Sunday, November 17, 2013

Prompt 12: The Year You Were Born

This week’s prompt is The year you were born
What happened:
    •    Historical
    •    Films
    •    Music
    •    Books
    •    Television


****If the events of 1954 that I copies are showing as white lines, I will fix them Monday morning. I have not used this blog for several months and I don't know why it is so wonky!

Television always played a big part in my life. My mother admitted she would use it to babysit me when there was a working television in the house. Much of the historical events of 1954 seemed to revolve around television which was still in its younger years. It was difficult to choose which events to list here, so I tried to stay with the ones that dealt with television, popular entertainment and the development of computers which became very important in my life.


Jan 1 – KSLA TV channel 12 in Shreveport, LA (CBS) begins broadcasting
Jan 1 – Rose & Cotton Bowl are 1st sport colorcasts
Jan 4 – Elvis Presley records a 10 minute demo in Nashville
Jan 7– Georgetown – IBM experiment the first public demonstration of machine translation system is held in New York at the head office of IBM
Jan 12 -Queen Elizabeth II opens NZ parliament
Jan 17 -Jacques Cousteau’s first network telecast airs on”Omnibus” (CBS)
Jan 26 - groundbreaking begins on Disneyland
Feb 1 – first TV soap opera ”Secret Storm” premieres
Feb 2 – Bevo Francis from Wellsville, Ohio (my hometown), Rio Grande College, scores 113 points in basketball game
Feb 14 – Sen. John Kennedy appears on “Meet the Press”
Mar 1 - US explodes 15 megaton hydrogen bomb a Bikini atoll
Mar 15 – “CBS Morning Show” premieres with Walter Cronkite and Jack Paar
Apr 1 – first Army helicopter Battalion forms, Ft. Bragg, NC
Apr 1 - earthquake/tsunami ravage Aleutians, 200 killed
Apr 1 - US Air Force Academy forms
Apr 6 – TV dinner was first put on sale by Swanson & Sons
Apr 23 – Hammerin’ Hank Aaron hits first of his 755 homers
May 24 – IBM announces vacuum to “electronic” brain that could perform 10 million operations an hour Jun 12 – Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock”, is originally released
Jun 14 – Pres. Eisenhower signs order adding words “under God” to the pledge (which explains why I always knew the pledge of allegiance with those two words)
Jun 19 – Tasmanian Devil debuts in “Devil May Hare” by Warner Bros.
Jul 12 - Pres. Eisenhower put forth a plan for an interstate highway system (where would we be without them?)
Jul 30 – Elvis Presley joins Memphis Federation of Musicians Local 71
Aug 15 – WCHS TV channel 8 in Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia (ABC) begins
Aug 15 – I was born at City Hospital, East Liverpool, Ohio
Aug 31 – Census Bureau forms
Sep 20 – first FORTRAN computer program is run
Sep 27 – Steve Allen’s “Tonight Show” premieres
Oct 3 – “Father Knows Best” premieres
Oct 18 – Texas instruments Inc. announces the first transistor radio
Oct 22 – West Germany joins North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Oct 23 – Britain, England, France & USSR agreed to end occupation of Germany
Oct 26 - Walt Disney’s first television program, “Disneyland” premieres on ABC
Nov 7 – US spy plane shot down north of Japan
Nov 22 - Humane Society forms
Dec 10 – Albert Schweitzer receives Nobel Peace Prize (28 years later I become a mother)
Dec 23 - first human kidney transplant is performed by Dr. Joseph E Murray at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts
Dec 26 - “The Shadow” airs for the last time on radio

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books were published. The second James Bond novel “Live and Let Die” was also published. The book was very different from the movie. And the most important to me the book “Horton Hears A Who” by Dr. Seuss was published. It was an excellent year for literature.

The films of this year were also very memorable. Two of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-known movies were released “Rear Window” and “Dial M For Murder”. Dial M was originally filmed in 3-D but because Hitchcock was a very meticulous director the movie ran past its deadline. 3-D was passé by the time the movie was ready to be released, so it was released in normal format. The other well-known movies of that year include “Seven Samurai”, “On The Waterfront”, “White Christmas”, “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” and “The Creature From The Black Lagoon”.

The most important television show to me was “Capt. Kangaroo” but it didn’t start until 1955. I can remember being in my jumper chair watching TV for hours at a time. The drooling one in the picture below is me.


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