March 26: So Much to Tell You Trivia Quiz

Answer: Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost was born in California, but moved at a young age to Massachusetts; many of his best-loved poems have rural New England as a setting. Robert Frost won four Pulitzer prizes for poetry, and was invited to write a poem for John F. Kennedy's inauguration. He wrote 'Dedication', but was unable to read it due to the sun glare, and instead recited an earlier work, 'The Gift Outright' (1942). He died two years later, on January 29, 1963.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) is also associated with New England, and is linked to Robert Frost in one line of the Simon & Garfunkel song 'The Dangling Conversation': "And you read your Emily Dickinson and I, my Robert Frost".

e. e. cummings (1894-1962), famous for pushing the boundaries of grammar and punctuation in his poetry, was also from New England.

Walt Whitman, whose most famous work is probably "Leaves of Grass", died on March 26, 1892.

Answer: Diana Ross

These four women were The Supremes, as signed by Motown Records in 1961. Barbara Martin left in 1962, and the other three continued as a trio through the group's period of greatest success. Florence Ballard was replaced in 1967, and Diana Ross left to pursue a solo career in 1970. The line-up changed frequently through the 70s, and the group disbanded in 1977.

Answer: Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy played the Enterprise's first officer, the Vulcan Mr. Spock. William Shatner played the starship's captain, James T. Kirk. DeForest Kelley was the medical officer, Dr. Leonard H. 'Bones' McCoy. James Doohan performed as the chief engineer, Lt. Commander Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott. Nimoy's ears and split-fingered Vulcan greeting became iconic symbols of the show, as did the phrase "Beam us up, Scotty."

Answer: Bob Woodward

The Watergate scandal involved five men, acting on behalf of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP, one of my favorite acronyms!), breaking into the headquarters of their Democratic Party opponents, situated in the Watergate building, in order to place electronic surveillance devices. Their subsequent arrest and the revelations of the extent of government involvement ultimately led to the resignation of Richard Nixon from the Presidency.

Frank Sturgis was one of the five involved in the original break-in. Ben Bradlee was the editor of "The Washington Post", the newspaper that broke the story. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were the journalists who drove the investigation, having been tipped off by an anonymous source to whom they referred as 'Deep Throat' in the book they subsequently wrote, "All the President's Men." This was later made into a successful movie starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.

Answer: 1911

Thomas Lanier Williams (March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983), better known as Tennessee Williams, was born in Mississippi and moved to Missouri with his family during childhood. His nickname was given to him by his fraternity brothers, a reference to his strong drawl. He became one of America's most heralded 20th Century playwrights, responsible for a number of classic plays, many of which were successfully transferred to the big screen. "A Streetcar Named Desire" won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, as did "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in 1966. "The Glass Menagerie" and "Night of the Iguana" were also successful both on stage and as movies.

Some sources give the year of his birth as 1912, more as 1911.

Answer: France

England's King Richard I (born 1157; reigned 1189-1199) is considered one of England's most popular kings, despite only spending 6 months of his 10-year reign in the country. (Maybe because of that?) He preferred his French lands, and never learned to speak English well. The first three years of his reign were spent on the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem after its conquest by Saladin. He was the 'good king' in the legends of Robin Hood, while his younger brother John was the 'bad king', demonized to the extent that there has never again been a King John of England!

Sources differ as to the exact date of his wounding, some giving March 25 instead of March 26. Even more interestingly, the identity and fate of his assassin is given in two vastly different forms. According to one set of sources, the crossbow bolt was fired by Peter Basile, a French nobleman who was subsequently executed. The other story is that it was a young boy, named Peter Basile or Jon Sabroz or Dudo or Bertran de Gurdun, whose father and brothers had died in the siege; Richard was so touched by the boy's plight that he forgave him, and gave him a gift of 100 shillings as compensation.

Answer: Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria reigned from June 20, 1837 until her death on January 22, 1901, making her Britain's longest-ruling monarch.

Sarah Bernhardt (October 3, 1844 - March 26, 1923) was a famous French actress nicknamed 'The Divine Sarah'. She is also the referent of the phrase 'You're no Bernhardt', meaning that one's acting skills are not of the highest quality.

David Lloyd George (January 17, 1863 - March 26, 1945) was a British statesman, and was Prime Minister from 1916-1922.

Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770 - March 26, 1827) was a German composer and virtuoso pianist who was highly influential in the transition of European music from the Classical Period to the Romantic. In his mid-20s he started to lose his hearing, suffering from severe tinnitus, and was totally deaf before he died. He continued to compose prolifically, but found performances increasingly difficult. The opening phrase of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is familiar to virtually everyone, even those who don't know its source. The cartoon strip 'Peanuts' includes a piano-player (Schroeder) who is obsessed by Beethoven, with a bust of the composer resting on his toy piano.

Answer: A translation into English of some of Aesop's fables

William Caxton published all of these, but not all on the given date. "Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye", an account of the Trojan War, was the first book printed in English, in 1473. "La Morte d'Arthur", Sir Thomas Malory's collection of French and English Arthurian legends, is still one of the most commonly drawn-on sources for Arthurian tales. Caxton printed his translation in 1485. Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", written in the 14th century over a number of years, and still incomplete (the preface suggests that there will be 120 stories, not the 24 that were produced) is one of the earliest literary works written in English rather than French or Latin. Of course, the vernacular of the day was very different from modern English, and reading Chaucer requires almost as much translation as if it had been written in another language!

Answer: Pakistan

While Myanmar shares a border with Bangladesh, there has been no political affiliation in recent times. Britain had been out of the political picture on the Indian subcontinent for a number of years. In 1947, the partition of India established the country of India and the country of Pakistan, which consisted of two Islamic states (East Pakistan and West Pakistan) geographically separated by over 1000 miles.

The people of East Pakistan felt themselves to be poorly treated by the national leaders in West Pakistan, and declared independence on March 26, 1971. Victory in the ensuing civil war was achieved on December 16, 1971 and the country of Bangladesh was established.

Answer: visiting the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment

And so much more happened of March 26:
March 26, 1834 - the first Henley Royal Regatta was raced
March 26, 1942 - Auschwitz received its first female prisoners (I didn't promise that they would all be NICE things)
March 26, 1953 - Dr Jonas Salk announced the development of his polio vaccine
March 26, 1979 - Anwar al-Sadat, Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter signed the Israeli-Egypt Peace Treaty in Washington, D.C.
March 26, 1982 - the ground breaking ceremony was held for the Vietnam Veterans' War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Birthdays on March 26 include:
Keira Knightley (1985) - English actress
Martin Short (1950) - Canadian actor
Erica Jong (1942) - American author ("Fear of Flying")
James Caan (1940) - American actor

Deaths on March 26 include:
Noel Coward (1899 - 1973) - English composer, playwright and actor/singer
Cecil Rhodes (1853 - 1902) - English explorer (of the African continent) after whom Rhodes Scholarships are named