January 17, 2022
I’ve been dragging this NFL nickname piece out too long. Here are 6 nicknames, the final 6 Wednesday.
The New England Patriots was selected in a fan survey. The New Orleans Saints was based on the city’s jazz heritage and their popular song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The New York Giants was borrowed from the baseball Giants, a common practice in the before time.
The New York Jets were originally called the Titans, but when a new ownership group bought the bankrupt franchise in 1963, they considered the Dodgers (like the Giants, but MLB didn’t like it). Gothams got some consideration, but was rejected because it could be shortened to Goths. Eventually the team became the Jets since it was going to play in Shea Stadium, which is close to LaGuardia Airport. According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the name was supposed to reflect the “modern approach of his team.”
The Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders was selected from a fan contest. In 1933, Bert Bell and Lud Wray purchased the bankrupt Frankford Yellowjackets. The new owners renamed the team the Philadelphia Eagles in honor of the symbol of the National Recovery Act, which was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
👉 A Sunday School teacher decided to have her young class memorize one of the most quoted passages in the Bible – Psalm 23. She gave the youngsters a month to learn the chapter. Little Rick was excited about the task, but he just couldn’t remember the Psalm. After much practice, he could barely get past the first line. On the day that the kids were scheduled to recite Psalm 23 in front of the congregation, Ricky was so nervous. When it was his turn, he stepped up to the microphone and said proudly, “The Lord is my Shepherd, and that’s all I need to know.”
👉 Speaking of Psalm 23, Richard Gunther has a great set of images illustrating that Psalm (the one above is from the collection). They are available for free at this link.
👉 Some blackouts:
👉 A copy of a Superman #1 comic book that sold on newsstands for a dime in 1939 was purchased one month ago for $2.6 million in an auction. The cover showing Superman leaping over tall buildings at a single bound was sold to a buyer who, like the Man of Steel, wishes to maintain a secret identity.
The character created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster is a pioneer of the superhero genre, and comics featuring the Man from Krypton have netted super prices recently. In April a copy of Action Comics #1, the comic that introduced Superman in 1938, sold for $3.25 million. “Now you look at the comic books and you go ‘superheroes everywhere.’ You look back in the ’30s, there was no such thing. So this was literally the first superhero,” said ComicConnect CEO Stephen Fishler.
👉 A new QB category – Monday Puns:
👉 Life according to Family Circus:
👉 Shopping at the grocery store is something we take for granted, but grabbing a buggy and exploring the aisles was not always the way we shopped. I remember Mom calling Martin’s Store (C.P. Martin and Son) on Thursdays and ordering groceries. Mr. Martin would write down the items and after each, say, “What else, Mrs.?” The order would be delivered on Saturday, and if we weren’t home, he would just go in the house and place the box on the kitchen counter. As Grandma Lowdermilk used to say, we only locked the door “when we were going to go away to be gone.”
Martin’s Store was self-service, but Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in the fall of 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee, and developed the first-ever self-service grocery store. Previously, grocery shoppers handed over a list of goods they wanted to purchase to the store clerk, and the clerk fetched the products for them. At Piggly Wiggly, customers were free to roam among the goods and pick out goods they needed or that happened to catch their eye.
With growing numbers of households that owned cars, C.L. Peckham came up with an idea to profit off of the increasing number of daily commuters. In 1924, Peckham opened Ye Market Place in Glendale, California. Ye Market Place had 23 separate stores built in a U-shape, with a parking lot in the center. Customers could shop at each store and store their items in their cars as needed. While these stores were not under one roof, it was the beginning of customers embracing department-oriented shopping.
King Kullen was founded in Jamaica, Queens, in New York City in 1930. Unlike the other markets of its time, King Kullen sold thousands of different products in one store with various departments for produce, meats, dairy, baked goods, and other dry goods. This multidepartment large grocery store earned the title of the first supermarket.
Prior to 1937, grocery stores provided customers with a small wire or wooden basket to carry their items while they were shopping. Grocery chain owner Sylvan Goldman noticed that at his Humpty Dumpty supermarkets, customers would start to head for the registers once these hand-held baskets got too heavy. In order to create a solution that would encourage customers to keep shopping, he teamed up with a local mechanic to create a prototype of what would become the shopping cart.
Joseph Woodland had an idea to create a way for grocery store checkout queues to move more quickly as well as hasten the process for taking stock of goods. He came up with the concept of a bar code (later named Uniform Product Code or UPC) while sitting on a beach in Miami and drawing his fingers through the sand.
As supermarkets became more popular, smaller regional supermarket chains decreased while larger, national chains acquired small chains and specialty markets. According to Food & Water Watch, between 1996 and 1999, 385 grocery store mergers took place, equaling almost 100 mergers per year during that period. By 2009, the top four supermarket chains – Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and SuperValu – were responsible for over half of all grocery sales. Walmart’s 2020 grocery sales were $341 billion from 4,756 stores, making them number one in the industry.
👉 Before we close, let’s listen to a grocery store song: Dan Fogleberg and “Same Old Lang Syne.”
👉 And a non-sequitur by Allan Sherman.
🛐 Our close, “Praise to God,” is by Max Lucado.
You are a great God.
Your character is holy
Your truth is absolute.
Your strength is unending.
Your discipline is fair.
You are a great God.
The mountain of your knowledge has no peak.
The ocean of your love has no shore.
The fabric of your fidelity has no tear.
The rock of your word has no crack.
You are a great God.
Your patience surprises us.
Your beauty stuns us.
Your love stirs us.
You are a great God.
Your provisions are abundant for our needs.
Your light is adequate for our path.
Your grace is sufficient for our sins.
You are a great God.
We even declare with reluctant words, your plan is perfect.
You are never early, never late.
Never tardy, never quick.
You sent your Son in the fullness of time and He will return at the consummation of time.
Your plan is perfect.
Bewildering. Puzzling. Troubling.
But perfect.
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