Ross Bagdasarian Sr.
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Ross Bagdasarian Sr.
Ross S. Bagdasarian (; January 27, 1919 – January 16, 1972), known professionally by his stage name David Seville, was an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor, best known for creating the cartoon band Alvin and the Chipmunks. Initially a stage and film actor, he rose to prominence in 1958 with the songs "Witch Doctor" and "The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don't Be Late)", which both became ''Billboard'' number-one singles. He produced and directed ''The Alvin Show'', which aired on CBS in 1961–62. Life Bagdasarian was born on January 27, 1919, in Fresno, California to an Armenian-American Family. He had two elder brothers: Richard Sirak (1910–1966) and Harry Sisvan (1915–1989). The novelist William Saroyan was his first cousin, to whom he was very close. Bagdasarian graduated from Fresno High School in 1937. During World War II, he served four years as a control tower operator and rose to the rank of a staff sergeant (SSgt) in the Army Air Forces. His ...
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Fresno, California
Fresno () is a major city in the San Joaquin Valley of California, United States. It is the county seat of Fresno County and the largest city in the greater Central Valley region. It covers about and had a population of 542,107 in 2020, making it the fifth-most populous city in California, the most populous inland city in California, and the 34th-most populous city in the nation. The Metro population of Fresno is 1,008,654 as of 2022. Named for the abundant ash trees lining the San Joaquin River, Fresno was founded in 1872 as a railway station of the Central Pacific Railroad before it was incorporated in 1885. It has since become an economic hub of Fresno County and the San Joaquin Valley, with much of the surrounding areas in the Metropolitan Fresno region predominantly tied to large-scale agricultural production. Fresno is near the geographic center of California, approximately north of Los Angeles, south of the state capital, Sacramento, and southeast of San Franc ...
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Armenian-American
Armenian Americans ( hy, ամերիկահայեր, ''amerikahayer'') are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana Massacre of 1909, and the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East (especially from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Turkey) migrated to the U.S. as a result of political instability in the region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons. The 2017 American Community Survey estimated that 485,970 Americans held full or parti ...
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Rear Window
''Rear Window'' is a 1954 American mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by John Michael Hayes based on Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder". Originally released by Paramount Pictures, the film stars James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendell Corey, Thelma Ritter, and Raymond Burr. It was screened at the 1954 Venice Film Festival. ''Rear Window'' is considered by many filmgoers, critics, and scholars to be one of Hitchcock's best and one of the greatest films ever made. It received four Academy Award nominations and was ranked number 42 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list and number 48 on the 10th-anniversary edition, and in 1997 was added to the United States National Film Registry in the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Plot Recuperating from a broken leg, professional photographer L. B. "Jeff" Jefferies is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment in Greenwich Village, Manhat ...
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Destination Gobi
''Destination Gobi'' is a 1953 American Technicolor World War II film released by 20th Century-Fox. It was produced by Stanley Rubin, directed by Robert Wise (his first color feature film) and stars Richard Widmark and Don Taylor. U.S. Navy chief Sam McHale takes command of a unit of weather observers stranded behind Japanese lines deep in Inner Mongolia. McHale must lead his men across the treacherous Gobi Desert to the sea coast. Mongols whom the sailors had befriended, led by chief Tengu, help them elude the Japanese and steal a Chinese junk in order to reach Okinawa. After the picture's opening credits, a written foreword reads: In the Navy records in Washington, there is an obscure entry reading "Saddles for Gobi." This film is based on the story behind that entry - one of the strangest stories of World War II. The unit involved was part of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO), referred to as Sino-American Combined Operations in the film. Actor Ernest Borg ...
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Stalag 17
''Stalag 17'' is a 1953 American war film which tells the story of a group of American airmen confined with 40,000 prisoners in a World War II German prisoner of war camp "somewhere on the Danube". Their compound holds 630 Sergeants representing many different air crew positions, but the film focuses on one particular barrack, where the men come to suspect that one of their number is an informant. The film was directed and produced by Billy Wilder who, with Edwin Blum, adapted the screenplay from the Broadway play of the same name. The play was written by Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski, based on their experiences as prisoners in Stalag 17B in Austria. The film stars William Holden in an Oscar-winning performance, along with Don Taylor, Robert Strauss, Harvey Lembeck, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Richard Erdman, Michael Moore, Sig Ruman, and Otto Preminger. Strauss and Lembeck appeared in the original Broadway production. Plot In a German prisoner-of-war camp named '' ...
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Viva Zapata!
