Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile under four minutes.
One of the things I always wondered: how does a medical student find time to become a record setting runner? Sort of an answer:
“Now that I am taking up a hospital appointment,” he said in an address to the English Sportswriters Association that December, “I shall have to give up international athletics. I shall not have sufficient time to put up a first-class performance. There would be little satisfaction for me in a second-rate performance, and it would be wrong to give one when representing my country.”
And I rather like this quote:
“He was running on 28 training miles a week,” Sebastian Coe, who set the world record in the mile three different times, once said. “He did it on limited scientific knowledge, with leather shoes in which the spikes alone probably weighed more than the tissue-thin shoes today, on tracks at which speedway riders would turn up their noses. So as far as I’m concerned, that was one of the great runs of all time.”
David Ogden Stiers. It is perhaps worth calling out that he was more than Major Charles Emerson Winchester III: he was the announcer in “THX-1138”, Cogsworth the clock in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” (and he had other roles in a lot of Disney films), and acted in four of Woody Allen’s movies.
In a statement after his death, Loretta Swit, who played Maj. Margaret (Hot Lips) Houlihan on “M*A*S*H,” called Mr. Stiers “my sweet, dear shy friend,” adding, “Working with him was an adventure.”
I’m throwing this in so I have an excuse to mention: over the weekend, I caught an episode of “Match Game” with Ms. Swit. She was wearing a very unfortunate yellow and black striped outfit: it made her look like a giant bumblebee.
Sometimes, I miss the 70s. Then I’m reminded of why I shouldn’t.