Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Henry E. Riggs - Wikipedia

Riggs worked for over a decade at early Silicon Valley companies and institutes. Between undergraduate and graduate school (1957-1958) he worked at Ampex, and from 1960-1963 at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_E._…

International).

Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence.

Ampex's first great success was a line

of reel-to-reel tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby.

After Crosby’s wife died, Bing had relationships with model Pat Sheehan (who married his son Dennis in 1958) and actresses Inger Stevens and Grace Kelly before

marrying actress Kathryn Grant, who converted to Catholicism, in 1957.

FBI files on Crosby revealed that he had ties with figures in the Mafia since his youth and that Crosby had a gambling addiction.

Crosby's FBI files were published in 1992 and looking into these there is no

indication that Bing Crosby had ties to the Mafia except for one major but accidental encounter in Chicago in 1929 which is not mentioned in the files but is told by Crosby himself in his as-told-to autobiography Call Me Lucky.

In the memo dated January 16, 1959 it is said: "The

Salt Lake City Office has developed information indicating that Moe Dalitz received an invitation to join a deer hunting party at Bing Crosby's Elko, Nevada, ranch, together with the crooner, his Las Vegas dentist and several business associates."

Dalitz was born on December 25,

1899, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Jewish parents, Barnet "Bernard" Dalitz (b. May 8, 1874 in Austria) and Anna Cohen (b. October 1876 in Austria). He was raised in Michigan.

Moe developed a partnership with the Maceo syndicate which ran Galveston and supplied liquor from Canada

and Mexico.

In 1982, Dalitz received the "Torch of Liberty" award from the Anti-Defamation League. It was presented by comedian Joan Rivers.

Juanita Dale Slusher (July 6, 1935 – December 30, 2006), better known by her stage name Candy Barr, was an American stripper.

At age 16, Slusher appeared in one of the most famous and widely circulated of the early underground pornographic films, Smart Alec (1951). Because of the widespread "underground" distribution and popularity of the flim, she has been called "the first porn star" by the media.

She originally told a men's magazine that she did the film for the money, as at the time, she said, she had a dollar.

Years later, Slusher instead said that she was drugged and coerced into appearing in the movie without her consent.

Shortly after the release of Smart Alec,

and while still underage, she was hired as a stripper at the Theater Lounge in Dallas by Barney Weinstein for $85 a week. She was given the stage name "Candy Barr" at this time (given to her by Weinstein, reportedly because of her fondness for Snickers bars), bleached her hair

platinum blond, and became famous.

She worked at Weinstein's Colony Club during her career as a porn star. Barr established herself in burlesque and striptease with her costume of a cowboy hat, pasties, scant panties, a pair of pearl-handled cap six-shooters in a holster

strapped on her hips, and cowboy boots. When the Theater Lounge would close, she would go to the after-hours Vegas Club, where she became acquainted with the owner and operator, Jack Ruby, in 1952.

Smart Alec, aka Smart Aleck, is a 1951 pornographic film. The silent short,

which is no more than 20 minutes in length and was filmed in black-and-white, was one of the most famous and widely circulated of the early underground pornographic era.

Candy Barr “packed with nuts” Snickers was working as a prostitute at the time, and was forced to feature in

the film by one of her clients. At the time there was a rumour that the man was Gary Crosby, son of Bing Crosby.

Dixie Lee (born Wilma Winifred Wyatt; November 4, 1909 – November 1, 1952) was an American actress, dancer, and singer. She was the first wife of singer Bing Crosby.

Dixie Lee was born Wilma Winifred Wyatt in Harriman, Tennessee, on November 4, 1909, to Evan Wyatt and the former Nora Scarborough.

Harriman was founded as a Temperance Town in 1889 by temperance movement activists led by New York-born minister and plant manager Frederick Gates.

Gates and fellow prohibitionists chartered the East Tennessee Land Company in May 1889. In subsequent months, the company acquired several hundred thousand acres of land around what is now Harriman, including the plantation of Union Army colonel and state senator, Robert K. Byrd.