''Viva Zapata!'' is a 1952 American Western film directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando. The screenplay was written by John Steinbeck, using Edgcomb Pinchon's 1941 book ''Zapata the Unconquerable'' as a guide. The cast includes Jean Peters and, in an Academy Award-winning performance, Anthony Quinn. The film is a fictionalized account of the life of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata from his peasant upbringing through his rise to power in the early 1900s and his death in 1919. To make the film as authentic as possible, Kazan and producer Darryl F. Zanuck studied the numerous photographs that were taken during the revolutionary years, the period between 1909 and 1919 when Zapata led the fight to restore land taken from common people during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Kazan was especially impressed with the Agustín Casasola collection of photographs and he attempted to duplicate their visual style in the film. Kazan also acknowledged the influence of Rober ...
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The Time Of Your Life
''The Time of Your Life'' is a 1939 five-act play by American playwright William Saroyan. The play is the first drama to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play opened on Broadway theatre, Broadway in 1939. Characters ;Main characters * Joe, a loafer with money and a good heart * Tom, his admirer, disciple, errand boy, stooge and friend * Kitty Duval, a young streetwalker who longs for a better life * Nick, owner of Nick's Pacific Street Saloon, Restaurant and Entertainment Palace * Arab, an Eastern philosopher and harmonica-player * Kit Carson, a teller of tall tales who looks like an old Indian-fighter * McCarthy, an intelligent and well-read longshoreman * Krupp, his boyhood friend, a waterfront cop who hates his job but doesn't know what else to do instead * Harry, a natural born hoofer who wants to make people laugh but can't * Wesley, a young colored man who plays a mean and melancholy boogie-woogie piano * Willie, a mar ...
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Broadway Theatre
Broadway theatre,Although ''theater'' is generally the spelling for this common noun in the United States (see American and British English spelling differences), 130 of the 144 extant and extinct Broadway venues use (used) the spelling ''Theatre'' as the proper noun in their names (12 others used neither), with many performers and trade groups for live dramatic presentations also using the spelling ''theatre''. or Broadway, are the theatrical performances presented in the 41 professional theatres, each with 500 or more seats, located in the Theater District and the Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world. While the thoroughfare is eponymous with the district and its collection of 41 theaters, and it is also closely identified with Times Square, only three of the theaters are located on Broadway itself (namely the Broadwa ...
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New York (magazine)
''New York'' is an American biweekly magazine concerned with life, culture, politics, and style generally, and with a particular emphasis on New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to ''The New Yorker'', it was brasher and less polite, and established itself as a cradle of New Journalism. Over time, it became more national in scope, publishing many noteworthy articles on American culture by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, John Heilemann, Frank Rich, and Rebecca Traister. In its 21st-century incarnation under editor-in-chief Adam Moss, "The nation's best and most-imitated city magazine is often not about the city—at least not in the overcrowded, traffic-clogged, five-boroughs sense", wrote then-''Washington Post'' media critic Howard Kurtz, as the magazine increasingly published political and cultural stories of national significance. Since its redesign and relaunch in 2004, the magazine has won more National Mag ...
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Seville
Seville (; es, Sevilla, ) is the capital and largest city of the Spanish autonomous community of Andalusia and the province of Seville. It is situated on the lower reaches of the River Guadalquivir, in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. Seville has a municipal population of about 685,000 , and a metropolitan population of about 1.5 million, making it the largest city in Andalusia, the fourth-largest city in Spain and the 26th most populous municipality in the European Union. Its old town, with an area of , contains three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Alcázar palace complex, the Cathedral and the General Archive of the Indies. The Seville harbour, located about from the Atlantic Ocean, is the only river port in Spain. The capital of Andalusia features hot temperatures in the summer, with daily maximums routinely above in July and August. Seville was founded as the Roman city of . Known as ''Ishbiliyah'' after the Islamic conquest in 711, Seville became ...
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United States Army Air Forces
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II (1941–1945). It was created on 20 June 1941 as successor to the previous United States Army Air Corps and is the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force, today one of the six United States Armed Forces, armed forces of the United States. The AAF was a component of the United States Army, which on 2 March 1942 was divided functionally by executive order into three autonomous forces: the Army Ground Forces, the United States Army Services of Supply (which in 1943 became the Army Service Forces), and the Army Air Forces. Each of these forces had a commanding general who reported directly to the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Army Chief of Staff. The AAF administered all parts of military aviation formerly distributed am ...
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Staff Sergeant
Staff sergeant is a rank of non-commissioned officer used in the armed forces of many countries. It is also a police rank in some police services. History of title In origin, certain senior sergeants were assigned to administrative, supervisory, or other specialist duties as part of the staff of a British Army regiment. As such they held seniority over sergeants who were members of a battalion or company, and were paid correspondingly increased wages. Their seniority was indicated by a crown worn above the three sergeant's stripes on their uniform rank markings. National variations Australia In the Australian Army and Cadets, the rank of staff sergeant is being phased out. It was usually held by the company quartermaster sergeant or the holders of other administrative roles. Staff sergeants are always addressed as "Staff Sergeant" or "Staff", never as "Sergeant" as it degrades their rank. "Chief" is another nickname though this is only used for the company chief clerk (in s ...
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