Tidbits of Grand Forks - February 2, 2023

By Kathy Wolfe

“Someday my Prince will come” is a common phrase voiced by many, but especially by the Disney princesses! Tidbits invites you to join us for the facts about these enchanting Disney creations.

• There are 12 “official” Disney princesses, ranging in date from 1937 to 2016. The first princess was, of course, Snow White, in the classic film released more than 85 years ago. Walt Disney hired 750 artists to draw nearly 2 million sketches for the movie, a project that took three years to complete. The initial estimated budget was $250,000, but as production progressed, it swelled to $1.5 million, requiring Disney to take out a mortgage on his home. While 25 songs were composed for the movie, only seven were actually used.

• Eighteen-year-old Adriana Caselotti was chosen over 150 other hopefuls to voice Snow White, receiving $20 a day for her efforts, a total of $970 for the role, about $18,300 in today’s dollars. The studio required Caselotti to sign a contract forbidding her from taking any other voice work, because Walt Disney wanted to “own” the voice of Snow White, not wanting to “spoil the illusion of Snow White.” This, along with her name not being listed in the credits, wiped out any hopes of a career in films for the young woman.

DISNEY PRINCESSES (continued):

• Adriana Caselotti pursued opera for a time, then settled into real estate sales. In her later years, she autographed letters and photographs to supplement her income.

• Thirteen years passed before another princess film hit the theaters. “Cinderella” was released in 1950, with upwards of 300 young women auditioning for the voice. The role was awarded to Ilene Woods, whose songwriter friends had called her to record three of the film’s songs. They presented the demo recordings to Walt Disney, who called Woods two days later with the offer of “Cinderella.” Walt’s all-time favorite animation scene of all of his movies was when Cinderella’s dress transformed from her shabby garments to the beautiful blue ball gown.

Quiz Bits

What was the name of Snow White’s prince? What Disney princess fell in love with Prince Eric?

What celebrity provided the voice of Tiana’s mother in The Princess and the Frog? Name the talking dragon in Disney’s 1998 movie Mulan. What was the name of the prince in Beauty and the Beast?

Where is Mount Fuji located? Which color has the longest wavelength?

Which decade did the United States outlaw child labor?

Who played the leading role in the legal series Ally McBeal?

Which animal represents the 2023 Chinese zodiac year?

What year did The Who release the song “Won’t Get Fooled Again”?

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• Cinderella lost her shoe not once, not twice, but three times in the 1950 film. The first is when she delivers breakfast trays to her stepmother and stepsisters, the second is as she runs away from the ball, and the third is as she walks down the steps at her wedding to the prince. Her actual shoe size is 4 ½, which explains why the other maidens in the kingdom had so much trouble squeezing into it!

• It shouldn’t be surprising that the Princess known for her sleeping is the most silent of them all. Aurora from 1959’s “Sleeping Beauty” has just 18 lines of dialogue and 18 minutes of screen time in the entire movie. Even when she is awakened by the Prince’s kiss, she doesn’t speak! The story is based on the Brothers Grimm story called “Briar Rose,” a name used by Aurora while she lived with her three fairy godmothers. She was the last princess created before Walt Disney’s death in 1966. The film was the only princess film that was a commercial failure at its debut. With a budget of $6 million, “Sleeping Beauty” earned just $5.3 million at its debut.

SPORTS QUIZ

What award is presented to the NHL player who leads the league in points at the end of the regular season?

What stadium was home to the New York Jets from 1964-83?

Offensive tackle Bubba Paris won three Super Bowls as a member of what team from 1983-90?

What year did the Eagles last win the Super Bowl?

What Ohio State Buckeyes linebacker was selected in the second round of the 1986 NFL Draft by the New York Giants? (Hint: He’s not salt.) Who was named American League Manager of the Year in 2013, ‘16 & ‘22? Name the Basketball Hall of Famer who was selected No. 1 overall by the Houston Comets in the inaugural WNBA Draft in 1997?

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DISNEY PRINCESSES (continued):

• After a 30-year drought of princesses, “The Little Mermaid” premiered in 1989, introducing the red-haired Ariel. The film’s animation was a monumental task, and due to a shortage of manpower at Disney, the company hired a Chinese animation studio to draw over a million bubbles by hand. And so marked the end of an era in which Disney films were created in the traditional method of hand-painting frames. After “The Little Mermaid,” digital animation became the practice. Of all the Disney characters, Ariel was the one who has sung more songs than any other. She was voiced by actress Jodi Benson, who also voiced the film’s character Vanessa, who was Ursula the Sea Witch in disguise. The film collected $84 million for its debut, and another $27 million at its theater re-release eight years later. Its lifetime gross worldwide is $235 million on a budget of $40 million. Two Oscars were awarded for the film’s musical score and best song.

