Gallery: 5 Up-and-Coming Canadian Cities (Postmedia News via The Montreal Gazette)

From Postmedia News via the Montreal Gazette:

If major cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are giving you a headache and even underdogs like Calgary or Halifax don’t thrill you, you might consider relocating to one of the other metropolises blossoming in our great nation. Here are five Canadian cities on the up and up

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/story.html?id=4177610

Passing: Jack LaLanne (Washington Post)

From The Washington Post

By Patricia Howard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 24, 2011

Jack LaLanne, the jumpsuit-clad fitness dynamo who starred in one of the nation's first and most popular TV exercise shows and touted healthful eating with such relentless earnestness that he helped usher in a modern era of health-consciousness, died on January 23 at age 96.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/23/AR2011012304391.html


For more see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/24/AR2011012403521.html

Advice form North Dakota: How to Get Through Winter (NY Times)

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: January 24, 2011


According to folks in Langdon, North Dakota, two ways of getting thorugh winter: kittylitter and shnapps.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/nyregion/25freeze.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

S.F. Giants Return for Fans They Left Behind (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By DAVID WALDSTEIN
Published: January 22, 2011

Warren Bellefond, a 72-year-old retired postal worker from Washington Heights, held up a clear plastic cube with a dirty, brown, smudged baseball in it, and described to Willie Mays how Mays hit the ball to him during batting practice on Sept.29,1957, the last game the Giants ever played at the old Polo Grounds.

The Giants, Bellefond’s favorite team, were about to leave New York and a small legion of fans who never severed their loyalty the way bitter Brooklynites did with the Dodgers, although they, too, felt rejected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/sports/baseball/23giants.html?_r=1&ref=sports

Also see:
Mays, at Home in Harlem, Connects With Its Children
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/sports/baseball/22rhoden.html?ref=baseball

Polo Grounds, and Its Former Tenants, Emerge From the Shadows
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/sports/20polo.html?ref=baseball

Polo Grounds, and Its Former Tenants, Emerge From the Shadows (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: January 19, 2011

Remembrances of the ballpark and football stadium, often an afterthought among classic 20th-century stadiums, move into the forefront this week (as teh baseball Giants come to New York to celebrate their championship where they started and the NY Jets -once of the Polo Grounds - play in a championship football game).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/sports/20polo.html?ref=sports

About Mule Riders in The Grand Canyon (USA Today)

From USA Today:

By Laura Bly, USA TODAY

Each year, an average of 15,400 Grand Canyon visitors take commercial mule trips into the canyon and above the rim. Rides have been a tradition here since the late 1800s, and the most popular route is along the Bright Angel Trail, originally used by the Havasupai Native Americans for access to water at modern day Garden Creek. Riders make reservations up to a year in advance and pay $481.71 per person for a one-night, two-day trip that includes meals and a stay at a rustic Phantom Ranch cabin.

But that popularity has taken its toll, and earlier this month the National Park Service announced a plan that designates a new, above-the-rim ride and formally approves recent decreases in the number of rides along the Bright Angel and South Kaibab trails.

http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2011/01/do-mule-riders-belong-in-the-grand-canyon-/138755/1

How Early 60's Florida Theme Park was Impacted by Disneyworld (Ocala Star-Banner via USA Today)

From USA Today:

By Rick Allen, The Ocala Star-Banner


In its day, Six Gun Territory was a hot property.
Opening with great fanfare on Feb. 2, 1963, the Western-themed attraction would draw thousands of visitors to Ocala during its 20-year lifespan. Six Gun and nearby Silver Springs attraction were among the premier stops in pre-Disney Florida.

Yet, even as this frontier town in the East reveled in its newness, the seeds of its demise were being sown some 100 miles to the south.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2011-01-15-six-gun-territory-disney-florida_N.htm

L.A. Kings Honor Rogatien Vachon

From The L.A. Daily News:

Rogie Vachon, is being honored tonight by the team with whom he remains most identified, the Kings.

