TRIVIA BITS
Ezra Jack Keats is best known as the author and illustrator of what children’s classic?
A) “The Cricket in Times Square” B) “The Snowy Day” C) “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” D) “A Wrinkle in Time” •••
The first and, to date, only woman awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor was Dr. Mary E. Walker, for her medical service at the Battle of Bull Run during the American Civil War. A trained surgeon, she served as a civilian nurse/surgeon’s assistant, initially without pay, because the Union Army did not permit women to be military surgeons. She also tended wounded soldiers after the Battle of Chickamauga and the Battle of Atlanta and, despite her civilian status, spent four months as a prisoner of war.
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A 1982 U.S. postage stamp that honored Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the 100th anniversary of his birth shows a grinning FDR seated in the back seat of an open car, his trademark cigarette holder between the fingers of his left hand. It’s known among philatelists as the last instance of a cigarette being depicted on a U.S. postage stamp. Later stamps honoring journalist Edward R. Murrow, musician Robert Johnson and artist Jackson Pollock were based on photos in which the subjects were smoking, but the cigarettes were removed from the final artwork.
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Starting in early October and ending Dec. 5 each year, a team of 40 gardeners plants 7 million flowering bulbs — by hand! — in the meticulously planned beds of Keukenhof garden in the Netherlands. Mainly a showcase for Dutch commercial flower growers, the 79-acre Keukenhof garden is open to the public for just eight weeks a year (March 22 to May 13 in 2018) when the hyacinths, crocuses, daffodils and tulips are blooming.
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In 1911, Theodore Thomson Flynn became the first chairman of the biology department at the University of Tasmania, where he studied local animal species, such as kangaroos, Tasmanian devils and bettongs, or kangaroo rats. As a boy, his son, Errol (the same Errol Flynn who starred in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “Captain Blood”), helped with his father’s research, setting traps to catch bettongs, which he sold to his father for a shilling a head.
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Answer: Ezra Jack Keats is best known as the author and illustrator of the children’s classic “The Snowy Day.”