The company's early investors included 1888 Prohibition Party presidential candidate General Clinton B. Fisk, who served as the company's first president, Quaker Oats co-founder Ferdinand Schumacher, and publishers Isaac K. Funk and A. W. Wagnalls.

Clinton Bowen Fisk (December

8, 1828 - July 9, 1890) was a senior officer during Reconstruction in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands and served as the Prohibition Party's presidential candidate during the 1888 presidential election. Fisk University was named in his honor after he endowed

Fisk University with $30,000.

Clinton Bowen Fisk was born on December 8, 1828 in York, Livingston County, New York to Benjamin Bigford Fisk and Lydia Aldrich Powell. As part of the 19th-century westward migration, his family soon moved to Coldwater, Michigan.

Ferdinand Schumacher (1822–1908), also known as The Oatmeal King, was an American entrepreneur and one of the founders of companies which merged to become the Quaker Oats Company.

Funk & Wagnalls was an American publisher known for its reference works, including A Standard

Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1893–5), and the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia (25 volumes, 1st ed. 1912).

Isaac Kaufmann Funk founded the business in 1875 as I.K. Funk & Company. In 1877, Adam Willis Wagnalls, one of Funk's classmates at Wittenberg College

(now Wittenberg University), joined the firm as a partner and the name of the firm was changed to Funk & Wagnalls Company.

After failing to purchase rights to the text of the Encyclopædia Britannica and World Book Encyclopedia for its Encarta digital encyclopedia, Microsoft

reluctantly used (under license) the text of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia for the first editions of its encyclopedia. This licensed text was gradually replaced over the following years with content Microsoft created itself.

Harriman is named for Walter Harriman, a governor of New Hampshire whose son, Walter C. Harriman, was managing director of the East Tennessee Land Company.

In 1849, Harriman entered politics as a Democrat and was elected to the New Hampshire Senate, serving through 1850. The

following year, he resigned as a minister and opened a store in Warner, partnering with John S. Pillsbury, a future governor of Minnesota and industrialist.

In the early 1890s Harriman's son, Walter C. Harriman, was one of the founders of the city of Harriman, Tennessee, which

is named for Governor Harriman.

To help finance its early operations, the East Tennessee Land Company borrowed just over one million dollars from the Central Trust Company of New York.

The American Temperance University was established in 1894, and operated out of the East

Tennessee Land Company's abandoned headquarters.

Central Trust Bank Building is a historic bank building located in downtown Rochester, Monroe County, New York. It was built in 1959, and is a five-story, International Style building with a flat roof.

Midlantic Corp. has

signed a definitive agreement to buy Central Trust Co. of Rochester and four other former subsidiaries of Irving Trust Co., it said Monday [1989].

Irving Trust was an American Commercial bank headquartered in New York City that operated between 1851 and 1988 when it was acquired

by Bank of New York.

Between 1913 and 1931, its headquarters was in the Woolworth Building; after 1931, until it was acquired by Bank of New York, its headquarters was located at One Wall Street, at what is now known as the BNY Mellon Building.

F. W. Woolworth, the founder of a brand of popular five-and-ten-cent stores, conceived the skyscraper as a headquarters for his company. Woolworth planned the skyscraper jointly with the Irving National Exchange Bank, which also agreed to use the structure as its headquarters.

The Irving National Exchange Bank moved its headquarters to 1 Wall Street in 1931, but the Woolworth Company (later Venator Group) continued to own the Woolworth Building for most of the 20th century.

Although established in 1974, and founded as a separate company in 1988,

Foot Locker's roots date to 1879, as it is a successor corporation to the F. W. Woolworth Company (“Woolworth's”), as many of its freestanding stores were originally Kinney Shoes and Woolworth's locations.

On August 31, 1963, the G.R. Kinney Company was sold to F.W. Woolworth.

Prior to this it was a subsidiary of the Brown Shoe Company which sold it for $45 million.

The company was created in St. Louis and was originally named Bryan, Brown & Company after its founders George Warren Brown and Alvin Bryan. The company began business in 1878 and

incorporated in 1881 as Bryan-Brown Shoe Company.

