Category Archives: American Heroes

America is filled with everyday heroes who help make this country great. By reading America Fun Fact of the Day, you’ve proven that you yourself are also an American hero. And we salute you.

But there’s no way in hell we’re going to salute you by making a fun fact about you, since this page is reserved for REAL heroes. You know, the people who are important enough to get wikipedia pages and such.

Rupert Mills: The One-Man Team of the 1916 Federalist League

Posted on August 19, 2015 | 1 comment

“I said.  A contract’s.  A contract.”

~Rupert Mills

rupert mills

On an instinctive level, just about everyone feels that it must have been much easier to become a professional athlete a hundred years ago than it is now.  Part of that stems from our general belief in progress—each year we get stronger, faster, better at writing hilarious jokes about American topics.  Shut up, it’s called intangibles, ask a scout.  Another part of this belief comes from the leaps and bounds our scientific knowledge about human physiology has made in the past century.  We know how to handle, and prevent, injuries, how to train our bodies in the most efficient ways- we’re no longer blindly hoping that we were born as naturally athletic freaks like Jesse Owens.  Oh, and speaking of that, we also stopped  limiting our professional athletics to random white guys who tended to get lucky enough to get exposed to sports right when they were being invented.  That’s a huge step.

The distinct disparity between, say, baseball athletes today and those during the Dead Ball Era might not have anything to do with this article, but it is important to note that Rupert Mills, who you have never heard of (unless you caught a brief story about him in our article about silly baseball team names), almost definitely would not have been considered a world class athlete if he were competing today.  And that’s okay!  Hell, he wasn’t considered a world class athlete when he was competing 100 years ago!  But maybe, in a weird way, the ability for “good but not stellar” athletes to play on a national stage in the 19th century was a blessing in disguise, because sometimes the best stories happen when a sport’s not yet at the point where it’s fully taken seriously.  Because while the level of play in 2015 might be higher than it was in 1916, you’ll never see a player show up to an empty field every day in order to take advantage of a loophole in his contract to get paid.

That’s what Rupert Mills did, and Rupert Mills was hilarious and amazing, and that’s only part of his story.

Rupert Mills:  The One-Man Team of the 1916 Federalist League

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The 1959 Chicago Pan American Games: The Most Hilarious International Competition Of All Time

Posted on August 13, 2015 | 3 comments

“What?  Is that like, a cooking show or something?”

~The Average American Response to the Pan American Games

pan am games

As roughly two of you already knew, this year saw the 17th Pan American Games take place in Toronto.  41 nations in the Americas competed, with America leading the way with 103 gold metals and 265 total metals.  Many of you might not be familiar with the Pan American games, and that is because, like most red blooded Americans, you only can muster up enthusiasm for the Olympics, which is understandable.  If you’re going to try to give a shit about track and field more often than once every four years, you’d better have just married a hot wife with a high school aged son from a previous marriage who you try to support in order to make him begrudgingly like and respect you (sorry, though, no matter how hard you try, he totally won’t).

For most American athletes, the Pan Am games are a way to clean up and snag a lot of metals when you only have to worry about going up against 2 of the 6 continents that field athletes competitively in international competitions.  And for most Cubans, the Pan Am games are a way to defect the fuck out of Cuba.  However, for a relatively inconsequential (as far as the typical American sports fan is concerned) competition, the history of the Pan Am games are both deeply interesting and kind of unintentionally hilarious.  And never in the 64 years that this sporting event has been held has there been more unintentional hilarity as the first ever Pan American games to be hosted in the United States.

Because, holy shit, Chicago had no idea what it was getting itself into when it tried to plan an entire international competition in less than two years, and as a result, history will always have the wonderful train wreck that is…

The 1959 Chicago Pan American Games: The Most Hilarious International Competition Of All Time

chicago games

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Posted in 20th Century Insanity, Athletes, Strange America

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More of the Silliest Major League Baseball Team Names of All Time

Posted on August 5, 2015 | 1 comment

“Let’s go Stogies!  No wait that can’t be right, can it?  We’re not honestly called that, right?”

~Pittsburgh Stogies fans

talkin baseball

A few weeks back, we talked to you about some late 19th and early 20th century professional baseball team names that we felt were, frankly, kind of ridiculous.  We’ve not always been great at naming teams, and well, considering the Phillies we’re still not that great at naming teams, but we’ve at least phased out the worst offenders.  From the Columbus Solons to the Cincinnati Kelly’s Killers, there are a whole slew of defunct major league baseball teams that had laughable, absurd names, and some of them even managed to not be from Ohio.

That said, as ridiculous as those names were, they weren’t the only ones out there.  So we combed through the history of major league baseball to find some more hilarious names, because we’re easily amused when drunk.

More of the Silliest Major League Baseball Team Names of All Time

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William Walker: Not THAT Kind of Filibuster

Posted on July 7, 2015 | 4 comments

“Wait, who’s our president?  What?”

~Residents of Nicaragua in the 1850s

 william walker

Not all Americans were heroes, and not all Americans who did things that initially come off as badass were actually badass.  What we’re trying to say is, there’s a lot of Manifest Destiny stuff that went down in the 1800s that doesn’t exactly sit well with history that many of us might not be aware of, but it is possible to at least talk about the impressive brazenness behind certain actions without condoning them.

