Eddie Rickenbacker was the most famous American aviator during World War I. He is mentioned in The Mansion by Strutterbuck, who calls him "Rick," implying an acquaintance with the "Ace" who shot down twenty-six enemy planes (84). But there is not the slightest chance that Strutterbuck is telling the truth.
The man whom Strutterbuck refers to in The Mansion as "Black Jack" is John Joseph Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Force that went to Europe during the last year of World War I - or as Strutterbuck puts it, who went "to France to run the show over there" (84). Strutterbuck claims to know Pershing, but there is not the slightest chance he is telling the truth, about that or anything else.
The son of Jefferson's cobbler and himself the local house painter, Tug Nightingale is over thirty years old when he enlists - over his father's furious objections - in the U.S. Army at the start of World War I in The Mansion. He serves in the War as a cook.
Mr. Nightingale in The Mansion is "a little scrawny man who wouldn't weigh a hundred pounds" even holding all the tools of his trade (201). His trade is shoe repair, "cobbling" (201). He is also a "Hardshell Baptist" who believes the earth is flat, and an ex-Confederate and unreconstructed Southerner who was "seventeen years old" at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He gets very upset when his son joins the "Yankee" army to fight in World War I (202).
Leader of Italy's National Fascist Party and the country's Prime Minister from 1922-43, during which time he took his country into World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. The Mansion links his name with Hitler's several times.
The American Legion was created in 1919 as an organization for veterans of World War I. Historically it has worked to secure veterans' rights. In The Mansion it is seen both positively and critically. Gavin is thinking of it when he talks about how "the Veterans' clubs and legions" provide "refuge" for the men who fought in the First World War only to find themselves feeling alienated, "betrayed and dispossessed" when they returned to the U.S. (201).
Doc Meeks himself does not appear in The Mansion, but the "patent medicine truck" he drives around Yoknapatawpha advertises "Watkins Products" - a real manufacturer of health medicines that has been in business since just after the Civil War - on "both [its] sides and the back" (171). The novel describes those advertisements as the source of the name that the parents of Watkins Products Snopes gave their son.
The bright and endearing daughter of Otis Meadowfill in The Mansion. She graduated valedictorian of her high school with "the highest grades ever made" (361).
Otis Meadow fill is the irascible neighbor of Orestes Snopes in The Mansion, and is "so mean [i.e. miserly] as to be solvent and retired even from the savings on a sawmill" (361).