The company competed as Brown shoes were sold throughout the Midwest at prices lower than New England shoes, and by 1900 the company was growing at a rate of $1 million a year. Four years later the company bought the rights to

Buster Brown, a character developed by cartoonist Richard F. Outcault they would use for marketing.

Outcault traveled to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, selling licenses to up to 200 companies to use the Buster Brown characters to advertise their products.

The

Louisiana Purchase Exposition, informally known as the St. Louis World's Fair, was an international exposition held in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, from April 30 to December 1, 1904.

The fair's 1,200-acre site, designed by George Kessler, was located at the present-day

grounds of Forest Park and on the campus of Washington University, and was the largest fair (in area) to date.

In conjunction with the Exposition the U.S. Post Office issued a series of five commemorative stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase.

The 1-cent value portrays Robert Livingston, the ambassador who negotiated the purchase with France; the 2-cent value depicts Thomas Jefferson, who executed the purchase; the 3-cent honors James Monroe, who participated in negotiations with the French; the 5-cent memorializes

William McKinley, who was involved with early plans for the Exposition; and the 10-cent presents a map of the Louisiana Purchase.

Personal automobile – One of the most popular attractions of the Exposition was contained in the Palace of Transportation: automobiles and motor

cars. The automobile display contained 140 models including ones powered by gasoline, steam, and electricity.

Four years after the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Ford Motor Company began producing the Ford Model T making the personal automobile more affordable.

Henry Ford

worked under Alex Dow at one of the Detroit Edison substations. Dow took Ford with him to the 1896 annual convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies being held that year in New York City. It was at this convention that Dow introduced Ford to Thomas Edison, the

meeting with, and encouragement from, the great scientist becoming a great inspiration to Ford in completing his first car.

To ob­tain the property for its dams and flowage area, Edison of­ten had to buy larger parcels, including entire farms. In 1913 the company combined all

the excess property, total­ing 2,000 acres, into one entity, the Huron Farms Compa­ny, and hired William E. Underdown, a 1904 Cornell graduate, to manage it.

Edison president Alex Dow oversaw construction of the company's power dams on the Huron River. Dow's wife, Vivienne,

chose the site for their sprawling shingle-style home for its view of Barton Dam.
Dow sought the firm's advice on the entire Huron Farms project. But its biggest contribution was its design for Barton Hills. Dow envisioned stately homes, a country club, and even a hotel on the

rolling hills north of the newly created Barton Pond.
During World War I a few grander homes were built by individuals with Edison connections. Underdown, the Huron Farms manager, began work on a house for his family in 1916. He consulted with a "Mr. G. Gibbs" of Olmsted on the

construction of the access road, later named Underdown.
Infrastructure work began in earnest af­ter the war. In 1919, by special action of the Huron Farms board, Dow's wife, Vivienne, was given her choice of any lot in the subdivision for $1. She chose a centrally located

sixteen-acre site, halfway between the high road and the shore road, that had an excellent view of the pond, so her hus­band could look out and see his dam.
Designed by U-M architecture dean Emil Lorch (who probably also did the Underdown house), the Dow home was started in 1921

and occupied by 1922. It is large, with twenty rooms, but feels com­fortable and homey. In the manner of the British rural gentry, the Dows gave it a name, "Brushwood." (According to their granddaughter, the name came from one of Vivienne's favorite poems.)

Helen Underdown built a smaller house on Juniper Lane after William was killed in a car crash in 1930.

Walter Esch recalls that one of the more colorful postwar residents was Edgar Kaiser, son of the industrialist Henry Kaiser, who had taken over the Willow Run bomber plant to

build Kaiser Frazer cars. Edgar enlarged the Riggs home and added a swimming pool. Every year he put up 3,500 outdoor Christmas lights that drew viewers from all around, and ended the hol­iday season with a big New Year's party. "If they [the guests] had too much to drink, Mr.

Kaiser would come and say, 'Walt, take one of the cars'—he always had five or six cars from the factory sitting there—'and take them home,' " remembers Esch.