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TIL in 1955 jazz musician Wardell Gray - who played with Count Basie and Benny Goodman - was scheduled to play the opening night of the Moulin Rouge Hotel in Vegas, the first integrated hotel-casino in the city. Gray never played and his body was found in the desert, with his death still a mystery.

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XE7Gk TIL: Jefferson Davis, U.S. Senator and President of the Confederacy, was caught by Union soldiers about a month after Robert E. Lee's surrender to Grant, wearing women's clothes in as desperate attempt to evade capture.
69o7W TIL: Thomas Midgley, the inventor, played an important role in introducing two environmentally disastrous products - leaded gasoline & chloro flouro carbons. At 51 he contracted polio and 4 yrs later he was strangled to death by the device he devised to allow him to get out of bed unassisted
X0DO8 TIL about an engineer who made a motorcycle out of his wrecked car to escape the desert
5YlNQ TIL of George Koval, who, in WWII, was an American soldier that secretly gave info the USSR about the Manhattan Project. In 1999, although living in Russia and having been outed as a spy for nearly a half-century, he applied for an American Veteran's Social Security Cheque. He was denied.
neN0r TIL that until a hard fought vote that only passed 83-80 in 1985, condoms could not be sold in Ireland w/o a prescription because of the Catholic Church's influence.