1957

We seem to look back and remember, what if?

What happened in 1957?

• January 1 - An Irish Republican Army attack on the Brookeborough police barracks in Northern Ireland leads to the deaths of Seán South and Fergal O'Hanlon.

• January 3 – Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.

• January 6 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the 3rd and final time. He is shown only from the waist up, even during the gospel segment, singing “Peace In The Valley”. Ed Sullivan describes Elvis thus: “This is a real decent, fine boy. We’ve never had a pleasanter experience on our show with a big name than we've had with you. You’re thoroughly all right.”

• January 10 – Harold Macmillan becomes the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

• January 13 – Wham-o Company produces the first Frisbee.

• January 16 – The Cavern Club opens in Liverpool as a jazz club.

• January 20 - Dwight D. Eisenhower is privately sworn in for a second term as President of the United States.

• January 23 – Ku Klux Klan members force truck driver Willie Edwards to jump off a bridge into the Alabama River; he drowns as a result.

• February 4 - A coal gas explosion at the giant Bishop coal mine in Bishop, Virginia, kills 37 men.

• February 16 - Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal opens at cinema in Sweden.

• March 1 - Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat is published in the United States.

• March 4 – Standard & Poor’s first publishes the S&P 500 Index in the United States.

• March 7 – The United States Congress approves the Eisenhower Doctrine on assistance to threatened foreign regimes.

• March 8 – Egypt re-opens the Suez Canal.

• March 10 – Floodgates of The Dalles Dam are closed, inundating Celilo Falls and ancient Indian fisheries along the Columbia River in Oregon.

• March 13 - The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation arrests labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa and charges him with bribery.

• March 26 – 22-year-old Elvis Presley buys Graceland on 3734 Bellevue Boulevard for $100,000.00

• April – IBM sells the first compiler for the Fortran scientific programming language.

• May 15 - Operation Grapple: At Malden Island in the Pacific, Britain tests its first hydrogen bomb, which fails to detonate properly.

• May 22 – A 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb accidentally falls from a bomber near Albuquerque.

• June 1 – Three-year-old thoroughbred Gallant Man wins the Peter Pan Stakes at Belmont Park.

• June 9 – Broad Peak, in the China-Pakistan border, is first ascended.

• June 15 – Oklahoma celebrates its semi-centennial statehood. A brand new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere is buried in a time capsule (to be opened 50 years later on June 15, 2007).

• June 15 – Gallant Man wins the Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park in record time.

• June 20 – Toru Takemitsu’s Requiem for Strings is first performed, by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.

• June 21 – John Diefenbaker becomes the 13th Prime Minister of Canada.

• June 25 – The United Church of Christ is formed in Cleveland, Ohio, by the merger of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

• June 27 – Hurricane Audrey demolishes Cameron, Louisiana and killing 400 people.

• July - Hugh Everett III publishes the first scientifically founded many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

• July 6 – John Lennon and Paul McCartney first meet as teenagers at a garden fete at St. Peter's Church, Woolton, Liverpool, England, at which Lennon’s skiffle group, The Quarrymen, is playing, 3 years before forming The Beatles.

• July 9 – Elvis Presley’s ‘Loving You’ opens in theaters.

• July 11 – His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV becomes the 49th Imam of the Shia Ismaili Muslims at age 20. His grandfather Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah Aga Khan III appoints Prince Karim in his will.

• July 14 – Rawya Ateya takes her seat in the National Assembly of Egypt, thereby becoming the first female parliamentarian in the Arab world.

• July 16 – United States Marine Major John Glenn flies an F8U supersonic jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds, setting a new transcontinental speed record.

• July 25 – Tunisia becomes a republic, with Habib Bourguiba its first president.

• July 29 – The International Atomic Energy Agency is established.

• August 5 – American Bandstand, a local dance show produced by WFIL-TV in Philadelphia, joins the ABC Television Network.

• August 21 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower announces a 2-year suspension of nuclear testing.

• August 28 – United States Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC) sets the record for the longest filibuster with his 24-hour, 18-minute speech railing against a civil rights bill.

• September 3 – The Wolfenden report on homosexuality is published in the United Kingdom.

• September 4 - African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68): Little Rock Crisis – Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas calls out the National Guard of the United States to prevent African-American students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School.

- The Ford Motor Company introduces the Edsel on what the company proclaims as “E-Day”.

• September 5 – The first edition of Jack Kerouac’s novel ‘On the Road’ goes on sale in the United States.

• September 7 – NBC introduces an animated version of its famous “living color” peacock logo.

• September 9 - The Civil Rights Act of 1957 is enacted, establishing the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

• September 14 – ‘Have Gun – Will Travel’ premieres on CBS.

• September 21 – ‘Perry Mason’ premieres on CBS.

• September 24 - U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends federal troops to Arkansas to provide safe passage into Little Rock Central High School for the “Little Rock Nine”.

• September 26 – Leonard Bernstein’s musical ‘West Side Story’ makes its first appearance on Broadway and runs for 732 performances.

• September 29 – The Kyshtym disaster occurs at the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant in Russia.

• October - The Africanized bee is accidentally released in Brazil.

• October 4 - Space Age – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth.

- The sitcom ‘Leave It to Beaver’ premieres on CBS in the United States.

• October 10 - U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower apologizes to the finance minister of Ghana, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, after he is refused service in a Dover, Delaware restaurant.

