Last time we explored…

40 Years Before I Was Born |
A Look At The Decade Of The1930s.

We now look at the preceding years leading up to my birth and entrance on this planet. A decade in which it looked like the world might be destroyed through war, and a new weapon capable of destroying an entire city. But their were bright spots amongst such a terrible time as people flocked to the cinemas to see Abbot and Costello and a whole host of new cartoon characters especially from the Warner Brothers Studio’s Loony Tunes series. It was the best of times and the worst of times…

31 Years Before I was Born
1940

Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Archie Andrews, The Flash, Captain America, Lex Luther, Robin and the Joker, Abbot and Costello on film, the first Anti-Nazi comedies and more all made their first appearances in this year of world transition. There are so many media cultural characters and important historical events that appeared in the start of the 1940s during the outbreak of World War 2, that its’ worth taking a look at all that happen during this year of turmoil and creativity with a more in-depth look.

1940 –
The Year Of Bugs, The Flash And Anti -Nazi Comedy |
A Look Back At The Year 1940.

“Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays – Vol. 9 – Saints and Cynics”

30 Years Before I was Born

1941

Films and books released in 1941
becomes public domain in 2037

Grant Wood –Spring in Town
Grant’s last painting

H. A. Rey and Margret Rey – Curious George
(first in the Curious George series of seven books)

Robert McCloskey – Make Way for Ducklings

 Eleanor Estes – The Moffats (1941)
Awarded the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award

Walter Farley, Keith Ward (Illustrator)
The Black Stallion (The Black Stallion, #1)

Mary O’Hara, Dave Blossom (Illustrator)
–My Friend Flicka (Flicka, #1)

Elizabeth Enright – The Saturdays

Other Children’s Books

• Maud Hart Lovelace Betsy-Tacy and Tib (Betsy-Tacy, #2)
• Heidi Grandma (1941) The third book in the Heidi series
• Walter D. Edmonds. The Matchlock Gun Newbury Winner
• Lois Lenski –Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison
• Laura Ingalls Wilder –Little House on the Prairie # 7  Little Town on the Prairie
• The Classic Comics series is launched in the United States, with a version of The Three Musketeers.

1941 – All in a Lifetime  by Frank Buck, with Ferrin Fraser, is Buck’s autobiography.

1941 –Traitor’s Purse (1941) (U.S. title: The Sabotage Murder Mystery) – Written by Margery Allingham.  It is the eleventh novel in the Albert Campion series and is set during the Second World War.

1941 – Red Ryder and the secret of Wolf Canyon by Stevens, S. S., pseud

1941 –Grin and Bear It Large Feature Comic (1941) #28

1941 – Nothing At All is a picture book by Wanda Gag. The story is about an invisible dog named Nothing at All and his attempts to turn visible. The book was a recipient of a 1942 Caldecott Honor for its illustrations.

1941 – On the George Burns and Gracie Allen radio show it was adapted to present them as a married couple as opposed to Allen being the object of Burns’s affections as well as those of other cast members. The show was redeveloped the show as a situation comedy.

Comic Book debuts: Gus Arriola‘s Gordo Batman villain the Penguin, Sad Sack,  Plastic Man, Captain America, Wonder Woman, Aquaman,  Pogo Possum in Animal Comics; Pep Comics #22 – marks the debut of Bob Montana‘s Archie Comics, who will receive their own title a year later.

1941 – Mighty Solver of Mysteries” (text version with pictures from “Visitors from Space” and “The Deep South“) by Lee Falk and Phil Davis. Better Little Book 1454

1941 – Tom Swift and His Magnetic Silence Book 40 in the Tom Swift series)
by Victor Appleton (House Name) (Harriet Stratemeyer Adams)

1941 – The Lieutenant’s Lady (A book in the Bison Book series) by Bess Streeter Aldrich

Other Drama  Books

• Sally Benson –Meet Me in St. Louis
• Compton Mackenzie – The Monarch of the Glen
• Franz Werfel –The Song of Bernadette

Some Non-Fiction Books

• The silence of the sea : and other essays by Hilaire Belloc (non-fiction)
• P. L. Travers – I Go By Sea, I Go By Land, (non-fiction)
• No Life for a Lady by Agnes Morley Cleaveland 
• Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid by Virginia Woolf 

1941 – Afghan inventor Ataullah K. Ozai‐Durrani sells his method of pre-cooking and then drying rice in a way that allowed the rice to be re-hydrated simply by boiling it quickly. This became Minute Rice.

1941 – Fr. Walter Joseph Ciszek, S.J. (November 4, 1904 – December 8, 1984) was arrested in 1941 under false accusations of espionage for Nazi Germany and the Vatican. To his shock, the NKVD (the USSR’s secret police) already knew his real name and that he was an American citizen and a Catholic priest. He spent the next several years held captive by the soviets. There were fifteen years he spent in confinement and hard labor in the Gulag, plus five preceding them in Moscow‘s infamous Lubyanka prison. He was released and returned to the United States in 1963, after which he wrote two books, He Leadeth Me and the memoir With God in Russia, and served as a spiritual director.

Father Alberto Maria de Agostini becomes the first to write about Cueva de las Manos.

January 1941 – The Mechanical Mice  by Eric Frank Russell with Maurice G. Hugi in Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1941

January 2, 1941 – “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” Recorded by The Andrews Sisters in the Abbott and Costello comedy film Buck Privates (1941).

January–August – 10,072 men, women and children with mental and physical disabilities are asphyxiated with carbon monoxide in a gas chamber, at Hadamar Euthanasia Centre in Germany, in the first phase of mass killings under the Aktion T4 program here.

January 3, 1941– A decree (Normalschrifterlass) promulgated in Germany by Martin Bormann, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, requires replacement of blackletter typefaces by Antiqua.^[2]

January 4, 1941 – Elmer’s Pet Rabbit – This is the first cartoon in which the name Bugs Bunny is given (on a title card, edited onto the end of the opening title following the success of 1940’s A Wild Hare), but the rabbit is similar to the prototype version of him seen and heard in Elmer’s Candid Camera (though his voice is different) and other prototype-Bugs Bunny shorts. This is Chuck Jones’ first cartoon featuring the recognizable Bugs Bunny, and it was written by Rich Hogan. Voices are provided by Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan. It was produced by Leon Schlesinger.

January 6, 1941 – During his State of the Union address, President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt presents his Four Freedoms, as fundamental global human rights.

January 7, 1941– Inner Sanctum Mysteries (1941–1952) debuts on the NBC Blue Network.

January 19, 1941 – Flash Gordon: Classic Collection Vol. 3 by Alex Raymond – Volume 3 reprints all of Alex Raymond’s Sunday strips from January 19, 1941 to August 13, 1944, and includes an extensive essay examining his final years on the series by writer Doug Murray.

February 1941 – Shottle Bop by Theodore Sturgeon in Unknown Fantasy Fiction, February 1941

February 9, 1941 – Winston Churchill, in a worldwide broadcast, tells the United States to show its support by sending arms to the British: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

March 5, 1941 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, having been President of the United States for 8 years, 1 day, becomes the longest-serving president in American history.

April 1941 – Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon in Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941

Woolton Pie: A vegetable-based pie popular during rationing. The recipe was created by François Latry Maître Chef des Cuisines at the Savoy Hotel in London, and appeared on the Savoy menu as “Le Lord Woolton Pie”. It was first publicized in an April 1941 article in The Times that described the dish as economic and wholesome and gave the recipe

April 11, 1941 – Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy

April 25, 1941 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, at his regular press conference, criticizes Charles Lindbergh by comparing him to the Copperheads of the Civil War period. In response, Lindbergh resigns his commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve on April 28.

May 1941 – Universe by Robert A. Heinlein in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1941. “Universe” was selected in 1973 by the Science Fiction Writers of America for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, which collected the most important works published prior to SFWA’s founding in 1965.

May 1, 1941 – Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane, consistently rated as one of the films considered the all-time best, is premiered at the Palace Theatre (New York City).

May 2, 1941 – The People vs. Dr. Kildare – Directed by Harold S. Bucquet and starring Lew Ayres, Lionel Barrymore, Bonita Granville, and Laraine Day. It was part of the series of Doctor Kildare films produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Kildare performs an emergency operation on a crash victim.

May 9, 1941 – The Spider Returns – Based on the pulp magazine character The Spider. It was the fourteenth of the 57 serials released by Columbia and a sequel to their 1938 serial The Spider’s Web. The first episode runs 32 minutes, while the other 14 are approximately 17 minutes each.

