Did one actor play two different roles in every episode of a 1960s situation comedy?

Most readers of this column will be receiving it on the day after Thanksgiving.  You know, the day when you realize that all of your clothing somehow mysteriously shrank overnight and it’ll be a few more days before you feel comfortable thinking about food again.

You will soon grow weary of turkey leftovers – sandwiches, casserole, hash, however you prepare the leftover bird.  Don’t worry, though, because soon you’ll be hit with another heavy feast day - Christmas.

Go do your shopping, but before you go, read some trivia for the week.  Here it is!

Did you know …

… the first weather report broadcast on a publicly-accessible radio station was in 1921?  On April 27 of that year, listeners to radio station 9YK, owned and operated by St. Louis University, heard an announcer read the next day’s weather forecast on the air.  Later that year, the station was re-christened WEW.  (What do you want to bet that first forecast was wrong?)

… who won the first Emmy™ award ever presented? On January 25, 1949, the first Emmy award ceremony was held, and the first-ever award was presented to Shirley Dinsdale (1926-1999), a Los Angeles television ventriloquist.  She won the award for Most Outstanding Personality.  Additional trivia note:  Though the Emmys are presented as television awards, that first Emmy ceremony was not televised.  (Ironic, no?)

… where the southernmost forest on Earth is located?  It’s the Magellanic subantarctic forest, located in the southern parts of Argentina and Chile.  The forests go as far south as the southern tip of South America and are made up primarily of beech trees. (Cold beech trees, at that.)

… until 1978, taking maternity leave from a job could mean losing the job?  According to Mental Floss, maternity leave was permanent in about 40% of businesses well into the 1960s.  There were no laws in place to protect women in the workplace from not being rehired once the maternity leave was over.  The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 finally guaranteed protection and benefits in the workplace to expectant mothers.

… music television channel MTV wasn’t always going to be called MTV?  In fact, not long before it went on the air in 1981, it was going to be called TV-1.  Robert Pittman (born 1953), one of the co-creators, said the TV-1 name was a way to establish a leadership position, by implying that everything else was secondary.  That plan went awry when they learned that another business had already claimed the TV-1 moniker for itself, and Pittman and his team went back to the drawing board.  They found that TV-M was available, but at the last minute changed it to MTV … and the rest is music television history.  (See what a little research can do for you?)

… one actor played two different roles in every episode of a classic 1960s television show?  From 1964 to 1966, The Addams Family was a popular situation comedy on ABC.  Among the cast was Ted Cassidy (1932-1979), who played the butler Lurch.  But that wasn’t Cassidy’s only role on the show – he was also Thing, the right hand which appeared out of boxes at various places in the house.  Cassidy even had separate contracts with the producers of the show for the two characters.  Additional trivia note:  Lurch was originally supposed to be a mute character in the show.  During the filming of the pilot episode, however, Cassidy ad-libbed his famous “You rang?” line.  The producers thought it was hilarious, Lurch was given more lines, and a catch phrase was born.  (They’re creepy and they’re spooky …)

… the actor who said one of the most iconic lines in movie history did not want to say the line?  In the 1984 classic science fiction movie The Terminator, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (born 1947) says the classic line, “I’ll be back.”  But Schwarzenegger did not want to say that line as written, feeling that with his Austrian accent, he would not be able to clearly enunciate the first word.  He preferred saying, “I will be back,” arguing that it fit his character of a machine.  Writer and director James Cameron (born 1954) advised the actor to just say the line as written, reminding Schwarzenegger to leave the writing to him.  (And we know how it turned out.)

… only two capital cities in Europe do not have a McDonald’s™ restaurant?  They are Vatican City and Tirana, the capital of Albania.  (I’m sure that says something.  I’m not sure what.)

… the largest fish in the ocean is a shark?  Specifically, the whale shark.  This harmless but enormous denizen of the deep holds the record for largest fish caught – one captured in Thailand in 1919 was 59 feet long.  Whale sharks, though members of the shark family, feed only on plankton (tiny sea creatures and plants), krill, and fish eggs.  (Thankfully, swimmers are off the menu.)

… the longest-ever wedding veil was very, very long?  In 2018, Maria Paraskeva (born 1985), a woman in Cyprus, was getting married and she wanted to set some kind of world’s record.  So she had the wedding veil for her dress made – get this – 22,843 feet long.  That’s the length of 63½ football fields.  Paraskeva said it had always been her dream to have the world’s record wedding veil; the problem she encountered was finding a factory that could produce enough of the lace material to make it.  It took a Greek firm more than three months to make the veil material.  (And a platoon of soldiers to carry it, I would wager.)

Now … you know!