No band has been as universally celebrated as the Beatles, but they haven't been without controversy. Their original cover for Yesterday and Today, released in 1966, stirred up so much trouble, you'd think that had posed with the severed head of a sitting United States President.

Amazingly, the Fab Four didn't learn their lesson from that brouhaha. One year latter, they would again step into trouble with their initial draft of the album cover for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released 50 years ago yesterday.

The Grammy-winning album cover included of images of people who had inspired the Beatles, including Sonny Liston, Shirley Temple, Lenny Bruce, Shirley Temple, Karl Marx, Marilyn Monroe, and Shirley Temple. (The Beatles really, really liked Shirley Temple.) But not everyone made the final cut. As People magazine reported yesterday:

"One of them wanted money for it," [Paul McCartney] continued.

"We just wrote to everyone and said, 'Do you mind?' Well, at first we didn't. But the head of EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood came to my house and complained! He said, 'This is going to be a nightmare. There are going to be legal battles!' I said, 'No, no, no. People are gonna love it! They're all on the Beatles cover, you know! It'll be a laugh, they'll understand.' He said, 'No, you've got to write to them all.'"

"So we did. We got a letter out: 'We are planning to do this using your image. Do you mind? Is it okay? Please give us the okay.' And all of them did, except for one ... who wanted to cut a deal," he explained. "And we thought, 'You know what, we've got enough people on here!'"

Who was the celebrity who wanted to get paid for the Beatles to use his likeness? Would you believe it was a profit-minded time traveler?

The album was eventually released without Booster Gold's image. Despite the omission, the album still sold pretty well — about two and a half million copies in 1967 alone. Compare that to 2016's best-selling album, Adele's 25, which moved a half million fewer copies. In fact, Sgt. Pepper's was outperformed in 1967 by More of The Monkees.

Perhaps if the Beatles hadn't been so greedy and had stuck with their original impulse to go Gold, their album might have survived as more than a footnote in history.

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Until 1933, the term of the President of the United States began on March 4. This created a long delay between the election, held in November, and the incoming government's ability to take action. The 20th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed in order to reduce this lame duck period during which the country was effectively ungoverned.

The first president to be inaugurated on the newly mandated date of January 20 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated to his second term on January 20, 1937, eighty years ago today.

Inauguration Day 1937 saw a record 1.77 inches of rain fall in 37° weather in Washington DC. Fun! Newspaper reports of the day say that crowds didn't linger long after FDR's public swearing in on the Capitol steps, and who can blame them? I'm sure most of them didn't have an impenetrable 25th-century force field to keep them dry.

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Gone with the Wind was a huge smash hit in 1939. Adjusting for inflation, it's still the biggest blockbuster of all time — by 200 million dollars! Isn't it ironic that a movie sympathetic to the antebellum South would be the catalyst for the first African-American to win an Academy Award on February 29, 1940?

Back then, the Academy Awards still tended to reward movies that people had actually seen in theaters. The financial success of Gone with the Wind carried over into eight Oscar wins, including Best Supporting Actress for Hattie McDaniel, the movie's delightful "Mammy."

There's a long-standing, unsubstantiated rumor that Mexican actor Emilio "El Indio" Fernandez was the model for the now-familiar Oscar award first introduced in 1929. However, you can't help but notice the similarity between the famous golden statuette and a certain, golden time-traveler ("The Greatest Model You've Never Heard Of").

Given how much attention has been given lately to the Academy's preference for lily-white talent, ask yourself which is more far-fetched: that the Academy Award of Merit was modeled on a white time-traveler or that it was based on a Mexican? You be the judge.

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My occasional alternate history posts never generate any feedback, so I'm amazed that the second most visited post on the year was this one from August 25.

It was on this day in 1875 that Captain Matthew Webb became the first person recorded to successfully swim the English Channel unaided.

Webb's feat was a carefully crafted bit of public showmanship. That the crossing had never been done and was thought impossible fueled the public's interest. The accomplishment made Webb famous and rich.

Hmm. Bold athletic achievements motivated by gambling? Instant and eternal fame? It sounds like this is just the sort of event that would inspire a certain time-traveling tourist we know.

I'm guessing Matt Webb has a big family who like to Google his name.

The top post of 2015 will be revealed Tomorrow.

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Booster Gold selected August 21, 1985, to make his public debut because he knew that was the day an assassin would make an attempt on the life of United States President Ronald Reagan. But what if Booster had chosen another red-letter day in American presidential history to make his debut?

Before election day, November 2, 1948, incumbent president Harry Truman was polling far behind his challenger, Thomas Dewey. No one outside of Truman's camp thought the President could pull out a second term. So remote were Truman's chances, that the Chicago Daily Tribune printed a headline declaring Dewey champion before the results were in.

Booster Gold could have earned a friend in high office and the general public alike if he'd arrived from the future and publicly thrown his support behind Truman, whose campaign against a "Do Nothing Congress" resonated with voters.

Of course, Truman's second term saw the Soviets get the Bomb, the war in Korean, McCarthy's Red Scare, and the Kefauver Committee against organized crime in America. Worse, 1948 saw the emergence of Fredric Wertham's campaign against super heroes. Maybe Booster decided that was all just too much trouble for one hero.

Or maybe a history student like Booster Gold preferred to make his debut closer to the dawn of the 90s, when technology would begin an unprecedented leap forward. It would be awfully hard for a guy with a robot sidekick to live in an era of vacuum tubes.

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