May 10, 1941 – The (Nazi) Hess Conspiracies (Rudolf Hess)  Rudolf Hess – Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich – embarked on his astonishing flight from Augsburg to Scotland. he hoped to arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be a prominent opponent of the British government’s war policy. Later on after he was captured, Was Rudolf Hess Murdered?   

May 15 – July 16, 1941 – Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (November 25, 1914 – March 8, 1999) sets the record for the longest hitting streak in major league baseball.

May 17, 1941 – The Rookie Bear  featuring Barney Bear in the fourth cartoon in the Barney Bear series. The Rookie Bear was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, but lost to Disney‘s Lend a Paw.

March 28, 1941 – Adventures of Captain Marvel

May 1, 1941 -Cheerios were introduced as “Cheerioats”. The name was shortened to “Cheerios” in 1945, after the Quaker Oats Company claimed to hold the rights to use the term “oats”

June 20, 1941 – The Big Store starring the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo and Chico) that takes place in a large department store. he Marxes had decided to retire as a team and The Big Store was advertised as their farewell film. However, they would return to the screen in A Night in Casablanca (1946) and Love Happy (1949).

June 1941 – Yesterday Was Monday by Theodore Sturgeon  in Unknown Fantasy Fiction, June 1941

Time Wants a Skeleton • (1941) • novella by Ross Rocklynne in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1941

June 22, 1941 -WWII: Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany (with allies) invades the Soviet Union and declares war on it. Winston Churchill promises all possible British assistance to the Soviet Union in a worldwide broadcast: “Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.” Italy and Romania declare war on the Soviet Union.

June 23 to 26, 1941 –9th National Eucharistic Congress (United States) – It took place at Saint Paul Union Depot, the Minneapolis Auditorium, the St. Paul Auditorium, the Cathedral of Saint Paul and the Basilica of St. Mary elsewhere in Minnesota. The Archdiocese of Saint Paul, led by Archbishop John Gregory Murray, was the host of the congress.

June 25, 1941 – Blossoms in the Dust 

June 25–29, 1941 – The Holocaust: Kaunas pogrom – Thousands of Jews are massacred in Lithuania by local partisans and invading German forces

June 27, 1941 – The Reluctant Dragon, starring Robert Benchley

July 1941 – No Man’s Land in Space • [The Asteroid Belt] • novelette by Leigh Brackett in Amazing Stories, July 1941

July 1, 1941 – Commercial television is authorized by the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.

NBC Television begins commercial operation on WNBT, on Channel 1. The world’s first legal TV commercial, for Bulova watches, occurs at 2:29 PM over WNBT, before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The 10-second spot displays a picture of a clock superimposed on a map of the United States, accompanied by the voice-over “America runs on Bulova time.

As a one-off special, the first quiz show called “Uncle Bee” is telecast on WNBT’s inaugural broadcast day, followed later the same day by Ralph Edwards hosting the second game show broadcast on U.S. television, Truth or Consequences, as simulcast on radio and TV and sponsored by Ivory Soap. Weekly broadcasts of the show commence in 1956, with Bob Barker.

CBS Television begins commercial operation on New York station WCBW (modern-day WCBS-TV), on Channel 2.  CBS Television News, debuts on CBS (1941-1943, 1944–Present).

July 2, 1941 – Sergeant York – A biographical film about the life of Alvin C. York, one of the most decorated American soldiers of World War I. Directed by Howard Hawks, the film stars Gary Cooper in the title role, and was based on York’s diary Sergeant York: His Own Life Story and War Diary.

CBS Television Quiz premieres as television’s first regular game show (1941–1943

July 4, 1941 – I’ll Never Heil Again with the The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard). It is the 56th entry in the series released by Columbia Pictures

August 1, 1941 – Truant Officer Donald The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1942 but lost to another Disney cartoon, Lend a Paw. The story features Donald Duck working as a truant officer and making sure that his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie go to school. The film was directed by Jack King while Clarence Nash provided the voices of Donald and the nephews.

 August 6, 1941 – C. S. Lewis begins a series of BBC Radio broadcasts that will be adapted as Mere Christianity.

Six-year-old Elaine Esposito goes to have an appendix operation in Florida and lapses into a coma, dying 37 years later, still comatose

August 7, 1941 – Between the Acts  by Virginia Woolf. It was published shortly after her death in 1941. Although the manuscript had been completed, Woolf had yet to make final revisions.

August 9, 1941 – Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill meet on board ship at Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland. The Atlantic Charter (released August 14), setting goals for postwar international cooperation, is created as a result.

August 14, 1941 – St. Maximilian Kolbe dies.

August 18, 1941   In a brutal police operation in Nazi Germany, over 300 Swingjugend (“Swing kids”) are arrested, marking the end of tolerance to swing music.

September 1941 – The Lost World of Time (Complete Novel) • Captain Future Fall 1941

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov in Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1941 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas. The Science Fiction Writers of America voted “Nightfall” the best science fiction short story written prior to the 1965 establishment of the Nebula Awards and included it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964.

Adam and No Eve • short story by Alfred Bester in Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1941 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas.

Other 1941 Sci-Fi/ Fantasy

• A Fish Dinner in Memison by E. R. Eddison, the second in his Zimiamvian Trilogy.
• The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) (with Fletcher Pratt) – first of the de Camp/Pratt collaborations, including the earliest Harold Shea stories

September 5, 1941 –Arthur Dreifuss‘ live-action feature Reg’lar Fellers (1941) stars Billy Lee as Pinhead Duffy and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer as Bump Hudson.

September 10, 1941 –M&M’s, are first sold.

September 14, 1941 – The State of Vermont “declares war” on Germany, by defining the United States to be in “armed conflict”, in order to extend a wartime bonus to Vermonters in the service.

September 20, 1941 – Nine Lives Are Not Enough directed by A. Edward Sutherland and starring Ronald Reagan, Joan Perry and James Gleason.

September 26, 1941– Paramount Pictures launches an animated film series based on Superman, produced by Fleischer Studios, which kicks off with the first film Superman.

October 1941 -“A Gnome There Was” (Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) in Unknown Worlds, October 1941

By His Bootstraps • (1941) • novella by Robert A. Heinlein [as by Anson MacDonald] in Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1941 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas

October 7, 1941 –June 6, 1944 –The Raleigh Cigarette Program starring comedian Red Skelton premiered. The program spun off The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet which premiered on CBS in October 1944, the year Red got drafted.

October 10, 1941 – Never Give a Sucker an Even Break  starring W. C. Fields, Gloria Jean, and Leon Errol. Fields also wrote the original story, under the pseudonym Otis Criblecoblis. Fields plays himself, promoting an extravagant screenplay he has written. As he describes the script to a skeptical producer, the often surreal scenes are shown. Never Give a Sucker an Even Break was Fields’s last starring role. Now 61 years old and in declining health, he frequently had to recuperate in his dressing room between takes, a lifetime of alcoholism having taken its toll.

October 16, 1941 – The organization Young Life was started in Gainesville, Texas  by Presbyterian minister Jim Rayburn and is currently led by president and CEO Newt Crenshaw.

October 18, 1941 –The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre 

October 31, 1941 – Dumbo, animated film from Walt Disney

November 1941 – InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA became an official organization.

November 12, 1941 – WWII: As the Battle of Moscow begins, temperatures around Moscow drop to −12 °C, and the Soviet Union launches ski troops for the first time, against the freezing German forces near the city.

November 14, 1941 – The Mighty Navy – The Mighty Navy (Fleischer Studios, 1941) is not only Popeye‘s hundredth theatrical short, but the first in which the iconic character is depicted as a member of the United States Navy, as well as given the white Navy uniform that he would mostly wear onscreen for decades to come.  Popeye the Sailorpedia 

November 20, 1941 – She’s Oil Mine – the last short subject American comedian Buster Keaton made for Columbia Pictures. The film is a reworking of Keaton’s 1932 feature The Passionate Plumber. The duel was also reworked in Keaton’s 1947 French short Un Duel A Mort. Keaton made a total of 10 films for the studio from 1939 to 1941. After making 10 shorts for Columbia, Keaton chose not to renew his contract and opted for supporting roles in feature films. Columbia continued to offer the Keaton comedies to theaters well into the 1960s.

November 21, 1941 – Look Who’s Laughing – The film is built around a number of radio stars from the Golden Age of Radio including  Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Lucille Ball, Harold Peary as Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve.