In a ceremony before LA's game with the Oilers, Vachon is the first Kings player honored as on a "Legends Night" at the Staples Center. The Kings are wearing their 1970s purple-and-gold jerseys to mark the occasion.

http://www.dailynews.com/sports/ci_17099350

Credit also to Stu Hackel @ Habsinsideout.

Passing: David Nelson, Son in ‘Ozzie and Harriet' (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: January 12, 2011

David Nelson, the elder son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, the brother of Rick Nelson and the last surviving member of the television family that perhaps more than any other stood for the Eisenhower-era middle-class American dream, died at home in Los Angeles on January 11. He was 74.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/13/arts/television/13nelson.html?ref=obituaries

Passing: Margaret Whiting, Singer of Jazz and Pop Standards (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By DAVID BELCHER
Published: January 11, 2011

Margaret Whiting, a songwriter’s daughter who as a bright-eyed teenage singer captivated wartime America and then went on to a long, acclaimed career recording hit songs and performing in nightclubs and on television, died on Jaunauary 10 in Englewood, N.J. She was 86.

Ms. Whiting may not have been a household name like her contemporaries Rosemary Clooney and Ella Fitzgerald, nor was she a singing movie star like Doris Day, but in her heyday she was widely popular in the worlds of big band, jazz, popular music — even country — for more than 30 years, beginning in the 1940s.

When she was 16, the comedian Phil Silvers asked her to fill in for a missing member of his act at the Grace Hayes Lodge in the San Fernando Valley. It helped start her career. At 18 she recorded the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer song “That Old Black Magic” with the bandleader Freddie Slack. The next year it was “Moonlight in Vermont” with the trumpeter Billy Butterfield and his band, followed in 1945 by “It Might as Well Be Spring,” with Paul Weston, a Rodgers & Hammerstein tune from the musical “State Fair.” That song became a signature for her.

There were more hits, among them “Come Rain or Come Shine,” a Mercer-Arlen song from the musical “St. Louis Woman.”

In 1948 alone Ms. Whiting had three major hits: “A Tree in the Meadow,” “Now Is the Hour” and “Far Away Places.” A duet with Mercer, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (by Frank Loesser), lasted 19 weeks on the Billboard chart in 1949. Her nine duets with the country star Jimmy Wakely, from 1949 to 1951, were sensations, particularly “Slippin’ Around.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/arts/music/12whiting.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

Library Of Congress Receives Largest Single Audio Donation (NPR News)

From NPR News:

by Tom Cole
All Things Considered

The donation came from Universal Music Group and is made up of master recordings — the final metal discs used to press commercial releases; lacquer discs that were cut in the studio to capture full takes of tunes; and reel-to-reel tapes from the late 1940s. The material dates from around 1930 to around 1950 and marks the first time the Library has received commercial masters from a major label.


Universal retains the copyright to the recordings and, as is the case in most donations of this kind, will get digital copies of the Library's preservation work. The label's agreement with the Library of Congress allows for non-commercial streaming on the Library's website — a site the Library hopes to launch this spring. It's a collaboration with another major label — Sony-BMG — a project to be called the National Jukebox.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/01/10/132803768/200-000-recordings-donated-to-library-of-congress

Hockey Video from Before the "Original Six" (Montreal Gazette)

From Habsinsideout.com

Thanks to Dave Stubbs at the Montreal Gazette and Habsinsideout.com for unveiling this wonderful a 65-second Universal Newsreel, released April 1, 1937, featuring that night's first game of the 1937 Stanley Cup semifinal between the New York Rangers and Montreal Maroons at Madison Square Garden.

http://habsinsideout.com/main/42704

Passing: Geraldine Hoff Doyle, "We Can Do It" Poster Inspiration (CNN)

From CNN:

The woman who inspired the famous World War II "We Can Do It!" poster has died (December 26, 2010).

Geraldine Hoff Doyle was just 17 when a United Press photographer captured her in 1942 working at a Michigan metal factory, wearing a red polka-dotted bandanna.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/30/geraldine-hoff-doyle-we-can-do-it-poster-inspiration-dies-at-86/?hpt=C2