- Ayn Rand's fourth, last and longest novel, ‘Atlas Shrugged’, is published in the United States.

• October 11 - The orbit of the last stage of the R-7 Semyorka rocket (carrying Sputnik I) is first successfully calculated on an IBM 704 computer by teams at The M.I.T. Computation Center and operation Moonwatch, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• October 21 - The U.S. military sustains its first combat fatality in Vietnam, Army Capt. Hank Cramer of the 1st Special Forces Group.

• October 31 – Toyota begins exporting vehicles to the United States, beginning with the Toyota Crown and the Toyota Land Cruiser.

• November 1 - The first (westbound) tube of the Hampton Roads Bridge–Tunnel linking Norfolk and Hampton, Virginia opens at a cost of $44 million.

• November 3 – Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2, with the first animal to orbit the Earth (a dog named Laika) on board; there is no technology available to return it to Earth.

• November 7 – Cold War: In the United States, the Gaither Report calls for more American missiles and fallout shelters.

• November 8 – Film Jailhouse Rock opens across the U.S. to reach #3, and Elvis Presley continues to gain more notoriety.

• November 13 - Gordon Gould invents the laser.

• November 16 - U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower has a stroke.

• December 5 – All 326,000 Dutch nationals are expelled from Indonesia.

• December 6 – The first U.S. attempt to launch a satellite fails when the Vanguard rocket blows up on the launch pad.

• December 20 – The Boeing 707 airliner flies for the first time.

• December 22 – The CBS afternoon anthology series The Seven Lively Arts presents Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘The Nutcracker’ on U.S. television for the first time, although heavily abridged.

• Date unknown - Three new neo-grotesque sans serif typefaces are released: Folio (designed by Konrad Bauer and Walter Baum), Neue Haas Grotesk (designed by Max Miedinger) and Univers (designed by Adrian Frutiger); all will be influential in the International Typographic Style of graphic design.

So who was born in 1957?

Katie Couric, Steve Harvey, Princess Caroline of Monaco, LeVar Burton, Spike Lee, Osama bin Laden, Sid Vicious, Scott Adams, Cindy Sheehan, Jon Lovitz, Melanie Griffith, Gloria Estefan, Peter Sellars, Bernie Mac, Caroline Kennedy, Andrew Cuomo, Donny Osmond, Ray Romano, Matt Lauer and my wife.

That may be speculation or folktale because I never saw a birth certificate. She told me 11/12/57 was the date and why would I dispute it? Without papers one can only believe. Besides she was adopted so it could have been July 3^rd or December 27^th but it doesn’t matter in this celebration.

For today, according to legend, she would have turned sixty years old.

Every decade change should be a memorable turn of life’s pages but some aren’t around to celebrate. Next year, Lord willing and the crick don’t rise; I’ll flip another page.

The whole idea of remembrance of birthdays for those who cannot attend the party is rather strange. It is all speculation of what John Lennon would be writing now or what would Mark Twain think about monument moment fuss or what would Jesus Christ say about all the mass murders?

On this day I will hold the thoughts that my wife didn’t enjoy the long train ride out West or enjoy the new windows and heat. She didn’t have to watch hours and hours of videos of people being slaughtered by bombs or guns or vehicles by people who look just like everyone else until they snap. She didn’t have the chance to sit in the newly screened porch and watch the harvest moon. She didn’t get to see the strange television persona who would tell celebrities to do awkward stunts and those who did not succeed to amuse him he fired, become the leader of the free world.

So the ‘what if’ day has come and I will celebrate what could have been or not with a slice of cheesecake and a glass of plum wine.

Happy Birthday!

2009

July 4, 2009 (Saturday)

• The Cherokee County killer claims his fifth victim in South Carolina.

• Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Micheál Martin, calls for the immediate release of two aid workers who were kidnapped in Sudan's Darfur region.

• Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali calls on homosexuals to “repent and be changed” and says the Church of England will not be “rolled over by culture”.

• North Korea test fires seven more missiles into the Sea of Japan.

• Torrential rain forces over 150,000 people from their homes, topples hundreds of houses and punches a hole in the spillway of a dam in southern China.

• The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is denied access to meet detained National League for Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi while on a visit to Burma.

• 12 militants are killed in an air raid in northwestern Pakistan.

• Nine Chechen policeman are killed after their vehicle is attacked in neighboring Ingushetia, southern Russia.

• The Iranian state-owned newspaper Kayhan calls for Mir-Hossein Mousavi to stand trial.

• 35 people are arrested in Mazandran, northern Iran, during post-election protests.

• Serena Williams wins the women’s singles at the 2009 Wimbledon Championships after defeating her sister, Venus Williams.

• Three people die as a result of contracting swine flu in New Zealand, the country's first flu deaths.

Deaths in 2009

• Patrick McGoohan • Ricardo Montalbán • Andrew Wyeth • John Updike • Ingemar Johansson • James Whitmore • Marilyn Chambers • Bea Arthur • Jack Kemp • Dom DeLuise • David Carradine • Farrah Fawcett • Michael Jackson • Karl Malden • Allen Klein • Robert McNamara • Walter Cronkite • Eunice Kennedy Shriver • Les Paul • Ted Kennedy • Patrick Swayze • Henry Gibson • Mary Travers • Gene Barry • Heather McIver Leftwich

… that is the way it was.