The live blues radio program King Biscuit Time is broadcast for the first time on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas; it will attain its 17,000th broadcast in 2014 making it the longest-running daily American radio broadcast.

December 1941 –Snulbug • short story by Anthony Boucher in  Unknown Worlds, December 1941

December 2, 1941 – Ball of Fire

December 4, 1941 – The State of Jefferson is declared in Yreka, California, with a judge, John Childs, as governor.

December 5, 1941 – Mr. Bug Goes to Town – It was the second and final feature-length film from Fleischer Studios (following Gulliver’s Travels in 1939), the sixth animated film produced by an American studio, and the first based largely on an original story. Mr. Bug was envisioned originally as an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlinck‘s 1901 novel The Life of the Bee, but Paramount was unwilling to purchase the rights from Samuel Goldwyn. It was Paramount’s last animated feature film until Charlotte’s Web in 1973.

December 7, 1941 (December 8 – 3:18 a.m., Japan Standard Time) – WWII Pearl Harbor?  Aircraft flying from Imperial Japanese Navy carriers launch a surprise attack on the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, thus drawing the United States into World War II. The attack begins at 7:55 a.m. Hawaiian Standard Time, and is announced on radio stations in the U.S. at about 11:26 p.m. PST (19.26 GMT). Was there a Pearl Harbor Conspiracy?  

At 2:26 p.m. EST (19:26 GMT), the Mutual Broadcasting System in the United States interrupts its play-by-play commentary on the New York Giants/Brooklyn Dodgers NFL game to announce the attack on Pearl Harbor.

December 9, 1941 – The Wolf Man – The film is the second Universal Pictures werewolf film, preceded six years earlier by the less commercially successful Werewolf of London (1935). This film is one of the Universal Monsters movies, and garnered great acclaim for its production.

After this movie’s success, Lon Chaney Jr. would reprise his role as “The Wolf Man” in four sequels, beginning with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943.

December 14, 1941 – Wedding Worries – It was the 202nd Our Gang short to be released. It was the final appearance of Darla Hood.

The Art of Skiing with  Goofy

December 19, 1949 – Twelve days after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland graduates its “Class of 1942” a semester early, so as to induct the graduating students without delay into the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps as officers, for immediate stationing in the war.

December 21, 1941– The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with new episodes broadcast at 4-week intervals, ending on 18 October 18 – 1942. The series was written by novelist and dramatist Dorothy L. Sayers, and produced by Val Gielgud, with Robert Speaight as Jesus.

December 26, 1941 – Playmates – The film stars Kay Kyser, John Barrymore (in his final film), Lupe Vélez, Ginny Simms, May Robson and Patsy Kelly.

Hellzapoppin

December 29, 1941 –Sullivan’s Travels, directed by Preston Sturges, starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake

1941 Okeh Presents the Wayfaring Stranger – Burl Ives

1941 – Small Fry – Bing Crosby

“Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays – Vol. 10 – The Junior Commandos”

29 Years Before I was Born

1942

In 1942, the Archdiocese of Detroit forced controversial radio priest Father Charles Coughlin to close his newspaper Social Justice and forbade its distribution by mail. Coughlin vanished from the public arena, working as a parish pastor until retiring in 1966. He died in 1979 at age 88.

1942 –Edward Hopper – Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago)

1942 – The Tetons and the Snake River is a black and white photograph taken by Ansel Adams in 1942, at the Grand Teton National Park, in Wyoming. It is one of his best known and most critically acclaimed photographs.

1942 – John V. Atanasoff with Clifford Berry successfully test the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, the first electronic digital computing device.

1942 – Enid Blyton –Five on a Treasure Island –Blyton’s books have been worldwide bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies, and have been translated into ninety languages. As of June 2019, Blyton was the fourth-most translated author.

1942 – Poo-poo and the Dragons by C S Forester

1942 – Lucky Bucky in Oz is the thirty-sixth book in the Oz series created by L. Frank Baum and his successors, and the third and last written and illustrated solely by John R. Neill. (He wrote a fourth, The Runaway in Oz, but died before illustrating it.)^[1] The book was followed by The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946).

1942 – Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck– serialized in Asia (9/1941–2/1942)

Other Dramatic Books

• Go Down, Moses by  William Faulkner

1942 – Buck Rogers #4

1942 – 1944 – Alley Oop Complete Sunday HC Vol 04 World War II 1942-1944

1942– A Witness Treeby Robert Frost, The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1943.

• “The Gift Outright“
• “A Question“
• “The Silken Tent“

1942 – John Hendrix, The Tennessee Prophet  Oak Ridge is a city in Anderson and Roane counties in the eastern part of the U.S. state of Tennessee, about 25 miles (40 km) west of downtown Knoxville.  Oak Ridge (the Atomic City) was established  as a production site for the Manhattan Project—the massive American, British, and Canadian operation that developed the atomic bomb. Being the site of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, scientific and technological development still plays a crucial role in the city’s economy and culture in general.

A popular legend holds that John Hendrix (1865-1915), a largely unknown local man, predicted the creation of the city of Oak Ridge around 40 years before construction on the project began. Hendrix lacked any formal education, and was a simple logger for much of his life.

January 1, 1942 – WWII: The Declaration by United Nations is signed by China, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, and 22 other nations, in which they agree “not to make any separate peace with the Axis powers“.

January 3, 1942 – Last episode of The Bishop and the Gargoyle

February 1942 – The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie and features her fictional amateur detective Miss Marple.

The Screwtape Letters by  C. S. Lewis and dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien.

February 1942 – “It Had to be Murder” (Rear Window)   Dime Detective Magazine under the title  by Cornell Woolrich

February 3, 1942 – Red Ryder debuts on NBC Blue West Coast.

January 15 1942– President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives baseball the go-ahead to play despite World War II. FDR encourages more night baseball so that war workers may attend. The Cubs, who had signed contracts to install lights at Wrigley Field, drop their plans because of the military need for the material. There will be no lights at Wrigley for 46 more years.

February 10, 1942 – Glenn Miller receives his first gold disc, for “Chattanooga Choo Choo“.

February 25, 1942 – “Battle of Los Angeles“: Over 1,400 AA shells are fired at an unidentified, slow-moving object (probably a meteorological balloon) in the skies over Los Angeles. The appearance of the object triggers an immediate wartime blackout over most of Southern California, with thousands of air raid wardens being deployed throughout the city. At least 5 deaths are related to the incident. Despite the several-hour barrages no planes are downed.

March 1942 – Runaround by Isaac Asimov in Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1942 and is part of I, Robot.

The plot revolves around the Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws

March 1942 – Street and Smith Comics: The Shadow

Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1942

• Recruiting Station • novella by A. E. van Vogt (variant of Masters of Time)
• The Wings of Night • short story by Lester del Rey
• Runaround • [Mike Donovan] • novelette by Isaac Asimov
• The Embassy • short story by Donald A. Wollheim [as by Martin Pearson]
• Day After Tomorrow • novelette by Roby Wentz
• Goldfish Bowl • novelette by Robert A. Heinlein [as by Anson MacDonald]
• Describe a Circle • novelette by Eric Frank Russell

May 1, 1942 – Donald Gets Drafted

March 4, 1942 – WWII: Operation K: The Japanese launch an unsuccessful attack carried out by two Kawanishi H8K (“Emily”) flying boats at Pearl Harbor. This is the longest distance ever undertaken by a two-plane bombing mission, and one of the longest bombing sorties ever planned without fighter escort.

March 5, 1942 – To Be or Not to Be

Spring 1942 – The Star Mouse • [Mitkey • 1] • (1942) • novelette by Fredric Brown in Planet Stories, Spring 1942 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas

April 1942 – The Compleat Werewolf” Unknown Worlds, April 1942

April 10, 1942 – Donald’s Snow Fight –Donald Duck gets in a snowball fight with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. 

April 13, 1942 – The Federal Communications Commission minimum programming time required of U.S. television stations is reduced from 15 to 4 hours a week during the war.

May 1942 – Tarzan’s New York Adventure stars Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan. This was the sixth and final film in MGM’s Tarzan series and was the studio’s last Tarzan feature until 1957’s Tarzan and the Lost Safari. Although Tarzan’s New York Adventure  includes scenes set in New York, as well as the customary jungle sequences, it is yet another Tarzan production primarily shot on MGM’s back lots.

