I just realized today is Johnny Carson’s birthday so I figured it would be a good time to post a couple of photos from his boyhood home, Norfolk, NE, which I visited briefly earlier this summer.

Watching his opening monologue every night was one of those comfortable traditions that I never got away from when I lived in the Midwest, but once I settled in the Eastern Time Zone I usually found myself in bed by the time it came on.

It’s difficult to come up with something one doesn’t already know about him, but I found a couple items:

1. The game “Twister” skyrocketed in popularity after he played an on-air game with actress Eva Gabor in 1966.
2. After Carson joked on the show in December 1973 about an alleged shortage of toilet paper, panic buying and hoarding across the county caused a real shortage that lasted for weeks. He apologized in January.

I do recall, once I was in the celebrity business, being constantly confused by his first three wives. They were, in order, Joan, Joanne and Joanna. He once said he had married three similarly named women to avoid “having to change the monogram on the towels.”

All I know is I was happy when he married Alexis. He must have been too, as they were still married when he died in 2005.