For example—did you know that an American was briefly president of Nicaragua for about a year in the 1850s?  That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?  Oh, what’s that?  Uh, why did that happen?  Oh, well….heeeeeee sort of wanted to take over most of Central America and turn it into a slave state affiliated with the American South.  So.  Yeah.  Not the greatest reason.  But still, interesting!  Let’s talk about it!

William Walker:  Not THAT Kind of Filibuster

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Posted in The Best of the Rest, The Rest of Them

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The Most Awkward Three Stooges Films

Posted on June 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Why I oughta!”

~You-Know-Who

 three stooges

Most of America (and, let’s be honest, statistically all of America’s men) love The Three Stooges and have for as long as “pointless violence without consequence” has been inexplicably hilarious for about 65% of the population.  The vaudeville slapstick act was around from 1930 to 1975, though they’re best remembered for their now-syndicated short films featuring Larry, Moe and Curly from 1934 to 1947 (as well as the Larry, Moe and Shemp films that ran from 1947 to 1956 that we were always secretly disappointed to watch when they came on).  Oh, there also was that Farrelly brothers movie version, which, um, well let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.

Many American childhoods have been spent watching three grown men beating on each other for no particular reason apart from “you said something dumb” or “you just asked me to hit your fist, which I will do, even though it will cause that fist to windmill around and bonk me on the head.”  And while we have every right to celebrate them for all that they have done, including but not limited to filming the funniest use of eye gouging on film (followed in a distant, distant, distant second place by Game of Thrones), today we’re going to recognize that some of their films, largely through fault of their titles, and largely through the fact that these were being churned out with no regard for “a story that makes sense”, have aged somewhat awkwardly.  Admittedly, no one remembers the names of any Three Stooges short, or even the plot of any individual one—our collective understanding of The Stooges begins and ends at “Moe is the boss, Curly makes the funny noises, and we guess Larry does stuff too sometimes.”   That said, while thin in premise and generally serving as lazy ways to justify twenty minutes of the Stooges beating the shit out of each other, when you actually sit down and read the titles out loud, or simply stumble through a plot synopsis, a reader in 2015 might awkwardly tug at their collar and make a noise not much different than one Curly would make.  So, we decided to look through the 190 shorts they managed to make in their career and cherry pick ones that we found to be especially uncomfortable-slash-hilarious.  We’ve naturally listed them below for your reading pleasure.

The Most Awkward Three Stooges Films

 three little beers three stooges Continue reading →

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The American Life of Smedley D. Butler

Posted on June 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

“No.  Seriously.  I won’t lose.”

~Smedley Butler Playing a Game of Bullshit

smedley butler

We recently wrote an article that focused on the Medal of Honor—mainly, how the military’s highest honor, now given only to acts of almost impossible levels of valor, was sort of tossed around pretty willy-nilly in the years after the Civil War and before World War I.  In that discussion, we briefly mentioned a U.S. Marine named Smedley Butler, who straight up tried to turn down his first Medal of Honor (yes, he was later awarded a second one) because he didn’t think he deserved it.  We then came to realize that Smedley Butler, a badass with a kind of funny first name, isn’t really well known to the casual American—hell, we had only sort of stumbled across his career by accident.

And that’s some bullshit, because Smedley Butler died as the most highly decorated Marine in U.S. history, and served 34 years where he managed to collect medals, tropical diseases, and tactics for tricking the enemy like it was his job.  Well, it sort of was his job, he was a marine, but you get the picture.

So allow us to spend three thousand words or so gushing about Smedley Butler, The Fighting Quaker.

butler and his dogs

Ha ha, holy shit, this picture.

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The Medal of Honor from 1871-1917: The Military Honor America Couldn’t Seem To Give Away Fast Enough

Posted on May 12, 2015 | 4 comments

“No, seriously, you have to stop printing these like Thin Mints.  What’s it gonna take, an actual major war to make you chill?”

~Smedley Butler, trying to turn down a Medal of Honor in the early 20th century

medal of honor

We’re going to start this one off with a disclaimer—any claims we make regarding the Medal of Honor is a reflection of how politicians and military leaders handed out the honor before we really had any intense modern wars under our belt.  Our servicemen that fought in the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or the many other excursions where they have put their lives on the line for their brothers and for their country have paid dearly for our benefit, and every single recipient of the Medal of Honor can, at worst, be called a hero (at best they can be called “basically Batman, if Batman could get free beer and deserved gratitude sex whenever they want”).