May 11, 1942 – Radio Classics – Abbott & Costello Show – Lou Substitutes For Joe DiMaggio

May 15, 1942 – WWII: In the United States, a bill creating the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) is signed into law.

May 20, 1942 – The first African-American seamen are taken into the United States Navy.

May 29, 1942 – Miss Annie Rooney starring Shirley Temple and Dickie Moore. The screenplay by George Bruce has some similarities to the silent film Little Annie Rooney, starring Mary Pickford, but otherwise, the films are unrelated. Notable as the film in which Shirley Temple received her first on-screen kiss, and Moore said it was his first kiss ever.

Yankee Doodle Dandy 

June 1942 – Proof • (1942) • short story by Hal Clement in  Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1942

Wonder Woman (1942 series) #1 – DC Comics, which marks the first stand-alone series of William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peter‘s Wonder Woman. In its first issue supervillain Ares makes his debut.

June 7, 1942 – Suspense debuts on CBS following its 1940 pilot on Forecast.

June 28, 1942 – The Poky Little Puppy written by Janette Sebring Lowrey and illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren. It was first published in 1942 as one of the first twelve books in the Simon & Schuster series Little Golden Books.

July 6, 1942 – The Holocaust: Anne Frank‘s family goes into hiding in an attic above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.

July 26, 1942 – St. Titus Brandsma dies.

Gene Autry takes his oath of office to join the United States Army during the broadcast of Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch.

August 1942 – Detective Comics (1937 series) #66 – DC Comics: In this issue the Batman villain Harvey Dent, better known as Two-Face, makes his debut.

August 9, 1942 – St. Edith Stein dies. 

August 13, 1942 –

Archie Comics Debuts

August 16, 1942 – Polish-Jewish teacher Janusz Korczak follows a group of Jewish children into the Treblinka extermination camp. He was an early children’s rights advocate, in 1919 drafting a children’s constitution.

August 24, 1942 (Rio de Janeiro) – Saludos Amigos (Spanish for “Greetings, Friends”) is a American live-action/animated anthology film produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Set in Latin America, it is made up of four different segments; Donald Duck stars in two of them and Goofy stars in one. It also features the first appearance of José Carioca, the malandro Brazilian parrot.Saludos Amigos premiered in Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1942. It was released in the United States on February 19, 1943.

The film was a success, helping launch the international popularity of Donald Duck and leading Disney to produce The Three Caballeros (1944), another government-funded film aimed at Latin American goodwill.

 September 1942 – The Twonky • (1942) • short story by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] and Nerves • novella by Lester del Rey in  Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1942 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas

September 18, 1942 – School Daze 

October 2, 1942 – The Cisco Kid debuts on Mutual.

October 15, 1942 – The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama opens at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.

October 16, 1942 –The Mouse of Tomorrow The origin story of Super Mouse (later changed to “Mighty Mouse”).

November 10, 1942 – Road to Morocco starring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, and featuring Anthony Quinn and Dona Drake. It’s the third of the “Road to …” films.  Road to Morocco was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

November 21, 1942 – The completion of the Alaska Highway (also known as the Alcan Highway) is celebrated (however, the “highway” is not usable by general vehicles until 1943).

November 28, 1942 – The Cocoanut Grove fire was the second-deadliest single-building fire in American history; only the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago had a higher death toll, of 602. It was only two years after the Rhythm Club fire which had killed 209.

November 26, 1942 – The film Casablanca premieres at the Hollywood Theatre in New York City. Released nationally in the United States on January 23, 1943, it becomes one of the top-grossing pictures of 1943 and goes on to win the Best Picture and Best Director awards at the 16th Academy Awards.

November 28, 1942 – Unexpected Riches – It was the 210th Our Gang short to be released. Unexpected Riches is the last appearance of George McFarland as Spanky, ending his eleven-year tenure with the series for reasons of aging into young adulthood as McFarland was 14. Billie “Buckwheat” Thomas would remain the only holdover from the Hal Roach Our Gang era to stay with the series until its end in 1944

George Washington Slept Here

December 1942 – The Weapon Shop by A. E. van Vogt in Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1942.

December 2, 1942 – Manhattan Project: Below the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (a coded message, “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world” is then sent to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt).

December 31, 1942 – The Times Square Ball in Times Square, New York City is not dropped for the first time. Instead, there is a moment of silence at midnight, followed by the sound of bells playing from sound trucks at the base of One Times Square.

28 Years Before I was Born

1943

1943 – The Four Freedoms is a series of four oil paintings made in 1943 by the American artist Norman Rockwell. The paintings—Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear—refer to President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s January 1941 Four Freedoms State of the Union address, in which he identified essential human rights that should be universally protected. The theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, and became part of the Charter of the United Nations. The paintings were reproduced in The Saturday Evening Post over four consecutive weeks in 1943, alongside essays by prominent thinkers of the day. They became the highlight of a touring exhibition sponsored by The Post and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The exhibition and accompanying sales drives of war bonds raised over $132 million.

1943 – How Beautiful Life is When It Gives Us Its Riches” by Frida Kahlo Fridas Photos 

1943 – The Return of the Flame by Rene Magritte – WikiArt.org

1943 – Mary Poppins Opens the Door by P.L. Travers, the third book and last novel in the Mary Poppins series that features the magical English nanny Mary Poppins.

Other 1943 Classic Children’s Books

• Enid Blyton
  • The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage
  • The Magic Faraway Tree
• Virginia Lee Burton – The Little House
• Eleanor Estes – Rufus M. The Moffats # 3 Newbury Honor
• Roald Dahl – The Gremlins
• Esther Forbes – Johnny Tremaine Newbury Winner
• C. S. Forester – The Ship
• Mary Norton – The Magic Bedknob   or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons
• Homer Price (1943) Robert McCloskey
• Arthur Ransome – The Picts and the Martyrs Swallows and Amazons # 11
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince)
• Malcolm Saville – Mystery at Witch End (first in the Lone Pine series of twenty books)

1943 – Betty Smith – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Other 1943 books

• The Story of Marie Powell: Wife to Mr. Milton by Robert Graves
• Colour Scheme  (Roderick Alleyn, book 12) by Ngaio Marsh
• The High Window (Philip Marlow novel # 3) by Raymond Chandler.
• Hungry Hill by Daphne du Maurier
• There Was an Old Woman aka The Quick and the Dead  #16 by Ellery Queen,

1943 – A chemist named James Wright working for General Electric accidently makes Silly Putty.

Chutes and Ladders based on Snakes and ladders is first sold.

This refurbished Coca-Cola advertisement from 1943 is still displayed in Minden, Louisiana.

1943 – Erwin Schrödinger publishes What is Life?, containing conceptual discussion of the genetic code and of negentropy.

 

January (or February) 1943 –Mary Elmes,  an Irish aid worker credited with saving the lives of at least 200 Jewish children at various times during the Holocaust, by hiding them in the back of her car, was arrested on suspicion of aiding the escape of Jews and was imprisoned in Toulouse, later being moved to Fresnes Prison run by the Gestapo near Paris, where she spent six months. Many years after her arrest, Elmes commented on her time in prison by saying “Oh, we all had to suffer some inconveniences in those days!”. Mary’s family hoped that after her ordeal she would leave France but she was determined not to abandon the refugees who still needed her help. Mary worked from her office in Perpignan until the war ended.

Time Locker • [Gallegher] • (1943) • novelette by Henry Kuttner in Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1943 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas

January 1, 1943 – Project Y, the Manhattan Project‘s secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, for development and production of the first atomic bombs under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, begins operations.

Der Fuehrer’s Face – a World War II anti-Nazi propaganda film and an Oscar winner.

January 1, 1943 – Frank Sinatra appears at the Paramount Theatre causing a mob of hysterical bobby soxers to flood Times Square and block midtown New York City traffic for hours. Sinatra becomes a featured singer on the popular Your Hit Parade radio program, and co-star of the series Broadway Bandbox. By fall, he will have left Bandbox to star in his own series Songs By Sinatra.

January 3, 1943 – St. Kateri Tekakwitha is venerated.

January 9, 1943 – Kismeha Jani Kashmiri. The film stars Ashok Kumar, Mumtaz Shanti, and Shah Nawaz. It is notable for introducing several bold themes to Indian cinema for the first time, including the depiction of an anti-hero and an unwed pregnant woman. Kismet became the first major hit in the history of Bombay cinema and is widely regarded as the first all-India blockbuster in Indian film history. Its patriotic songs, which resonated with the ongoing Indian independence movement, played a significant role in its unprecedented box office success.

anuary 14–24, 1943 – WWII: Casablanca Conference: Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States; Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and Generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud of the Free French forces meet secretly at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, to plan the Allied European strategy for the next stage of the war.

