Facts of the day

Though it was intended for both men and women, from its earliest days Vogue magazine’s readership skewed heavily toward women interested in fashion. Dressmaker Rosa Payne saw that as a marketing opportunity. In 1905, she persuaded the magazine’s publisher to offer her own hand-cut dressmaking patterns for sale to readers. Her instinct was right on target. Readers were happy to pay an additional 50cents above the magazine’s 10-cent cover price for one of Payne’s patterns. The first person to appear on the cover of TV Guide was the child of which reallife TV couple?

A) Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz

B) George Burns and Gracie Allen

C) Stuart Erwin and June Collyer

D) Ozzie and Harriet Nelson The first 911call in U.S. history was made in Haleyville, Alabama, on Feb. 16, 1968. Alabama Speaker of the House Rankin Fite called Rep. Tom Bevill to test the system, and that rotary-dialed call (from a red phone, no less) set in motion a nationwide emergency calling system that now handles some 240million calls a year. An old riddle asks, “Where does the Lone Ranger take his trash?” Answer: “To the dump, to the dump, to the dump, dump, dump!” If you read that with the proper cadence, the famous “Lone Ranger” theme may be echoing in your head. That theme comes from the overture to Gioachino Rossini’s 1829opera, “William Tell,” the tale of the Swiss folk hero who shot an apple off his son’s head with a crossbow. The story is eternal, and so was Rossini’s original, unabridged four-act opera, which clocked in at more than five hours long. An American Viticultural Area, or AVA, is a federally designated winegrowing region regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The first place to earn that distinction was the area surrounding Augusta, Missouri, which received its AVA designation June 20, 1980. Second was Napa Valley, named an AVA in January 1981. Published in 1604, Robert Cawdrey’s “Table Alphabeticall” was the first dictionary of the English language. Its 3,000or so entries concentrated on words that Cawdrey determined to be difficult for unedu- cated people (women in particular) to comprehend. His simple definitions often were charming. Hospitality is defined as “good entertainment for friends and strangers.” Chaos is “a confused heap or minglemangle.” And a labyrinth is “a place so full of windings and turnings, that a man cannot find the way out of it.” As of this writing, only five players in Major League Baseball history have played all nine defensive positions in a single game. The most recent was Andrew Romine of the Detroit Tigers, on Sept. 30, 2017, in a game against the Minnesota Twins at Target Field in Minneapolis. (That game also marked Romine’s first appearance as a catcher in an MLB game.) The other players on this exclusive list are Bert Campaneris (Sept. 8, 1965), Cesar Tovar (Sept. 22, 1968), Scott Sheldon (Sept. 6, 2000) and Shane Halter (Oct. 1, 2000). Trivia answer: In April 1953, the infant Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV, better known as Desi Arnaz Jr., son of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, became the first person to appear on the cover of TV Guide.