In the mid-1980s, Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas was the voice of Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally.
Wilford Brimley was once Howard Hughes’ bodyguard.
Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) was planning to quit Star Trek. Martin Luther King Jr convinced her to stay. As a fan of the show, he told her “First the first time, we are seen as we should be seen. You don’t have a black role; you have an equal role.”
The actor who played French Corporal Louis LeBeau in “Hogan’s Heroes” was Jewish. He was interned at a concentration camp in Poland and later sent to Buchenwald. He was not anxious about being in the show because it was about a POW camp, which was “a world of difference” from a concentration camp.
Frederick Baur invented the Pringles can. When he passed away in 2008, his ashes were buried in one.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer was a trained sniper. As a youth in Palestine, for her obligatory civil service, she chose the forerunner to the Israeli Defense Forces and was able to “hit the target in the center further away than anyone could believe”. She fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and learned to throw grenades but says, fortunately, she never had to use any of those skills.
Harriet Tubman was a former slave who became a political activist for the abolition movement. But in addition to smuggling escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, during the Civil War she was the first woman to lead an armed assault. She planned and executed a number of raids and was known to carry a revolver for personal protection.
Walt Disney was actually terrified of mice. It’s commonly believed he created Mickey Mouse to confront this fear.
Texting before his time… Thomas Edison taught his second wife Morse code so they could communicate with each other when among family members by tapping on each other’s arms.