angeles in 1958. She first got known in the movie Bachelor Party. Then she played Marty McFly's sister in a couple of Back to the Future movies. On TV, she was on Booze and Buddies and Private Benjamin. She married once for nine years, and they had two children. Wendy Jo, she was told that she had breast cancer in 1997. She continued to do work, though. Yeah, she did it until 2005. Yeah, the cancer finally got her.

12:42 47 years old. All righty-er. Quote of the day. It comes from Rico Kasich. Dance all night. Get real loose. You don't need no bad excuse. Dance all night with anyone. Don't let nobody pick you up. Shake it up. Shake it up. Rick was the lead singer of the band The Cars. He died today in 2019 at 75 years old. Rick says, refusing to ask for help when you need it is refusing the chance for someone to be helpful. Well, thank you all for listening today. Don't forget to follow us on you listen to us on and on the bottom of the show. Don't forget about show notes. That gives you all the links to how you can find us and follow us and all that good stuff and give you some links to some of the artists that we actually play. our country underground radio artist of the day.

13:30 It comes from Mark in Wichita. He wants to hear Anthony Price's song, A Memory I Can't Drown. You guys have an awesome day, and we'll talk tomorrow. Here I am once again I'm here most every night Tryin' to drown a memory That seems to hang around Well, the bar room. Is closin' And I'm drinkin' whiskey down And when the barkeep yells, Last call I'll order one more round.

14:22 Calls, last call. To get you off my mind So I can face. The lonely night With you not by my side And when the dawn awakes me I know what I will find. Just another cold, cold heartache And a memory I can't drown