• Disney’s 1991 story of “Beauty and the Beast” was loosely based on a French fairy tale, “La Belle et la Bete.” Screenwriter for the film, Linda Woolverton, says that her interpretation of Belle was inspired by Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Jo March in the 1933 film “Little Women.” The idea for Belle’s yellow ball gown was borrowed from Audrey Hepburn’s gown in the 1953 movie “Roman Holiday.” Careful viewers will notice that Belle is the only person in her village to wear the color blue, symbolic of her being an outsider among the townspeople. When production of the animated feature ran behind schedule, the studio re-used the animation from the dance between Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip in “Sleeping Beauty” for Belle’s dance with Prince Adam.

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DISNEY PRINCESSES (continued):

• Disney Studios released “Pocahontas” on June 23, 1995, the 400th birthday of the real Pocahontas. She was the first Disney princess to be based on an actual historical character. The name Pocahontas is believed to be a nickname for Chief Powhatan’s daughter, meaning “playful one.” The young woman’s given name was Amonute, but she used the name Matoaka. Historians claim that her tribe concealed her name from the English out of “superstitious fear,” concerned that the colonists could do her harm if they had knowledge of her real name. In the Disney interpretation, Pocahontas was the first of the studio’s princesses to have a human best friend.

• The year 2009 brought “The Princess and the Frog” to the big screen with Princess Tiana, the only Disney princess to work an actual job. Although other princesses performed plenty of chores, none were paid for their employment, as was Tiana, who worked as a waitress in 1920s New Orleans while saving to open her own restaurant. The plot deviates from the usual frog becoming a prince. Tiana herself turned into a frog after kissing a frog prince, and embarked on a plan to turn back into a human. Her name comes from the Greek word meaning “princess,” which she becomes when she marries Prince Naveen of Maldonia. This was the first Disney princess movie to employ digital

My new password had to be 8 characters. So I used Snow White and the 7 dwarfs.

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by Freddy Groves

Scammers Nabbed in False Claims Cases

It's not the brightest of individuals who try to con the Department of Veterans Affairs out of goods, services and money. They eventually get caught.

A Pennsylvania company has been fined $44 million for allegations about services they didn't provide. In this false claims case, the service they allegedly provided was cardiac monitoring. Instead of doing what they'd been contracted to do, when they got "busy," they farmed out the services to India. The diagnostic testing and monitoring, as well as other services, were done by personnel in India who weren't qualified. Patients getting health care via the VA, TRICARE, Medicare and the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and likely their physicians, had no idea.

To their credit, it was some former company employees who blew the whistle and brought the whole thing to light. (They'll be getting $8.3 million as a reward.) The company, meanwhile, was fined and denied access to any further government business, right? Wrong. Per the press release, the company was put under a fiveyear agreement to do assessment and internal review to pinpoint compliance risk.

In another false claims case, a New York man is going to prison for 20 years for crimes involving investment fraud and the sale of nonexistent N95 masks. Over the years, in a long-term Ponzi scheme, he continued to solicit money, using new money to fund new acquisitions and a fancy lifestyle.

Enter the pandemic and the need for masks and personal protective gear in hospitals and clinics. Pretending to have a direct pipeline to U.S. factories that could provide those items, he conned $7.4 million out of medical supply companies that believed they were buying the hard-to-get gear. It didn't help that the criminal attempted to con the VA out of $3 million in upfront money for 125 million masks, in what would have been a $750 million deal. Besides the 20 years in prison, he'll also be paying back $106 million in money he stole from investors.

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by Lucie Winbourne

• During World War II, the Lay-Z-Boy company had to stop producing recliners because of the war effort. Instead, they used their production facility to mass produce (we hope much more comfortable) seats for tanks and other military vehicles.

• Champagne was originally a holy wine.

• The only people guaranteed to get Super Bowl rings, regardless of a game's outcome, are the referees, though their rings aren't nearly as large or valuable as that of the players.

• In the 1880s, a railroad signalman named James Edwin Wide taught a South African baboon to perform his job by recognizing the whistles that indicated a train was about to change tracks. Dubbed "Signalman Jack," the animal performed his duties so well that not only was he formally hired at a salary of 20 cents per day and half a bottle of beer per week, he carried on for nine years until his death from tuberculosis in 1890.

• Trees were not around for 90% of Earth's history.

• Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury's overbite resulted from four extra teeth in his upper jaw. He refused to have them removed, however, for fear the surgery would affect his voice and vocal range.

