History

They made viewers laugh, stay up late, sing along and play games. How personalities such as Lucille Ball, Jack Paar and Merv Griffin influenced the small screen is explored in "Pioneers of Television," a new PBS miniseries that starts Wednesday. The four programs -- covering sitcoms, late-night shows, variety shows and game shows -- include hundreds of clips and the observations of small-screen pioneers and people who knew them.

He had wandered the world, selling butter in czarist Siberia, fighting in France during World War I, walking the Appalachian Trail with his dog -- and strolling down Colorado Boulevard, unofficially bringing up the rear of the Rose Parade one year. But when he got to Laguna Beach, Eiler Larsen was so captivated by it that he stayed and welcomed the rest of the world there. Laguna Beach returned the salute, naming him its official greeter.

The spread of syphilis across the globe was probably sparked by Christopher Columbus and his crew, who ferried the bacterium, or a version of it, from the New World to the Old World, according to a new genetic analysis published Monday. A comparison of 23 strains of Treponema pallidum bacterium found that the modern variety that causes the sexually transmitted disease was most closely related to bacteria collected from a remote tribe in Guyana.

In many churches this weekend, religious leaders will extol the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in anticipation of Monday's federal holiday in his honor. Some will quote from his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Others will invoke a letter he wrote while in an Alabama jail four months earlier.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to locate a rare, vintage copy of the nation's founding document, try looking behind the filing cabinet. That was a lesson learned the hard way at the Supreme Court, where a 185-year-old facsimile of the Declaration of Independence gathered dust for seven years, tucked behind the office furniture, a court spokeswoman acknowledged this week.

One of the most feared men in 19th century Los Angeles wore a badge. Both his temper and his trigger finger were notoriously quick, and, after a business partner he had defrauded shot him to death, hundreds attended his funeral but few mourned him. Joseph Franklin Dye was a lawman, oilman and rancher who dispensed his own form of justice in 1870 by killing his boss, City Marshal William Warren.

Before the University of Houston's first appearance in an NCAA Final Four in 1967, its players were sitting in a hotel ballroom in Louisville, Ky., when they found themselves in the middle of a chaotic scene. Camera lights flashed, reporters shouted questions and fans begged for autographs as college basketball's greatest player, Lew Alcindor, hidden behind dark glasses, and the rest of the UCLA team entered the room like so many rock stars. "Do they have to pay these guys?"

Their name evokes an image that has become shorthand for head-shaking, awe-inspiring dominance, dropped into press box and sports bar conversations 80 years after they pummeled their last opponent: "And then, out of nowhere last September, the Rockies morphed into the '27 Yankees." Their nickname carries the same kind of currency: "Sure, Grady Little had his faults, but that lineup he had wasn't exactly Murderers' Row."

Our image of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, although a good one, is outdated. We still have him frozen in mid-skyhook, his No. 33 as memorable as the grace of his shooting motion. The current image should be of a still-shy man, now 60 years old, hunched over a computer keyboard, pulling words from a mind that has long played second fiddle to a 7-foot-2 body and a pro basketball career that will never be replicated. The leading scorer in the history of the National Basketball Assn.

So influential was Jackie Robinson that a single phone call from him to Tommy Davis changed the course of Davis' life. Davis, who won batting titles with the Dodgers in 1962 and '63, was among the guest speakers Thursday at the club's first Jackie Robinson Legacy Day, which fell on what would've been the late Robinson's 89th birthday and the eve of Black History Month. Davis shared his stories about Robinson at Dodger Stadium with more than 200 local elementary and middle school students.