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The statue of John Alexander Logan, installed July 22, 1897, is located in Grant (Ulysses) Park in Chicago, Illinois. The bronze figure of the general was created by the artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens, while the horse he rides was sculpted by Alexander Phimister Proctor. On the day the statue was instated, there was a two-hour dedication ceremony, gun salute, and a parade of ten thousand marchers. In the evening, the widowed Mrs. Logan was welcomed with a fireworks display followed by a band concert. Mrs. Logan planned to move her husband’s body to the tomb where the monumental sculpture is located, but the move never happened. The tomb stands empty to this day.

John Alexander Logan was a war hero and political figure who lived from 1826 to 1886. He, as the leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization for Union Army veterans, was key in establishing Memorial Day as a federal holiday. Logan started his military service in the Mexican-American war before studying law and serving a number of terms as an Illinois State Representative for the Democratic party. He served as a United States Congressman, and then joined the Civil War as rank colonel. He reached the rank of general during his service. After the Civil War, Logan changed his party affiliation and became a Republican representative in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. Logan “became well known for supporting the rights of former slaves and of women.” In 1884, he was nominated for Vice President on John Blaine’s presidential ticket, but was not elected. A number of streets and towns were named in his honor after the Civil War, and the Logan Museum was established in his hometown in Illinois.

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Harry B. Hershey was born in Mifflin, Ohio, and lived from 1885 to 1967. During his lifetime, he was an attorney, mayor, and Illinois Supreme Court Justice. In 1909, he earned his Applied Baccalaureate Degree, A.B. Degree, from the University of Illinois. Three years later, he graduated from the University of Chicago with his J.D. Degree. 

After passing his bar exam, the city of Taylorville elected him as the city attorney, followed by him serving two terms as Christian County’s state attorney. A couple of years later, he was elected the Taylorville Mayor. Taylorville is a small city in central Illinois with a little over 10,000 residents. Taylorville is the seat of Christian County, and is the only city in the county.

Hershey was well-known at the time while running for Governor of Illinois in 1940 as the Democratic candidate. He lost to Dwight H. Green, the Republican candidate. Hershey held several other state government positions in the following years before being appointed to the Illinois Supreme Court in 1951 as a justice. He served for sixteen years on the Illinois Supreme Court and served one term as the chief justice.

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Scotland's national flower is the thistle, a prickly weed with very long thorns and a light purple flower. Thistle was used as a royal symbol for the first time in the year 1470, when King James the Third issued silver coins imprinted with the plant's image. The Scottish royalty established The Order of the Thistle in the late 17th century, which is still the highest honor British royalty can bestow onto Scots. The plant also served as inspiration for the famous Scottish poem written by Hugh MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. 

Planning a trip to Scotland soon? Be on the lookout for this prickly wild flower growing everywhere!

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Iomega was a data storage company established in 1980. It is now known as LenovoEMC after a takeover in 2008 by EMC, the largest data-storage provider in the world. Iomega had over one thousand employees and was first located in the state of Utah. The company was present at a number of trade show events during the early 2000s, before the 2008 takeover.

Some of Iomega’s well-known products included REV Drives, Zip Drives, HDD Desktop Hard Drive, Iomega Automatic Backup software, Iomega NAS servers, and Iomega iStorage. iStorage allowed customers to access online storage with an unlimited capacity at any time, any place. The company also provided complete data recovery services for both customers and businesses who lost data because of “hardware failure, file corruption or media damage.” Iomega provided services to four different regions: North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and Africa, and Asia Pacific. 

LenovoEMC and Iomega NAS products were discontinued by Lenovo in 2018. In 2020, a hacker group started wiping Lenovo NAS devices and holding the contents for ransom. NAS/LenovoEMC devices have been targeted with malware and ransomware a number of other times in recent years.

White background with thin small black text curling at the top of the button. Below the small text is large bold black text. The bottom half of the button has an illustration of two cartoon boys. The one on the left has black hair and has his hand cupped over his mouth. He is speaking to the second boy on the right who has red hair and freckles. 

Universal Button Company, established in 1962, was a manufacturer of fabricated metal products, including badges and emblems. Located in Bethnal Green in London’s East End, they were responsible for producing some of the most iconic badges of the late 1970s. In honor of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, political activist Sherri Yanowitz created a badge to mark the occasion. The “Stuff the Jubilee” button was an anti-monarchy protest on the cost of the event as the county’s unemployment rose and public funding was cut. Sherri Yanowitz recalls,  “I ordered 4000 badges from the Universal Button Company in, they sort of laughed at me. The same company had the order for hundreds of thousands of pro-monarchy items. In the end, we sold over 40,000 in less than three months.” In 1977, the company received an order to produce The Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen” badges but refused due to their loyalty to the Queen.

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In April of 1971, McDonald’s Restaurants sponsored a Barnum Festival Booster to raise money. The Ringmaster of the circus at the time was Charles L. Batchelder. There was a Booster Button Committee, and the button sales revenue supported festival events. The booster was advertised in the local newspaper with a photo of McDonald Representative R.C. Taylor pinning one of the buttons to the Ringmaster’s lapel. 

The Barnum Festival in 1971 took place in Bridgeport, Connecticut at Seaside Park. The Festival had vendor stalls, small game stalls, and rides for festival attendees to enjoy. There was a ferris wheel, a pendulum boat ride, a paratrooper ride, and more. Attendees could win cute stuffed animal prizes at the game stalls. There was also a parade down the streets of town with many musical bands, the ringmaster, and many more performers. There was a mummers band in plumed red and white costumes, and cyclists on bicycles. There were elaborate parade floats and horse drawn carts. Clowns ran past with a red fire engine. Many citizens young and old lined the streets to watch the parade go by.

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This slogan likely dates to the sit-down strike by the United Automobile Workers of America (or UAW) in 1936-37, also called the General Motors Strike. Workers organized in 1935 to form the UAW after the Wagner Act in 1933 gave federal recognition of worker’s rights to organize and bargain. Fisher Body Plant workers went on strike to protest poor working conditions and a lack of job security at the plant in Atlanta, Georgia in November 1936, and workers at the plant in Kansas City followed suit in December of the same year. Both strikes began as “sit-down” strikes, which differed from many strikes in that the workers occupied their normal posts within the plant, so that General Motors could not replace them with new hires, and police would have a harder time forcibly removing them from the space without causing property damage. Later in December 1936, workers at the plants in Cleveland, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan began to strike. The sheer number of participants in the strikes, 140,000 employees, along with the production line issues caused by the lack of labor, resulted in a lack of work for other plants, and many of those in turn joined the strikes. In February 1937, GM formally recognized the union, which caused Chrysler and Ford to do the same, permanently changing the labor landscape in this industry.

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The idea of kissing a frog comes from a traditional fairy tale, The Frog Prince, most notably retold by the Brothers Grimm. They published their version in the early 19th century, however scholars have found versions of the story dating back to the 13th century. The fairy tale is about a spoiled princess who meets a Frog Prince. She falls into a pond, dropping a golden ball, and he retrieves it; for a price, he seeks her friendship. When she agrees and he returns the ball, it's discovered he is under a witch's curse and is magically transformed into a handsome prince. Over the years, the story has been modified with the most common version requiring a kiss from the princess to change the Frog Prince. The image here shows a shorthand reference to the story; the frog is looking for a kiss.

In the mid-1970s, the saying "you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet a prince" gained popularity. A variation was first found in needlepoint patterns, then newspaper articles aimed at single women looking for love.  In 1977, a copyright was created for a pen and ink drawing of an amphibian wearing a crown with text reading, "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet a prince."