by Curt Kovener
Many times in my youthful misbehavior my Mom or Dad, Grandpa & Grandma, Gramp & Granny (and even my Aunt Clarice) would admonish me that they would make me improve my behavior if it was the last thing they did.
So I then behaved…at lease when they were around.
But what are some of those other ‘last things’ that have occurred in this column’s readers’ lifetime?
•The last year that Sony made Betamax VCRs (which battled VHS for market share in the 1980s) was 2002. For our more youthful readers, video cassette tapes are what we watched before DVDs.
•The last time a gallon of gas cost less than $1: March 1999 when the US average was 97¢.
•Last song that Elvis Presley performed in public: ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’. It was in Indianapolis at the now razed Market Square Arena on June 26, 1977.
•The last state to abolish flogging as a legal punishment was Delaware in 1972. (Glad I never visited Delaware in my youth.)
•Napoleon’s last descendant was Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. He died in 1945 after tripping over his dog’s leash.
•Jimmy Stewart’s last file role was the voice of a dog named Wylie Burp in ‘An American Tail: Fieval Goes West’ in 1991.
•Ethel Merman’s last film: ‘Airplane’ in 1980. She played a shell-shocked soldier who believed he was…Ethel Merman.
•The last time Frank Sinatra appeared on TV was in 1989 when he played himself in an episode of ‘Who’s The Boss?’
•The last cow to graze at the White House was Pauline the Holstein who belonged to President William Howard Taft in 1913.
•Last word spoken by Oxford professor Joseph Wright who edited the English Dialect Dictionary: “Dictionary”.
•The last US president with a beard: Indiana’s Benjamin Harrison, who left office in 1893.
•Last American veteran of World War I: Frank W. Buckles, who lived to be 110. He died in 2011. His advice for a long life: “When you start to die, don’t.”
And making full circle to our first example…
•The last Blockbuster Video rental (it was in Hawaii on Nov. 9, 2013): ‘This Is The End.’