Haven't you ever wondered how Abraham Lincoln was connected through history... to Huey Lewis?
Someone asked me that the other day, so I put some thought into it. I happen to know that Huey has met Bill Clinton, so I tried to devise a connection via American presidents. At first I thought I needed Helen Thomas to link some of them together, but then I remembered that Clinton had once met JFK. JFK was acquainted with Eleanor Roosevelt. Her uncle was Theodore Roosevelt, and whose father was a strong supporter of Lincoln's. But I don't know if they ever actually met, so I'm not sure this routing necessarily works.
Hoping to get some other ideas I posted the problem to the Huey Lewis and the News fan board. The hardest part of this exercise is making the leap from Lincoln to someone more contemporary, given the large historical gap that needs to be covered. Someone suggested that Lincoln's son Robert was a detractor of Theodore Roosevelt, so if they'd ever met that would be an alternative connection that could then hook up with the rest of my JFK-based one. Someone else meanwhile managed to avoid the presidents almost entirely by connecting Lincoln to his assassin, to Dr. Mudd, to his descendant Roger Mudd, who had worked with Charlie Rose at 60 Minutes. And Charlie Rose will apparently be speaking at an upcoming event where HLN will also be performing (although I wonder if there's not already a Huey Lewis-Charlie Rose connection derived from other circumstances).
It's all very silly, but actually something of an interesting educational exercise. The kind of thing that could make history classes interesting, linking major historical figures to contemporary ones. Which, as a matter of fact, is what James Burke has been working on with his KnowledgeWeb project - an educational tool to help students see connections between figures throughout history and how one influenced another down the line. (Disclosure: I worked on this project before law school.) For those unfamiliar with his work, James is famous for his "Connections" and "Day the Universe Changed" television series (among other things) and related books where he notes and chronicles how various innovations, often seemingly unrelated, influenced, if not actually directly caused, other subsequent ones. (One of my favorite connections that can be seen described on the KnowledgeWeb website tracks how Napoleon was a necessary precursor of the modern computer. I'm also fond of the link between the Alamo and chewing gum.)
I don't know, however, if Huey Lewis has been entered as a data point into his system, although I suspect Lincoln might well have been. I'm also not sure that Lincoln's influence on Huey has been any more significant than it has been on any other American. Although perhaps I'm wrong - after all, HLN did have a record entitled, Four Chords and Several Years Ago...