February 1943 – Mimsy Were the Borogoves  • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] in Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1943

February 2, 1943 – WWII: In Russia, the Battle of Stalingrad comes to an end, with the surrender of the German 6th Army.

February 3, 1943, at 12:55 – The Dorchester was torpedoed by German submarine U-223. The Four Chaplains were four of the Army officers among the military personnel being transported overseas for duty: they died because they gave up their life jackets to save others. These chaplains included Methodist minister George L. Fox, Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling, Catholic Church priest John P. Washington and Rabbi Alexander B. Goode.

Congress established February 3 as “Four Chaplains Day” to commemorate this act of heroism, and on July 14, 1960, created the Chaplain’s Medal for Heroism, presented posthumously to the next of kin of each of the chaplains by Secretary of the Army Wilber M. Brucker at Fort Myer, Virginia on January 18, 1961.

February 19, 1943 – September 23, 1943 – Red Rackham’s Treasure – The twelfth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

February 23–24, 1943 – Cavan Orphanage Fire: 35 girls and a cook from St Joseph’s Orphanage, an industrial school at Cavan, Ireland, are killed in a fire in their dormitories. A subsequent inquiry absolves the Poor Clares of blame.

March 1943 – Q. U. R. • [Quinby’s Usuform Robots] • (1943) • short story by Anthony Boucher in Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1943

March 4, 1943 – Australia wins its first Oscar, with cinematographer Damien Parer honoured for Kokoda Front Line! documentary.

March 13, 1943 – Having received information that the Kraków Ghetto was to be cleared, Oscar Schindler kept his Jewish workers in the factory. Schindler witnessed the clearing the Kraków Ghetto. Many were sent to the gas chambers while hundreds of others were murdered in the streets. What he saw shocked Oskar Schindler and made him determined to save as many Jews as he could. Oskar Schindler Timeline 1908-1974 | TheTimelineGeek

March 17, 1943 – These Happy Golden Years  -by Laura Ingalls Wilder the eighth of nine books in her Little House series – although it originally ended it. It is based on her later adolescence near De Smet, South Dakota, featuring her short time as a teacher, beginning at age 15, and her courtship with Almanzo Wilder. It spans the time period from 1882 to 1885, when they marry.  The novel was a Newbery Honor book in 1944, as were the previous four Little House books.

(Saint Patrick’s Day) – Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, makes the speech “The Ireland That We Dreamed Of“, commonly called the “comely maidens” speech, in Dublin Castle.

March 20, 1943 Tex Avery‘s Dumb-Hounded is first released, produced by MGM, marking the debut of Droopy.

March 31, 1943 – Oklahoma! opens on Broadway.

April 2, 1943 Clyde Geronimi‘s Pluto cartoon Private Pluto, produced by the Walt Disney Company, premieres. It marks the debut of Chip ‘n’ Dale.

April 25, 1943 – Easter occurs on the latest possible date (last time 1886; next time 2038) in the Western Christian Church.

April 30, 1043 – Air Raid Wardens starring Laurel and Hardy.

May 3, 1943 – The musical comedy drama Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald, premieres in New York City. It opens in Los Angeles on August 16. The highest-grossing picture of the year, it goes on to win a total of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for McCary, Best Actor for Crosby and Best Original Song for “Swinging on a Star“.

May 16, 1943 – Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which began on April 19 ends. 13,000 Jews have been killed in the ghetto and almost all the remaining 50,000 residents are deported to Majdanek and Treblinka extermination camps.

May 21, 1943 – The Ox-Bow Incident directed by William A. Wellman, starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Mary Beth Hughes, with Anthony Quinn, William Eythe, Harry Morgan and Jane Darwell.

May 29, 1943 – Norman Rockwell‘s illustration of ‘Rosie the Riveter‘ first appears, on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

June 2, 1943 – Hit the Ice starring the comedy team of Abbott and Costello.

June 3, 1943 – The Zoot Suit Riots erupt between military personnel and Mexican-American youths in East Los Angeles

June 29 1943 –Mystici Corporis Christi – On the Mystical Body of Christ, by Pope Pius XII, 

July 16, 1943  –Batman

July 17, 1943 – Porky Pig’s Feat is one of the few short films in which Porky interacts with both Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.

Victory Through Air Power -Produced by Walt Disney Productions It is based on the 1942 book of the same name by Alexander P. de Seversky, who himself appeared in the film, an unusual departure from Disney animated feature films of the time.

July 25, 1943 – Benito Mussolini, Fascist Prime Minister of Italy since 1922, is arrested after the Grand Council of Fascism withdraws its support. “Il Duce” is replaced by General Pietro Badoglio.

August 1943 – M 33 in Andromeda • [Space Beagle] • short story by A. E. van Vogt in Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1943

August 2, 1943 – Former baseball player Moe Berg accepted a position with the Office of Strategic Services Special Operations Branch (SO) for a salary of $3,800 ($69,100 today) a year. He played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, though he was never more than an average player and was better known for being “the brainiest guy in baseball.” Casey Stengel once described Berg as “the strangest man ever to play baseball.”

August 3, 1943 – Patton slapping incident: U.S. General George S. Patton Jr. slaps a soldier suffering from battle fatigue, at a field hospital in Sicily. On August 10, he slaps another soldier suffering from the same condition.

August 12, 1943 – Phantom of the Opera

August 13, 1942 – Bambi produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures, loosely based on Felix Salten‘s 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods.

August 14, 1943 – WWII: Rome is declared an open city by the Italian government, with Italy offering to demilitarize the capital, in return for an Allied agreement not to bomb the city further.

September 1943– Doorway Into Time • short story by C. L. Moore in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, September 1943

September 13, 1943 – June 5, 1944 – Ed Sullivan Entertains was the basis for Sullivan’s later television program.

October 1943 – The Proud Robot • [Gallegher] by Henry Kuttnein Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1943 and Adventures in Time and Space (1946) by  Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas

October 7, 1943 – Lassie Come Home starring Roddy McDowall as the boy Joe Carraclough, Pal as Lassie, and featuring Elizabeth Taylor. The motion picture was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry. A remake of Lassie Come Home, entitled Lassie, was released in 2005.

October 30, 1943 – “Pistol Packin’ Mama” by Al Dexter goes where no “Hillbilly” record has ever gone, to the top of the National Best Selling Retail Records chart in the United States.

 November 1943 – Allied prisoners of war were forced to broadcast propaganda, and Iva Toguri D’Aquino (July 4, 1916 – September 26, 2006) was selected to host portions of the one-hour radio show The Zero Hour. Toguri called herself “Orphan Annie“, but she quickly became inaccurately identified with the name “Tokyo Rose“, coined by Allied soldiers and which predated her broadcasts.

November 4, 1943 –Abbott and Costello resume their NBC Radio programme after a six-month hiatus for health reasons, Lou Costello having battled a severe case of rheumatic fever. While rehearsing, Costello learns that his youngest son accidentally drowned in the family pool, just two days before his first birthday. The show goes on as scheduled, with no one in the audience having any knowledge of what has happened until the end, when Costello abruptly rushes from the stage in tears. Partner Bud Abbott delivers the tragic news live over the entire network to the shocked audience.

November 5, 1943 – First Bombing of the Vatican – Four bombs are dropped on the neutral Vatican City; the aircraft responsible is never certainly identified.

Effects of shrapnel on a wall of the Vatican City railway station, which is adorned with a sculpture of Elijah in his fiery chariot

November 7, 1943 – 1944 United States presidential election: Franklin D. Roosevelt wins reelection over Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey, becoming the only U.S. president elected to a fourth term.

November 19, 1943 – Margaret of Hungary (January 27, 1242 – 18 January, 18 1270) is canonized.

November 22, 1943 – MGM’s musical Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien, premieres. Hugely popular with both audiences and critics, the film is nominated for four Academy Awards.

November 26, 1943 – Her Honor the Mare  –Popeye‘s first standard cartoon to be produced in color and the 123rd in the overall series.

December 14, 1943 – Eggs Don’t Bounce  is the 1st Little Lulu cartoon.

December 23, 1943 – The first complete opera, Hansel and Gretel, is telecast, by WRGB in Schenectady.

