Flashback Friday: Billy Ray on Armageddon, Gatorade and an explosion

Oct. 26--25 Years

(Oct. 26-27, 1993)

With the NFL announcing Charlotte would get the next expansion franchise, News columnist Mike Morrison said Jacksonville partisans should pack it in.

"Jacksonville has spent considerable time, effort and money in chasing its elusive dream of becoming an NFL city," Morrison wrote. "But the moment has arrived to say enough is enough.

"No more ticket drives. No more lavish displays of community support. No more hopes. No more dreams. No more delusions.

"The NFL owners must make their decision and Jacksonville must live with it and if the city fails to get a franchise, so what? Life goes on without the NFL.

"Who needs that bunch of grandstanding, money-grubbing, attention-seeking yahoos, anyway?"

And to think, if Morrison was right, we wouldn't have had the comedic joy of watching NBC's "The Good Place" make perpetually problematic Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles into a pop culture phenomenon.

Meanwhile, country music's Billy Ray Cyrus related in an interview that before he made it big, he would video record segments from CNN in a sort of hobby to document the end of the world as we know it.

"Every time I saw a story that documented different things from the Book of Revelations in the Bible -- wars, earthquakes, the depletion of the ozone layer, world hunger -- I would capture it on tape," the Associated Press reported Cyrus told TV Guide.

But in the following years, the he became self-conscious about the practice and stopped doing it. He also didn't know what became of the tapes.

"I'm afraid it got lost in the shuffle when I got divorced," Cyrus said.

50 Years

(Oct. 26, 1968)

The day the Florida Gators were set to play at Vanderbilt, The News ran an AP account that noted the Commodores weren't Florida's only foe.

"The University of Florida professor who invented Gatorade says his group expects to realize possibly $2.5 million from sales of the beverage," the AP reported. "But the U.S. government claims it owns the rights and will take legal steps to gain control. The university itself, where the work was done under a federal grant, waived its rights, thinking Gatorade was not commercial.

"Now it is rethinking the matter with hopes of grabbing some of the profits. Neither the federal government nor Florida taxpayers, joint supporters of the research, have received one dollar from the sale. In fact, the university football team -- which acted as a guinea pig while the drink was being tested -- now buys its stock of Gatorade from the Stokely-Van Camp Corp., which bought the rights."

After an AP investigation revealed UF failed to adhere to a state policy to protect the public interest in research rights, a university investigation ensued. A federal official said Washington decided to retain its rights to the drink in June 1967, seven months after the invention was reported to it.

75 Years

(Oct. 21, 1943)

What was called a "violent explosion" ripped through the fabrication shop of the J.A. Jones Construction Company at the Brunswick shipyard.

The News reported, "In all, 14 persons were injured in the blast, and while early reports after the explosion were to the effect that three or four had been possibly fatally injured, it was reported today that only two of the injured were considered seriously burned, and they will recover.

"Those two are H.G. Crow, 45, 2778 Gordon Oaks, and O.B. Simmons, 3189 Dartmoor Homes. They were treated at the yard clinic and were later transferred to the city hospital, and reports today indicated they were doing well.

"The others, both women and men, who sustained injuries were burned, some sustained cuts and bruises and others suffered shock. All of them, however, were reported today to be recovering. Quick action on the part of the shipyard clinic personnel was of great aid to the injured."

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