Browsing: Arts & Entertainment

A Brief History On March 31, 1923, the first U.S. dance marathon ended in New York City but began a strange fad with sometimes fatal consequences! Digging Deeper Less than a decade later, in 1932, a young woman dropped dead after dancing non-stop for 48 hours in a dance marathon!  And when the police raided a ballroom during a Marathon World Championship, the promoters simply transferred the contestants, who were still dancing, into a van.  From there they were taken onto a sloop, a small sailing ship, which sailed out of territorial waters and so beyond the area of police…

A Brief History On March 25, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came up with a unique way to celebrate their honeymoon, by inviting friends and reporters to spend the day in their hotel bedroom each day for a week! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find soon to be Ex-Beatle John Lennon married to the love of his life, Yolo Ono, on honeymoon in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (Holland). In accordance with Lennon and Ono’s avowed opposition to war (especially the Viet Nam War) they staged an event they called a Bed-In for Peace, where the lovebirds would spend a week…

A Brief History On March 24, 1944, the hard work of 600 American and British POW’s was ready to pay off, and 200 of them were ready to escape from Stalag Luft III! Digging Deeper Stalag Luft III operated as a prisoner of war camp run by the German Luftwaffe to hold allied aviators (officers) that had been shot down and captured.  Having been opened in 1943, the camp held almost 11,000 allied airmen, mostly American with about a quarter of the total British and some 900 from other allied air forces. Determined to escape, 600 of the inmates worked…

A Brief History On March 21, 1952, disc jockey Alan Freed (inventor of the term “rock and roll”) and record store owner Leo Mintz staged the first rock concert in Cleveland, Ohio! Digging Deeper At the time, our country was divided by race, with African-Americans who served the country during World War II expecting to achieve something more like equality than the segregation and discriminatory treatment of the day. With major civil rights milestones such as integration of the armed forces in 1948 and landmark events such as Brown v. Board of Education and the Rosa Parks led bus boycott…

A Brief History On March 19, 1987, under fire for sex and financial irregularities the star of one of television’s most popular evangelist Christian shows resigned! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Jim Bakker, star of The PTL Club in hot water for allegedly raping a show secretary, Jessica Hahn, and paying her $279,000 in hush money. If that was not cracked enough, questions quickly were raised about other aspects of misuse of charitable donations and fraudulent fund raising.  Bakker and his wife, famously over-made up Tammy Faye Bakker had been living like royalty, spending millions of dollars on an…