December 24, 1943 –  The Phantom starring Tom Tyler as “The Phantom” and Jeanne Bates as “Diana Palmer“.

December 25, 1943 –The Song of Bernadette, starring Jennifer Jones. The movie wins the 1st Golden Globe for best Picture, Actress and Director.

December 31, 1943 – The Times Square Ball in Times Square, New York City isn’t dropped a second time. Instead, there was a moment of silence at midnight, followed by the sound of bells playing from sound trucks at the base of One Times Square.

“Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays – Vol. 11 – Death Be Thy Name”

27 Years Before I was Born

1944

1944–45 –  Pablo Picasso –The Charnel House, oil and charcoal on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. –  The painting is purported to deal with the Nazi genocide of the Holocaust. The black and white ‘grisaille‘ composition centers on a massed pile of corpses and was based primarily upon film and photographs of a slaughtered family during the Spanish Civil War.^[1] It is considered to be the second of three major anti-war Picassos, preceded by Guernica in 1937 and succeeded by Massacre in Korea in 1951.

1944 – The Chalet School #18 Gay Lambert at the Chalet School by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

1944 – Shadow of Doctor Syn is the seventh and last in the series of Doctor Syn novels by Russell Thorndike. It follows the events of Amazing Quest of Doctor Syn. Though it is the last book written in the series it acts as a prequel for the first novel. Thorndike dedicated it to Emma Treckman, with whom he co-wrote the stage play The Return of Doctor Syn.

1944- Wilderness Trek by Zane Grey

1944 – Perry Mason # 25 – The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde (1944) – A beautiful blonde gets a fist in the eye from her employer’s son, and Mason must defend her when her roommate is murdered.

1944 –  Flash Gordon: Classic Collection Vol. 4 by Don Moore (Author) , Austin Briggs (Illustrator) reprints the Flash Gordon Sunday strip from 1944-1948.

1944 – Hingees Katzenjammer Kids (1944 King Features Syndicate) comic books

1944– Time Must Have a Stop  by Aldous Huxley. It follows the story of Sebastian Barnack, a young poet who holidays with his hedonistic uncle in Florence. Many of the philosophical themes discussed in the novel are explored further in Huxley’s 1945 work The Perennial Philosophy.

Other 1944 Literature

• Immortal Wife by  Irving Stone.– Historical novel based on the life of Jessie Benton Frémont

1944 – The reed of God by Caryll Houselander

1944 – Between 1944 and 1960, Adrienne von Speyr dictated to Hans Urs von Balthasar some sixty books of spiritual and Scriptural commentary, including John, Mark, The Letter to the Ephesians, Elijah, and Three Women and the Lord. Given von Speyr’s commitments as a mother and a doctor, von Balthasar alone worked to arrange, edit, and publish the texts with ecclesiastical approval through the German-language press Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln. One of her first books to appear was her translation of The Story of a Soul by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—the first in the German language.

1944 – The only known fossils of Poekilopleuron are destroyed during the Allied liberation of Normandy.

January 1944 – Technical Error

January 13, 1944 – Henry Aldrich, Boy Scout

January 16, 1944 – The Life of Riley premiers on the Blue Network (later known as ABC).

January 25, 1944  – A total solar eclipse is visible in Pacific Ocean, South America, Atlantic Ocean and Africa, the 48th solar eclipse of Solar Saros 130.

January 28, 1944 – Lifeboat, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Tallulah Bankhead, John Hodiak, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Henry Hull and Hume Cronyn

February 44– The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

The Zadran tribe rises up against the Afghan government, starting the Afghan tribal revolts of 1944–1947.

February 5, 1944 – Captain America (serial)

February 28, 1944 – Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker and later a Christian writer and public speaker, who worked with her father, Casper ten Boom, her sister Betsie ten Boom and other family members to help many Jewish people escape from the Nazis during the Holocaust in World War II by hiding them in her home. A Dutch informant, Jan Vogel, told the Nazis about the Ten Booms’ work on this day at around 12:30 p.m. The Nazis arrested the entire Ten Boom family. They were sent to Scheveningen Prison when Resistance materials and extra ration cards were found at the home.

March 19, 1944 – Chicago Tribune
Terry and the Pirates

March 19, 1944 – Blessed Cosma Spessotto makes his profession of solemn vows.

March 24, 1944 – The “Great Escape”: 76 Royal Air Force prisoners of war escape by tunnel “Harry” from Stalag Luft III in Silesia this night. Only 3 men (2 Norwegians and a Dutchman) return to the UK; of those recaptured, 50 are summarily executed soon afterwards, in the Stalag Luft III murders.

March 27, 1944 – In Sweden, Ruben Rausing patents Erik Wallenberg‘s method of packaging milk in paper, origin of the international company Tetra Pak.

March 27, 1944 – It Happened Tomorrow

Spring 1944 – The Veil of Astellar • [The Asteroid Belt] • novelette by Leigh Brackett in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spring 1944

April 1, 1944- Tex Avery‘s Screwball Squirrel premieres, produced by MGM’s Cartoon Studio; marks the debut of Screwy Squirrel.

April 16, 1944 – WWII: Allied forces start bombing Belgrade, killing about 1,100 people. This bombing falls on the Orthodox Christian Easter.

April 29, 1944 – Dancing Romeo –It was the 220th and final Our Gang short to be released.

• Billy Laughlin as Froggy
• Bobby Blake as Mickey
• Janet Burston as Janet
• Billie Thomas as Buckwheat

May 1944– Jean-Paul Sartre‘s existentialist drama No Exit (Huis Clos) premières in Nazi-occupied Paris. The play centers on a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. It is the source of Sartre’s especially famous phrase “L’enfer, c’est les autres” or “Hell is other people”, a reference to Sartre’s ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object from the view of another consciousness.

City • [City] • novelette by Clifford D. Simak in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1944

May 7, 1944– Chucho Ramos made his major league debut as first baseman and outfielder with the Cincinnati Reds. He was the third baseball player from Venezuela to play Major League Baseball

May 14, 1944 – George Lucas is born.

June 44 – Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1944

June 6, 1944 – WWII: D-Day: 155,000 Allied troops shipped from England land on the beaches of Normandy in northern France, beginning Operation Overlord and the Invasion of Normandy. The Allied soldiers quickly break through the Atlantic Wall and push inland, in the largest amphibious military operation in history. This operation helps liberate France from Germany, and also weakens the Nazi hold on Europe.

June 9, 1944 – The Invisible Man’s Revenge – It is the fifth film in the Invisible Man film series, loosely based on the novel by H. G. Wells.

June 10, 1944 – 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall becomes the youngest baseball player to pitch a game in major league history.

June 16, 1944 – Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944). He was an African-American child who was convicted, in a proceeding later vacated as an unfair trial, of apparently murdering two white girls, Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames, ages 7 and 11, in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was executed by electric chair. Stinney is the youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed since Hannah Ocuish in 1786.

June 23, 1944 – The Holocaust: Maurice Rossel of the International Committee of the Red Cross visits Theresienstadt concentration camp, uncritically accepting the propaganda view of it presented by the Schutzstaffel.

June 30, 1944 – The Mummy’s Ghost – It is the second of three sequels to The Mummy’s Hand (1940), following The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) and preceding The Mummy’s Curse (1944). Lon Chaney Jr. again takes on the role of Kharis the mummy.

July 1944 – “Huddling Place” by Clifford D. Simak –Astounding Science Fiction, July 1944

Zorro # 10 – “Zorro Draws a Blade”, West Magazine Vol. 56 No. 2, July 1944 – Zorro’s first appearance in West Magazine.

July 6, 1944 – WWII: At Camp Hood, Texas, future baseball star and 1st Lt. Jackie Robinson is arrested and later court-martialed, for refusing to move to the back of a segregated U.S. Army bus (he is eventually acquitted).

July 16, 1944 – WWII: Adolf Hitler departs Berchtesgaden for what will be the final time as he flies to the Wolf’s Lair, aborting Operation Foxley, a British plot to assassinate him.

July 20, 1944 – WWII: Adolf Hitler survives the 20 July plot to assassinate him led by Claus von Stauffenberg; he and his fellow conspirators in this and Operation Valkyrie are executed the following day.

The annular solar eclipse of July 20, 1944 is visible in Africa, Indian Ocean, Asia, Pacific Ocean and Australia, and is the 35th solar eclipse of Solar Saros 135.