Even when we make fun of the skirmishes that resulted in Medals of honor being handed out during the time period of 1869 (when we had kind of forgotten what the Civil War was like) to 1917 (when we started World War I and realized, holy shit, this shit is super intense), we’re acknowledging that the soldiers who were awarded did show valor and a love of this country.  They just happened to get an award that was handed out to pretty much anyone who asked for it up until recently.  Let’s put it this way—Congress gave out 1522 Medal of Honors in the Civil War, of which 32 were posthumous.  Now, the American Civil War was a bloody and bitterly fought war, but when you consider the fact that we awarded only 464 during the entirety of World War II (266 posthumously by the way), or that we’ve only given out 16 (7 of which were to fallen soldiers) of these awards in the Afghanistan and Iraqi War combined, you can see how we’ve increasingly made the honor harder and harder to get.  The Congressional Medal of Honor, as we know it know, is the most prestigious and rare award for those who have gone above and beyond their duty to keep freedom within these borders—for those of you with a loose idea of what military action generally means, this is the award a soldier gets when doing something so brave and so intense that, if you saw it in a movie, you’d respond, “Oh, come on, the director’s really taking some liberties with this battle to make it seem more exciting.”

So currently, yes, the Medal of Honor is given out only in the most extraordinary and harrowing cases , but during the time period between the end of the Civil War and start of World War I?  Well, at that point it was more…

The Medal of Honor from 1871-1917: The Military Honor America Couldn’t Seem To Give Away Fast Enough

 more medals of honor

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Posted in 19th Century Factoids, 20th Century Insanity, America's Greatest Fun Facts, American Heroes, Fighters

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Gary Kness: The Ultimate Badass Bystander

Posted on May 7, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Wait, you mean life ISN’T supposed to be like a Michael Bay film?”

~Gary Kness

gary kness medal

On April 5th, 1970, two career criminals named Bobby Davis and Jack Twinning were planning on using explosives to rob an armored car in California, since action movies had yet to catch up to real life at this point.  On the way to steal these explosives, Davis decided to performed an ill-advised U-turn, cutting off a military serviceman who he then threatened by brandishing a gun before fleeing when the serviceman told him that officers from the California Highway Patrol were in the area.  They weren’t, but they would be, since the serviceman immediately went to a payphone (before cell phones we used to call people by, you know what, no time to explain, just roll with it) to actually get the police there to track down the crazy dude brandishing a gun on the highway.  This little bit of road rage eventually lead to the Newhall massacre, a tragic event that took the lives of four young CHP officers, which at the time was the deadliest day in the history of California law enforcement, and lead to drastic overhauls in the way police officers are kept safe in this country.

We could talk about the Newhall massacre specifically, because it’s a very intense story, but it’s also a bummer to focus in on that, so instead we’re going to take a moment to tell you about the Newhall massacre through the eyes of Gary Kness, the 31-year-old former Marine who happened to drive past the shootout and think, “You know what, this is something I should probably stick my nose in.”  While it was a day that was filled with tremendous sacrifice (God, we’re going to have a hard time tossing in jokes about this without feeling like dicks) Gary Kness proves the American spirit of just, straight up not giving a fuck when it comes to putting punks in their damn place.

So with a lot of hemming and hawing, we present to you…

Gary Kness:  The Ultimate Badass Bystander

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Samuel Whittemore: The Most Badass Grumpy Old Person in American History

Posted on April 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Do not fuck with me.”

~Samuel Whittemore

samuel whittemore

So long as they don’t accidentally go vegetarian or something, all Americans turn into badass zero-fuck-giving machines once they reach a certain age.  The whispers of mortality apparently change the American temperament as they get louder, turning our nation’s elderly into stubborn, fighting-off-bears, beating-up-a-robber-after-getting-shot-in-the-head badasses.  This is not a recent quality only seen in the Greatest Generation, it’s engrained in our DNA.  Trust us on this, if you think you’re kind of soft and weak currently, you should really do something about your self-esteem.  But also, you should know that by the time you hit 80 you’re basically going to be a superhero.

That being said, no matter how badass you get in your old age, you still won’t have anything on Samuel Whittemore, the oldest known colonial combatant in the Revolutionary War.  Trust us on this.

Samuel Whittemore:  The Most Badass Grumpy Old Person in American History

 whittemore tombstone Continue reading →

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Boston Corbett: The (Insane) Killer Of John Wilkes Booth

Posted on March 17, 2015 | 2 comments

“I mean, yeah.”

Boston Corbett, when asked “like, are you crazy, or?”

boston corbett

So, let’s talk about history, shall we?  American history, naturally, because that’s the best kind, and all you “our church was made in 1103, and our beer has been brewed for a thousand years” European ninnys can hand us the beer, sure, but otherwise shut your damn mouths.  American history is great, largely because, and we can’t believe how this gets glossed over in our Social Studies books in elementary school, but it is deeply weird a lot of the time.  Like, we once had a president die because he drank a bunch of milk and ate too many cherries.  Died!  A real honest-to-God Commander-in-Chief died doing an impression of someone who plays Pac Man but keeps wanting to be able to eat the ghosts.

So the point is, American history is awesome, and entertaining, and deeply, deeply weird, and we at America Fun Fact of the Day embrace that, because it means that every day we can come across something we didn’t know that suddenly becomes our new favorite fact.

For example, Boston Corbett, the man who shot and killed Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was a self-castrated soldier driven mad by mercury poison.  Let’s talk about that motherfucker, right?  Okay then!

Boston Corbett:  The (Insane) Killer Of John Wilkes Booth

corbett 2 Continue reading →

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