Bruce Brown (born December 1, 1937 in San Francisco, California) is an American documentary film director, known as an early pioneer of the surf film. He is the father of filmmaker Dana Brown.

Brown's films include Slippery When Wet (1958), Surf Crazy (1959), Barefoot Adventure (1960), Surfing Hollow Days (1961), Waterlogged (1962), and his most well known film, The Endless Summer (1964) which received a nationwide theatrical release in 1966. Considered among the most influential in the genre, The Endless Summer follows surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August around the world. Thirty years later Brown would film The Endless Summer II with his son in 1994.

He has also made a number of short films including The Wet Set, featuring the Hobie-MacGregor Sportswear Surf Team and one of the earliest skateboarding films, America's Newest Sport, presenting the Hobie Super Surfer Skateboard Team. These short films along with some unused footage from The Endless Summer were included in the DVD Surfin' Shorts, as part of the Golden Years of Surf collection. Brown has gone beyond surfing a few times with films about motorcycle sport, On Any Sunday (1971) which is held in high regard as one of the best motorcycle documentaries of all time, On Any Sunday II (1981) Baja 1000 Classic (1991), and On Any Sunday, revisited (2000). He made a guest appearance in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode SpongeBob vs. The Big One.

Brown is a 2009 inductee into the Surfers' Hall of Fame in Huntington Beach, California.

---wikipedia

http://encyclopediaofsurfing.com/entries/brown-dana

Charles Nesbitt "Charlie" Wilson (June 1, 1933 – February 10, 2010) was a United States naval officer and former 12-term Democratic United States Representative from Texas's 2nd congressional district.

Wilson is best known for leading Congress into supporting Operation Cyclone, the largest-ever Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert operation which, under the Carter and Reagan administration, supplied military equipment including anti-aircraft weapons such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles and paramilitary officers from their Special Activities Division to the Afghan Mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. His behind-the-scenes campaign was the subject of the non-fiction book Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History by George Crile III and the subsequent film Charlie Wilson's War starring Tom Hanks as Wilson....
photo circa 1995
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson_%28Texas_politician%29

Tahiti Trot, Op. 16, is Dmitri Shostakovich's 1927 orchestration of "Tea for Two" from the musical No, No, Nanette by Vincent Youmans.

Shostakovich wrote it in response to a challenge from conductor Nikolai Malko: after the two listened to the song on record at Malko's house, Malko bet 100 roubles that Shostakovich could not completely re-orchestrate the song from memory in under an hour. Shostakovich took him up and won, completing the orchestration in around 45 minutes.

Tahiti Trot was first performed in Moscow on 25 November 1928, and has been a popular encore ever since. It was used as an entr'acte for the ballet The Golden Age at the suggestion of conductor Aleksandr Gauk.

And, since Joanne King Herring was born in 1929, it all ties together...

MS. DIANE REHM
... Bestselling author Hampton Sides has a new book. It's all about an epic naval expedition in the late 19th century to reach the North Pole. Thirty-three men journey north of the Bering Strait in a wooden ship and become marooned on an ice cap almost a thousand miles north of Siberia.The title of the book is "The Kingdom of Ice." (sic) And author Hampton Sides joins me in the studio...You know, so few people really know about this story. What prompted you to delve?

SIDES

Well, yeah, I'd never heard of it before. And no one I knew had heard of it before. I went to Oslo, Norway to write a story for National Geographic about another explorer who had tried to sort of duplicate the voyage of the Jeannette in a different kind of vessel. This was Fridtjof Nansen. And at the museum there in Oslo, you see references to the Jeannette, the Jeannette and DeLong, this American voyage. And I'm an American, never heard of it before, filed that away, decided to dig a little deeper...Great characters, amazing primary documents, kind of now obscure but then very, very well-known bit of a sensation, kind of internationally known story, so I thought, you know, this is something. I'm going to follow this. And it's been about four years of travel and research and reading, and it's finally out.

You say the world at the time was kind of obsessed with Arctic fever.

Yeah. Yeah. I talk about that in the early part of the book. Just how little was known about what was up there and what a kind of nagging, gnawing obsession that it bothered people...
And the myths that were out there.

Yeah. Right. I mean, there's a lot of crazy ideas or what we would now think are crazy, some of them going back to the Greeks and the Vikings and the early Mercator maps that showed things like an Open Polar Sea and sea serpents and tropical islands up there, Hyperborea -- the Greeks had this place -- ultima Thule, these -- all these concepts kind of swam in our imagination.

But when we discovered how powerful the Gulf stream was and that it moved north from the tropics past Norway, that began to get some of the scientists thinking that what's really happening here is that these thermal currents are tunneling under the ice, creating kind of a gateway to this Open Polar Sea and that the planet has this sort of beautiful and symmetrical way of regulating its own heat.

So this expedition, the Jeannette expedition, was really designed to test this idea of a gateway to the Pole that's made by a thermal current, in this case, a Pacific Ocean current called the Kuroshio (sp?) that was believed to tunnel through the Bering Strait and north into the ice pack.

Well, Gordon Bennett was one of the just outlandish Gilded Age characters. And I really wanted to write about the Gilded Age, a time of really great facial hair, a time of unbelievable sums of money now being made by certain individuals. And he was one of them. He was the third richest man in Manhattan. He was the publisher and owner of the New York Herald, which was the largest newspaper in the world at that time. And he was a lover of spectacle and sports and adventure. He believed that you shouldn't just cover the news.

You should create spectacles that would generate more and more copy. He had sent Stanley to Africa to find Livingston or "find Livingston" -- in quotes -- because Livingston wasn't exactly lost. But he had enjoyed with his newspaper such enormous success with the Stanley Livingston dispatches that he decided it was time to do something even bigger. And so he wanted to bankroll an expedition to the North Pole, pay for it entirely himself in order, yes, to generate more copy for his paper, but in the name of science and also, you know, just because he was a great lover of spectacle and adventure. And he was a believer in some of the ideas of a scientist who believed deeply in this Open Polar Sea theory... the naval lieutenant, George Washington DeLong, who apparently planted the idea in Bennett's head is the hero of the story. He's the captain of the ship. He was a young ambitious naval officer, graduate of the naval academy. He had just missed the Civil War by a few months and was, I think, burning with a desire to kind of make up for lost time and do something especially big and ambitious. He had been to Greenland on an earlier expedition and had fallen in love with the Arctic, and something about the atmosphere and the just grandeur of this wilderness. And he became sort of addicted to this puzzle of what's up there, how does it work, what's at the attic of the planet?

So he knew he was going to go back, and he really began carefully plotting an expedition and reading everything he could get his hands on, kind of imbibing, you know, all the theories of what's up there and made this decision that the way to go was by way of Bering Strait 'cause all the attempts thus far had been through or around Greenland. So now it's like, let's go west, and let's go through the Bering Strait. There was a lot of interest in that part of the world, partly because no one had really been there and also because we had recently purchased Alaska from the Russians.