• In the 2015 film "Jurassic World," Chris Pratt's character carries a stainless Marlin 1895 the only firearm on Marlin's website that's rated for a T-Rex.

• Two churches in Vrontados, Greece, have a particularly unconventional way of marking the Easter holiday: They fire rockets at each other! While they used to use cannons, those were outlawed. The tradition has been carried out for at least four centuries. ***

Thought for the Day: "The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too." --

Vincent Van Gogh

KING GILLETTE

Gillette has been a household word for more than 125 years, but how much do you know about the ingenious inventor who started the company? Follow along as Tidbits brings readers an account of this corporation’s founder.

• King Camp Gillette came by his creative temperament naturally, with a father who was a patent agent and seasoned mechanical tinkerer. After years of experimenting and devising her own recipes, Gillette’s mother wrote a cookbook in 1887 that remained in print for 100 years.

• When Gillette was 16, his family’s possessions were lost in Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, and the young man was compelled to go to work. He took a job as a traveling salesman, selling hardware items, all the while continuing to experiment with inventions. By 1890, he had been awarded four patents.

• During the 1890s, Gillette was working for the Crown Cork and Seal Company, and noted that the cork seals for bottle caps he was peddling for them were discarded once the bottle was opened. When the company president learned of Gillette’s patents, he advised him to invent “something that would be used and thrown away,” ensuring a continual use by consumers.

• After years of being on the road, Gillette was well familiar with shaving with a heavy, wedge-shaped blade fitted perpendicularly onto a handle. The blade dulled quickly and had to be sharpened every day on a leather strop, eventually becoming too worn to sharpen. In 1895, Gillette took his employer’s advice, conceiving the idea of a thin, inexpensive blade that could be thrown away and easily replaced when it grew dull.

• Gillette’s idea was to put a sharp edge on a small sheet of steel, then place a thin, double-edged steel blade between two plates held together by a “T” handle. He was quickly informed by metallurgists that it would be impossible to manufacture such a blade, since thin, cheap steel was very difficult to sharpen. It took Gillette six years to find an MIT-educated engineer capable of transforming his vision into the mass-production of the blades from sheet metal.

• Gillette Safety Razor Company was founded in 1901, but production didn’t begin until 1903. First year sales were 51 razors and 168 blades, increasing the following year to 90,000 razors and 12.4 million blades. Although the company earned a huge profit that year, Gillette actually sold the razors at a loss, making the profits on the blades. The razor handle was a one-time purchase with a spendy price tag of $5, about half a week’s pay for the average worker. The blades were sold in multiple packages.

• By 1908, there were factories in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, France, and Germany. King Gillette’s face was a familiar one, featured on the packaging, making him recognizable internationally.

• Blade sales in 1915 were 70 million units. In 1917, in the midst of World War I, Gillette issued all American soldiers a field razor set, financed by the U.S. Government.

• The stock market crash of 1929 left King Gillette nearly bankrupt and the value of his corporate shares plummeted. He had also spent much of his fortune on property, and was embroiled in patent battles.

• The company survived the financial crisis and continued to thrive after Gillette’s death in 1932. They added Foamy shaving cream to their line-up in 1953 and Right Guard deodorant in 1960. King Gillette would have been gratified to know his company was sold to Procter & Gamble in 2005 for $57 billion.

Matilda Charles

Covid ... It's Still Here

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Covid cases has steadily risen since December. Earlier in the fall, Covid took a short break while the flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) made it to center stage. Those illnesses are now waning a bit, and here comes Covid again.

It doesn't help that we have a new variant -- an offshoot of Omicron, the XBB.1.5 taking off around the country. By Christmas nearly half the cases of Covid were that new variant, so it's growing.

Seniors, as usual, are being hit hard with those in the age 70+ range being the largest group affected, followed by ages 60-69.

If you're hesitant to go back to being extremely careful, we're experiencing what some doctors are calling the Senior Wave. It means the numbers on a graph show that the largest group affected with hospitalizations are seniors.

Which means it's still not time to let down our guard. If anything, it means renewing our efforts to stay safe. Frequent handwashing, wearing a mask in the store, even if you're the only one who is, staying out of large groups we know how to do this.

And like it or not, we should. The growing number of seniors being hospitalized or dying due to Covid should shake up all of us.

Another, and possibly even more accurate, statistic for the spread of Covid is the wastewater. This is where municipalities test the sewage for Covid. People can hide their exposure and illness by using the at-home tests we all received in the mail, thereby skewing the "official" numbers, but the sewage in an area is sure to be more accurate.

