 |
| Leona Gage - stripped of her title |
By mid-summer it had reached the United States, where it initially infected relatively few people, but several months later numerous cases were reported, especially in young children, the elderly, and pregnant women. This upsurge was the result of a second pandemic wave that struck the Northern Hemisphere in November 1957.
The second wave was particularly devastating and by March 1958 an estimated 69,800 deaths had occurred in the United States.
Some infected individuals experienced only minor symptoms, such as cough and mild fever, others experienced life-threatening complications. Those persons who were unaffected by the virus were believed to have possessed protective antibodies.
The rapid development of a vaccine and the availability of antibiotics to treat secondary infections limited the spread and mortality. Interestingly, the Center for Disease Control believes there are laboratories throughout the US that are still storing the 1957 virus.
When Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the 3rd time the cameras would only show him from the waste up. By that time he was being called Elvis the Pelvis because of his striptease-like behavior on stage. Jack Gould of The New York Times declared Elvis had no discernible singing ability and John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune called Elvis “unspeakably untalented and vulgar.”
Parents, religious groups and the Parent-Teacher Association condemned Elvis and rock 'n' roll music by associating both with juvenile delinquency. At a live concert in Seattle Elvis asked his audience to please stand for the national anthem. When they did, he picked up his guitar, began his vulgar gyrating and sang You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog. The crowd ate it up.
The director of the Detroit Public Library banned The Wizard of Oz for having "no value for children of today," for supporting "negativism"
Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes accidentally invented bubble wrap while trying to create plastic wallpaper. At first it was marketed as a greenhouse insulator. Apparently that didn’t sell and eventually it was sold as the packaging material we know today.
When Northeast Airlines Flight 823 crashed on Rikers Island on February 1, 1957, prisoners were released from the prison building to help pull people from the wreckage. Some had their sentences commuted or reduced for acts of heroism during the incident. Story
The idea that there was a nationwide web of organized crime wasn't recognized until police raided the Appalachian Meeting, a mafia summit in upstate New York in 1957. Story
Racist South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond set a record for the longest filibuster by a lone senator when the old windbag talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes as he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which basically was designed to make sure blacks in the South had the right to vote. He also later opposed ending segregation.
Bits and Pieces:
Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy) refused to ever perform publicly again after the death of his friend and partner Oliver Hardy.
Laika, a dog, was the first living creature to be sent into space, in Sputnik 2; she didn’t survive the trip.
Kent cigarettes used asbestos filters from 1952-1957. The were marketed as offering "the greatest health protection in the history of cigarettes."
Journalist Drew Pearson claimed that John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage had been ghost-written by his speechwriter Ted Sorenson. JFK's father sued and ABC retracted the statement and apologized. In 2008 Sorensen admitted he wrote most of the book.
Miss USA 1957, Leona Gage was stripped of her title when it was revealed that she was 18, married, and the mother of two children.
During a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game, a foul ball off the bat of Richie Ashburn hit a fan and broke her nose. When play resumed, as she was being taken out on a stretcher, another foul ball off Ashburn’s bat hit her again. What are the odds?
A US Air Force pilot caught in bad weather discovered his prototype F-107 jet fighter had no cockpit lighting. He managed to navigate and land the aircraft by periodically flicking a Zippo cigarette lighter and using the flame to read the instruments.
James Vicary created a controversy when he announced that he invented subliminal advertising at a Fort Lee, New Jersey movie theater and he was flashing messages between film frames telling people to buy Coke and popcorn. In 1962, he said he made the whole thing up.
Lawrence Joseph Bader, a cookware salesman from Akron, Ohio, disappeared on a fishing trip on Lake Erie in 1957. Eight years later he was found alive in Omaha, Nebraska, as a local TV personality, Fritz Johnson.
The horror film Texas Chainsaw Massacre was partially based on the real murderer Ed Gein. When Gein's house was searched by authorities in 1957, they found, among other things, a belt made from a human and a lampshade made from human skin
The chess world lost several prominent players in 1957. On January 5, 1957, Czech Champion Oldrich Duras died in Prague at the age of 74 on January 5th and on February 15th Harald Malmgren, the Swedish Correspondence Champion in 1942 died in Uppsula at the age of 52. On April 6, 1957, Nancy Roos, US Women’s Champion, died of cancer at the age of 52 in Los Angeles at the age of 52. Max Pavey passed away in New York at the age of 39 on September 4th. He won the Scottish Championship in 1939, was US Lightning Champion in 1947, New York State Champion in 1949 and Manhattan Chess Club Champion in 1952-53 and 1955-56.
Vasily Smyslov defeated Mikhail Botvinnik to become world champion thus ending Botvinnik's nine-year reign. Botvinnik regained his title in the rematch the following year.
In June, the World Junior championship was held in Toronto and won by William Lombardy with a perfect score.
Bobby Fischer won a typewriter for taking first in the US Junior Championship in San Francisco. He also won the US Junior Speed Championship. In August Fischer tied for 1st-2nd with Arthur Bisguier at the US Open in Cleveland. The tournament the TD, Georges Koltanowski, originally awarded the title, trophy and prize money to Bisguier based on incorrectly calculated tiebreaks. Later it was determined Fischer was actually the winner and at the age of 14. His rating was 2264. See my post on the SNAFU HERE.
In September, the first women's chess Olympiad was held in Emmen, Netherlands and was won by the USSR.
There was a time when a feature of the finals of the Soviet Championship was that a crop of new talent was discovered, adding to the already large number of Soviet GMs. 1956 was such a year with several talented young masters who had fought their way through the semi-finals to qualify.
Mikhail Tal was one of those players. For him 1956 was a year of great progress. Not yet a GM, his results and his play were showing signs of genius.
The 23rd USSR Championship was held in Leningrad from January 10 through February 15, 1956. While not as strong at the previous championship it did feature the first appearance of Tal and Polugaevsky. They did well, but the tournament was a battle between Averbakh and Spassky. Taimanov made a hard charge by winning his last three games and so managed to catch them.
Tal's opponent in this game, Alexander Tolush, is barely known today, but a few years before this game Botvinnik described him as the one Master in the Soviet Union who above all others based his play on sound reasoning coupled with strong attacks and tricky tactics. Tal’s most potent weapon was his ability to orient himself in positions with head whirling complications. When these two met you could expect an exciting game!
Nice write-up, really enjoyable. She got hit by a Richie Ashburn foul twice in the same game?? I'm sorry, that's not an accident.
ReplyDeleteOn August 17th, 1957 in a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Giants, Ashburn’s foul ball hit Alice Roth, the wife of the sports editor for The Philadelphia Bulletin who was there with her two grandsons square in the face, breaking her nose. The game was then paused as medics tended to her. According to the sports editor for The Philadelphia Bulletin, there was blood everywhere. As she was being carried out on a stretcher, play was resumed and Ashburn fouled off the first pitch thrown to him and it, too, by astronomical odds struck Roth, this time breaking her knee. After that incident Roth always sat in the left field bleachers.
ReplyDelete