August 1, 1944 – WWII: The Warsaw Uprising begins.

Missus Goes a Shopping premiers CBS. The show was “set very simply in a store”, with John Reed King as master of ceremonies.

August 4, 1944 – WWII: The Holocaust: A tip from a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed-off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they find Jewish diarist Anne Frank, her family, and others in hiding. All will die in captivity, except for Otto Frank, Anne’s father.

August 9, 1944 – The United States Forest Service and the Wartime Advertising Council release the first posters featuring Smokey Bear.

August 10, 1944 – I Survived the Nazi Invasion, 1944 (I Survived #9) by Lauren Tarshis 

August 19, 1944 – WWII: Liberation of Paris starts with resistance forces staging an insurrection against the German occupiers.

August 31, 1944 – The Mad Gasser of Mattoon   The Mad Gasser of Mattoon gases their first house.  The Mad Gasser was the name given to the person or people believed to be responsible for a series of apparent gas attacks that occurred in Mattoon, Illinois. More than two dozen separate cases of gassings were reported to police over the span of two weeks, in addition to many more reported sightings of the suspected assailant. The gasser’s supposed victims reported smelling strange odors in their homes which were soon followed by symptoms such as paralysis of the legs, coughing, nausea and vomiting. No one died or had serious medical consequences as a result of the gas attacks.

September 30, 1944 –In issue #30 of Superman recurring villain Mister Mxyzptlk makes his debut.

October 8, 1944– The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet debuts on CBS radio.

October 16, 1944 – The Beach Nut with Woody Woodpecker and the first appearance of his recurring antagonist, Wally Walrus.

October 19, 1944 – Hogar de Cristo  is a Chilean public charity created by Saint Alberto Hurtado, a Jesuit priest. He was declared as saint by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 becoming his country’s second saint. Currently, this foundation serves monthly more than 25,000 people in extreme poverty, in the more than 500 works throughout the country. It is led by Fr. Pablo Walker and is part of the works of the Jesuits in Chile.

November 1944 – Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon – This story represents Sturgeon’s sole output between the years 1941 and 1945. Everything else that was published during this time had been written before. Sturgeon suffered from long bouts of writer’s block, but was somehow able to produce this story in 9 days. It is one of his most famous stories, and was his most financially successful during the first decade of his career.

November 17, 1944 – The Princess and the Pirate starringBob Hope with Virginia Mayo and Walter Brennan

December 1944 The Andrews Sisters “Rum and Coca-Cola“^[

December 1, 1944 – Kickapoo Juice starring Li’l Abner

December 15, 1944- The Keys of the Kingdom

House of Frankenstein

Glenn Miller is reported missing. The official explanation is that his plane went down somewhere over the English Channel, although many alternate theories have been suggested.

December 16, 1944 – WWII: Germany begins the Ardennes offensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge. On the same day General George C. Marshall becomes the first U.S. Five-Star General.

December 18, 1944 – General Douglas MacArthur becomes the second U.S. Five-Star General.

December 26, 1944 – The original stage version of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams premieres in Chicago.

26Years Before I was Born

1945

1945 – Baskin-Robbins was founded in 1945 by Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins in Glendale, California.

1945– The White Deer by James Thurber

1945 – Tove Jansson – The Moomins and the Great Flood (Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen, first in the Moomin series of 14 books

1945 –Astrid Lindgren – Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Långstrump, first in the Pippi Longstocking series of three full-length and six picture books)

1945 – E. B. White– Stuart Little

1945 – The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (Italian: La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia) written and illustrated by Dino Buzzati. It tells the story of an armed conflict between the bears and humans of Sicily. It is written in novel format, with a great deal of poetry and illustrations as well.

1945 – The High Barbaree by Charles Nordhoff 

1945 – The Adventures of Sam Spade and other stories by Dashiell Hammett

Till Death Do Us Part by John Dickson Carr featuring his series detective Gideon Fell in his 15th story. This novel is a mystery of the type known as a locked room mystery. Carr considered this one of his best impossible crime novels.

Other Mystery Books

• Virus X – (The sixth book in the Dr. Paul Vivanti series) by Sydney Horler 

1945 –  The Lost Gospels   The Nag Hammadi library (also known as the   “Chenoboskion  Manuscripts” and the “Gnostic Gospels”) is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. The Nag Hammadi library (also known as the “Chenoboskion Manuscripts” and the “Gnostic Gospels”  is a collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi.

1945 – “Leaf by Niggle” (short story), by J. R. R. Tolkien published in The Dublin Review

1945 – All Hallows’ Eve by Inkling Charles Williams– Follows the fortunes of two women after death and their interactions with those they knew before, contrasting the results of action based either on selfishness or an accepting love.

1945 – Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by  Evelyn Waugh,

1945 – THE SEVEN WORDS OF JESUS AND MARY: A Christian Guide to Understanding Motherly Love by Fulton J. Sheen

1945 – The splendor of the Rosary by Maisie Ward

January 1945 – Cannery Row by  John Steinbeck

Superboy in More Fun Comics #101 (January), created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – DC Comics

January 3, 1945  – Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet Edgar Cayce  (March 18, 1877 – January 3, 1945) dies. He was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to channel his higher self while in a trance-like state. If you  Test Edgar Cayce’s Psychic Abilities  do they hold up?

January 6, 1945 – Chuck Jones‘ Odor-able Kitty premieres, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons which marks the debut of the French skunk Pepé Le Pew.

January 16, 1945 – WWII: Adolf Hitler takes residence in the Führerbunker in Berlin.^[4]

January 17, 1945 – WWII: The Soviet Union occupies Warsaw, Poland.

The Holocaust: Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who has saved thousands of Jews, is taken into custody by a Soviet patrol during the Siege of Budapest and is never again seen publicly.^[5]

January 18, 1945 – The Holocaust: The SS begins the evacuation of Auschwitz concentration camp. Nearly 60,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, are forced to march to other locations in Germany; as many as 15,000 die. The 7,000 too sick to move are left without supplies being distributed.

January 19, 1945 – The Holocaust: Soviet forces liberate the Łódź Ghetto; only 877 Jews of the initial population of 164,000 remain at this time

January 26, 1945 – WWII: 19-year-old U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Audie Murphy sees action at Holtzwihr, France, for which is awarded the Medal of Honor.

Brenda Starr, Reporter  

January 27, 1945 – Draftee Daffy – The film depicts Daffy as a draft dodger, who desperately tries to avoid an agent of the draft board. Part of the film is set in hell, but Daffy is unable to end this pursuit.

January 29, 1945– Lionel Barrymore becomes the host of Lux Radio Theater, replacing Cecil B. DeMille

January 30, 1945 –  Adolf Hitler makes his last public speech to be delivered personally, on broadcast radio, expressing the belief that Germany will triumph in World War II.

February, 1945 – Raymond L. Libby of American Cyanamid‘s research laboratories, at Stamford, Connecticut, announces a method of orally administering the antibiotic penicillin.

Wanted – an Enemy • short story by Fritz Leiber in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1945

February 3, 1945 – The Three Caballeros produced by Walt Disney

February 13–15, 1945 – The bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces destroys 13 square miles (34 km²) of the city, and causes a firestorm that consumes the city centre. Landmarks destroyed include the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper (the Saxony state opera house), and the Zwinger Palace. In the decades following the end of the war, some of the lost buildings are reconstructed.

February 22, 1945 – Leave It to Blondie  – Directed by Abby Berlin and starring Penny Singleton, Arthur Lake and Larry Simms. It was fifteenth of the twenty-eight in the series of Blondie films released by Columbia Pictures.

February 23, 1945 – The Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is an iconic photograph of six United States Marines raising the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in the final stages of the Pacific War. Taken by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press the photograph was published in Sunday newspapers two days later and reprinted in thousands of publications. It won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography and has come to be regarded in the United States as one of the most recognizable images of World War II.

March 1, 1945 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives what will be his last address to a joint session of the United States Congress, reporting on the Yalta Conference.

March 3, 1945 – Superman encounters Batman and Robin for the first time. This occurs on the Mutual Network.

March 25, 1945 – Saint Maria Goretti (October 16, 1890 – 6 July 6, 1902) is venerated.

April 1, 1945 – WWII: Battle of Okinawa: The Tenth United States Army lands on Okinawa. During the battle United States Army corporal and combat medic Desmond Doss  (February 7, 1919 – March 23, 2006) saved the lives of 50–100 wounded infantrymen atop the area known by the 96th Division as the Maeda Escarpment or Hacksaw Ridge. Due to his religious beliefs, he refused to carry a weapon. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Okinawa.

