Mormon Life - Famous Mormons tag

‘Jeopardy!’ champ Ken Jennings speaks to Utah teachers at UEA

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:47:00 -0600

source: sltrib.com

Opossums have 13 nipples. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day. Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon. These facts may seem like little more than trivia at first glance. But to "Jeopardy!" champ and former Utahn Ken Jennings they’re bits of information that can help people connect to others and ignite an interest in learning more about the world.

"Information may not be the same as knowledge, and it may not be the same as wisdom, but it is the building block," Jennings told hundreds of teachers gathered for the first day of the Utah Education Association Convention and Education Exposition Thursday. Jennings, who famously won 74 games of "Jeopardy!" to win $2.5 million in 2004, kicked off the annual two-day convention with a humor-filled take on the importance of trivia and knowledge.

Butch Cassidy, Wayward Mormon, Surfaces Again

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:43:00 -0600

source: keepapitchinin.org

Mormon Life says: Interesting information behind recent discovery, as well as Butch's family. The outlaw Butch Cassidy was born as Robert LeRoy Parker on 13 April 1866 in Beaver, Utah, son of Maximilian Parker (a 12-year-old handcart pioneer of 1856) and Ann Gillies Parker (a 9-year-old traveler with the Hodgetts Company, the wagon company that followed after the Martin Handcart Company and shared their disastrous experiences in the Wyoming blizzards). While Robert Parker was still a small child, the family moved across the mountain range to the smaller, newer town of Circleville in Piute County. All the evidence (and I’m something of a Piute County history fanatic), the Parkers were an industrious, well respected, compassionate family. I find Max Parker, for example, riding almost 50 miles on horseback to the nearest telegraph station to send word to distant family members that Max’s neighbor – a passenger with Sam Brannan on the 1846 Brooklyn voyage to San Francisco – had died in a cabin fire in 1897. The next year, Max drove a wagon all the way to Salt Lake City to take a neighbor with appendicitis to the hospital. Max’s obituary reflects his neighbors’ opinion of his service: “He was a quiet, unassuming man and was often called the silent giver.”

Butch, on the other hand … well, everybody knows something about the outlaw Butch.

Butch Cassidy imposter exposed

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:11:00 -0600

source: deseretnews.com

Mormon Life says: Recent news about Butch Cassidy, that infamous Mormon . . . Larry Pointer has been chasing the trail of the outlaw Butch Cassidy for 40 years. He thought for sure he had him pinned down — that Cassidy had cheated death in a gun battle in South America, changed his name to William T. Phillips and lived out his life in Spokane, Wash. But Cassidy gave Pointer the slip.

It turns out Phillips in Spokane wasn't Cassidy after all.

It began in the 1970s when Pointer discovered a 96-page manuscript by Phillips titled, "The Bandit Invincible: the Story of Butch Cassidy." On its surface it was a fictionalized biography of Cassidy, but Pointer noticed Phillips wrote about obscure and unusual details that it seemed only Cassidy himself would know.