Events On This Day In History October 7 1922 - The first radio network -- of sorts -- debuted. It was a network of just two stations. WJZ in Newark, NJ teamed with WGY in Schenectady, NY to bring the World Series game direct from the Polo Grounds in New York. Columnist Grantland Rice was behind the microphone for that broadcast. 1940 - Kate Hopkins, Angel of Mercy was heard for the first time on CBS radio. Tom Hopkins, Kate’s husband, was played by eventual Beat the Clock host Clayton ‘Bud’ Collyer. The 15-minute radio drama was written by Chester McCraken and Gertrude Berg (writer and Emmy Award-winning actress of The Goldbergs, a popular radio and TV series in the 1940s & 1950s). The announcer for the four-year run of Angel of Mercy was Ralph Edwards of future This is Your Life fame. And the sponsor was Maxwell House of coffee fame. 1940 - Portia Faces Life debuted on the CBS network. This radio soap opera centered around the life of Portia Blake Manning, an attorney and a widow with a young son. And we thought this concept was unique to TV nighttime soaps of the 1990s... Portia Faces Life was extremely popular, and therefore, had many sponsors -- none of which were soap. The sponsors included Post Toasties, Grape Nuts Flakes, Grape Nuts Wheat Meal, Maxwell House coffee, Jell-O desserts and La France bleach. 1940 - Artie Shaw’s orchestra recorded Hoagy Carmichael’s standard, Star Dust -- for Victor Records. 1950 - The Frank Sinatra Show debuted. It was the crooner’s first plunge into TV, the beginning of a $250,000 per year, five-year contract. Ben Blue, The Blue Family, the Whippoorwills and Axel Stordahl’s orchestra were regulars on the show. 1965 - Robert Mitera’s tee shot, aided by a 50-m.p.h. tailwind, traveled 447 yards to the pin, and dropped in for the longest hole-in-one in golf history. This at the 10th hole of the Miracle Hills Country Club, Omaha, Nebraska. 1969 - Put on your headband, love beads, surfer’s cross and give the peace sign. It was on this day that The Youngbloods hit, Get Together, passed the million-selling mark to achieve gold record status. And just try to get into those bell bottom hiphuggers... 1982 - Cats, opened on Broadway. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical is most memorable for its song, Memories. 1985 - Terrorists hijacked an Italian cruise ship, Achille Lauro, demanding the release of prisoners held by Israel. Of the four hundred people on board, only Leon Klinghoffer, wheelchairbound, was shot to death; an example that the four Palestinian gunmen meant business. They surrendered two days later to the Egyptians who promised them free passage out of their country. When Klinghoffer’s body was returned to his native New York City, New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that Leon Klinghoffer died “because he was an American, because he was a Jew and because he was a free man.” 1993 - Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was the first black woman to received the award and one of America’s most significant novelists of the twentieth century. She is the Author of six major Novels, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved and Jazz. Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 and Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. 1995 - A crowd of some 125,000 people were sitting or standing in Central Park to see Pope John Paul II. The pontiff’s message at the outdoor mass was geared to the role of young people in the church and the world. “You young people will live most of your lives in the next century,” he said. “You must help the holy spirit to shape the social, moral and spiritual character.” 1995 - Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill album made it to number one on the Billboard 200 chart. The album, in its fifteenth week on the chart, featured these tracks: All I Really Want, You Oughta Know, Perfect, Hand in My Pocket, Right Through You, Forgiven, You Learn, Head Over Feet, Mary Jane, Ironic, Not the Doctor, Wake Up. Jagged Little Pill was #1 for two weeks.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 13:14:27 +0000
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