Ray Stevens is a country music, pop singer-songwriter known for his novelty songs as well as his recent involvement in the Tea Party movement. Stevens’ recording career began in the mid 1950s with Prep Records. In 1958 Ray joined the National Recording Corporation (NRC), playing numerous instruments, arranging music, and performing background vocals for the labels bands. Stevens later signed with Mercury Records
recording  a series of hit records in the 1960s that included songs such as Ahab the Arab and Harry the Hairy Ape.

Ernest Borgnine is an  actor of both television and film. His career has spanned more than six decades. He was an unconventional lead in many films of the 1950s, including his Academy Award-winning role in the 1955 film Marty. On television, he is best known for playing Quinton McHale in the 1962-66 ABC series McHales Navy, costarring in the mid-1980s action series Air wolf, and voicing the character Mermaid Man in the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants. Borgnine earned an Emmy nomination at age 92 for his work on the series ER on NBC from 1994 to 2009. In August 2009 he earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

                    
       
                  Borgnine in a scene from The Flight of the Phoenix, 1965.

       
                                         Ernest Borgnine in Air wolf

The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began when gold was discovered by James W. Marshall (above) at Sutter’s Mill, in northern California at Coloma. News of the discovery 
brought some 300,000 people to California from vast parts of the United States and abroad.Some became quite wealthy, but many returned home with little more than what
they started with. The effects of the Gold Rush resulted in San Francisco growing from a small settlement to a boomtown. A state constitution was written and California became  
a state in 1850 as part of the compromise of 1850.