To see the wastewater data by county, go online to CDC. gov and search for "National Wastewater Surveillance System" (NWSS).

Gordon Smith, Owner Petersburg, ND

• On Feb. 10, 1535, notwithstanding the winter chill and in a form of protest that was, unsurprisingly, ridiculed by both Protestants and Catholics, a small group of Anabaptists ran stark naked through the streets of Amsterdam, shouting that they "had been sent from God to communicate the naked truth to the godless."

• On Feb. 9, 1861, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens were respectively elected to six-year terms as the Provisional President and Provisional Vice President of the Confederate States of America, after running without opposition.

• On Feb. 11, 1916, American feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested and imprisoned for violating the Comstock Act just before she was scheduled to deliver a public lecture on birth control, which she argued was essential to women's social, economic and sexual freedom.

• On Feb. 6, 1952, England's King George VI passed away, making his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth II. The sovereign received the news from her husband, Prince Philip, while on a trip to Kenya, which was immediately cut short as she prepared to assume her new role.

• On Feb. 7, 1964, the music world would never be quite the same after the Beatles arrived in New York for their first visit to the U.S., where thousands of near-hysterical fans waited to greet them at Kennedy Airport. During their appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," they whipped up an even greater frenzy, with 73 million viewers watching on their TVs at home.

• On Feb. 8, 2008, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the electric chair, which was the only execution method used in that state, represented a violation of human dignity and was consequently unconstitutional, adding that electrocution "has proven itself to be a dinosaur more befitting the laboratory of Baron Frankenstein than the death chamber."

• The 12 Disney Princesses are divided into three eras. The Golden Era includes the first three, Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, the gentle, kind-hearted princesses. Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, and Mulan belong to the second era, the Renaissance Era, those intelligent, independent, and self-reliant ones searching for adventure. The Modern Era princesses are Tiana, Rapunzel, Moana, and Merida, those who work hard to achieve their dreams.

• Although “The Princess and the Frog” used digital effects, 2010’s “Tangled” was the first completely computer-animated princess movie. Based on the Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel, who was locked in a tower in the middle of the woods by a sorceress, the movie was six years in production, and carried a price tag of $260 million, the most expensive animated film in history. More than 30 animators and engineers worked to animate the 100,000 strands of Rapunzel’s 70-foot long hair. This was the first princess film to receive a PG rating.

• Princess Merida of DunBroch was introduced in the 2012 film “Brave,” the first Disney princess created by Pixar. Merida was also the first princess to be uninterested in going to balls and finding her prince. In fact, the 16-year-old princess with the fiery red hair spent her time fighting against a betrothal to a prince she had no desire to marry. Pixar generated 111,700 hairs for Merida’s curly hairdo.

• Eight of the princesses are of royal birth. Pocahontas was the daughter of a Native chieftain, thus qualifying her as native royalty. Moana became the second daughter of a chief princess in that 2016 film, set on the Polynesian island of Motunui.

Quiz Answers

• There are certain qualifications that must be met in order to be classified as a Disney Princess. She must be royal, marry into royalty, or perform an act of heroism. Mulan (1998) was not born into royalty and did not marry into it. Based on a legendary sixth-century Chinese female warrior, Hua Mulan, it’s the story of a daughter who disguised herself as a man to fight in a war in place of her father. An ancient Chinese ballad tells the story of her 12 years of brave and daring service in the Chinese army. More than 700 animators worked for five years to create the Disney classic.

• In the wardrobe department, Jasmine and Mulan are the only princesses who wear pants. Pocahontas is the only one with no costume changes. Tiana has 11 costume changes. Princess Merida in 2012’s “Brave” had 22 different costumes and five different hairstyles.

• In addition to the official Princesses, there are more than 40 “unofficial” ones, known as Disney Heroines. These include Elsa and Anna from 2013’s “Frozen,” Alice from 1951’s “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” character Esmeralda, and “Peter Pan” fairy Tinkerbell.

• Live-action remakes of the animated films began in 2015 with “Cinderella,” followed by “Beauty and the Beast” in 2017, and “Mulan” in 2020. Still to come are the planned liveaction versions of “Little Mermaid,” “Snow White,” and “Aladdin.”

NUGGET OF KNOWLEDGE

Although several animated characters have received stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, including Bugs Bunny, Snoopy, Kermit the Frog, and Woody Woodpecker, Snow White is the only Disney princess who has been honored as such, an occurrence that took place in 1987.

Sports Answers

1. Mustache is missing. 2. Buttons are missing.

3. Towel is missing. 4. Carrot is missing.

5. Club is different. 6. Pail is missing.