 

April 9, 1945 – Abwehr conspirators Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnányi are hanged at Flossenberg concentration camp, along with pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

April 12, 1945 – The death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt interrupts programming on radio networks in the United States. On CBS, John Charles Daly interrupts his narration of Wilderness Road to read the wire message.

Vice President Harry S. Truman becomes the 33rd president of the United States upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia of an intracerebral hemorrhage. President Truman is sworn in later this evening in the White House.

A devastating tornado outbreak occurs across the United States, which kills 128 people and injures over 1,000 others. This is heavily overshadowed by the death of President Roosevelt.

April 16, 1945 – WWII: The Battle of Berlin begins, opening with the Red Army launching the Battle of the Oder–Neisse and the Battle of the Seelow Heights.

April 19, 1945 – Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s Carousel, a musical play based on Ferenc Molnár‘s Liliom, opens on Broadway, and becomes their second long-running stage classic. It includes the standard “You’ll Never Walk Alone“.

April 20, 1945 – Son of Lassie based on characters created by Eric Knight, and starring Peter Lawford, Donald Crisp, June Lockhart and Pal (credited as Lassie). A sequel to Lassie Come Home (1943).

The Horn Blows at Midnight

April 28, 1945 – The bodies of Benito Mussolini, his mistress, Clara Petacci, and other followers are hung by their heels at a gas station in the public square of Milan, Piazzale Loreto, following their execution by Italian partisans after an attempt to flee the country.

April 30, 1945 – WWII: Death of Adolf Hitler: Adolf Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, commit suicide as the Red Army approaches the Führerbunker in Berlin. Großadmiral Karl Dönitz succeeds Hitler as Reichspräsident (President of Germany) and Joseph Goebbels succeeds as Reichskanzler (Chancellor of Germany), in accordance with Hitler’s political testament the day earlier.

May 1945 – “First Contact” by  Murray Leinster   (from Astounding Science Fiction, May 1945)

May 2, 1945 – WWII:The Soviet Union announces the fall of Berlin. The famous picture of Raising a Flag over the Reichstag was taken at this date.

A Holocaust death march from Dachau to the Austrian border is halted under two kilometers west of Waakirchen by the segregated, all-Nisei 522nd Field Artillery Battalion of the U.S. Army in southern Bavaria, saving several hundred prisoners.

May 5, 1945 – Friz Freleng‘s Bugs Bunny cartoon Hare Trigger premieres, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, It marks the debut of Bugs’ other iconic adversary Yosemite Sam.

May 7, 1945 

May 8, 1945 – WWII: Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) is observed by the western European powers as Nazi Germany surrenders, marking the end of WWII in Europe.

May 18, 1945 – The Bullfighters – Starring comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, the sixth and final film the duo made under 20th Century Fox as well as the last released in the United States.

Summer 1945 – The World-Thinker • novelette by Jack Vance in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945

June 1945 – “The Ethical Equations” by Murray Leinster (from Astounding Science Fiction, Jun. 1945

June 10, 1945 – Karl Swenson played the title character of Father Brown in the 1945 Mutual radio program The Adventures of Father Brown.

June 20, 1945 – The Naughty Nineties starring the comedy team of Abbott and Costello. The film is noteworthy for containing a filmed version of the duo’s famous “Who’s on First?” routine. This version is shown at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

July 19, 1945 – Anchors Aweigh ^♫

July 30, 1945 – Perry Como Till The End Of Time“^[

August 1945 – “Pipeline to Pluto”by  Murray Leinster (from Astounding Science Fiction, Aug. 1945)

August 3, 1945 – Gypsy Life starring Mighty Mouse cartoon that was nominated for an Oscar in the 18th Annual Academy Awards.

August 6, 1945 – WWII: Atomic bombing of Hiroshima: United States Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay drops a uranium-235 atomic bomb, codenamed “Little Boy“, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. local time, resulting in between 90,000 and 146,000 deaths.

August 7, 1945 – U.S. President Harry Truman announces the successful atomic bombing of Hiroshima, while he is returning from the Potsdam Conference aboard the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31), in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

August 8, 1945 – The United Nations Charter is ratified by the United States Senate, and this nation becomes the third to join the new international organization.

WWII: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.

August 9, 1945 – WWII: Atomic bombing of Nagasaki: At 11:00 a.m. a Japanese marine engineer at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries named Tsutomu Yamaguchi was describing the blast in Hiroshima to his supervisor, when the American bomber Bockscar dropped the Fat Man atomic bomb over the city two minutes later. His workplace again put him 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) from ground zero, but this time he was unhurt by the explosion. He he is the only person to have been officially recognized by the government of Japan as surviving both explosions. The 2nd bombing resulted in between 39,000 and 80,000 deaths.

While the bombing devastated both the city of Nagasaki and its large Catholic population, the monastery of Seibo no Kishi located in the mountains on the outskirts of Nagasaki was spared.

A Franciscan monastery built by Father Maximilian Kolbe and his supporters in 1931, this spot served as the second location for Kolbe’s “City of the Immaculata” mission that had started with his Niepokalanów monastery in Tersein, Poland.
– EWTN Great Britain

God and the atom by Fr. Ronald Knox. An ethical and philosophical analysis of the shock of the atomic bomb, its use against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the moral questions arising therefrom.

Also on this date the Soviet–Japanese War opens: The Soviet Union begins its army offensive against Japan, in the northern part of the Japanese-held Chinese region of Manchuria.

August 10, 1945 – WWII: Japan offers to surrender to the Allies, “provided this does not prejudice the sovereignty of the Emperor”.

August 14–15 , 1945 –Desperate Coup in Japan!   The Kyūjō incident was an attempted military coup d’état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened  just before the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.

August 15, 1945 – Emperor Hirohito broadcasts his declaration of surrender following the effective surrender of Japan in World War II; Korea gains independence from the Empire of Japan.

V-J Day in Times Square, a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, was published in Life in 1945 with the caption, “In New York’s Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers”

August 25, 1945 – Bảo Đại abdicates as Emperor of Vietnam, ending 2,000 years of dynastic and monarchic rule in the country and 143 years of the Nguyễn dynasty.

September 1945 –  Uncommon Sense • [Laird Cunningham] • short story by Hal Clement

September 1, 1945 – The folk song This Land Is Your Land sung by Woody Guthrie is published. One of the United States‘ most famous folk songs, its lyrics were written in 1940 in critical response to Irving Berlin‘s “God Bless America“. Its melody is based on a Carter Family tune called “When the World’s on Fire”. When Guthrie was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio in the late 1930s, he sarcastically called his song “God Blessed America for Me” before renaming it “This Land Is Your Land”.

September 2, 1945 – World War II ends: Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita surrenders to Philippine and American forces at Kiangan, Ifugao.

The final official Japanese Instrument of Surrender is accepted by the Supreme Allied Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz for the United States, and delegates from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, China, and others from a Japanese delegation led by Mamoru Shigemitsu, on board the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

September 8, 1945 – U.S. troops arrive in Southern Korea, while the Soviet Union occupies the north, with the dividing line being the 38th parallel of latitude. This arrangement proves to be the indirect beginning of a divided Korea, which will lead to the Korean War when North Korea invades in 1950.

October, 1945 – Arthur C. Clarke puts forward the idea of a geosynchronous communications satellite, in a Wireless World magazine article.

October 4, 1945 – Kiss and Tell

October 5, 1945 – Hollywood Black Friday: A strike by the Set Decorator’s Union in Hollywood results in a riot.

October 24, 1945 – The United Nations is founded by ratification of its Charter, by 29 nations.

November 9, 1945 – Soo Bahk Do and Moo Duk Kwan martial arts are founded in Korea.

November 16, 1945 –  Isadore Sparber‘s The Friendly Ghost premieres, produced by Famous Studios, in which Casper the Friendly Ghost makes his debut.

November 17, 1945 –  Captain Tugboat Annie – This is the second sequel to the classic Tugboat Annie (1933), this time starring Jane Darwell as Annie and Edgar Kennedy as Horatio Bullwinkle. The film was directed by Phil Rosen, and is also known as Tugboat Annie’s Son.

November 20, 1945 – The Nuremberg trials begin: Trials against 22 Nazis for war crimes of World War II start at the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg.

November 27, 1945 -The Slinky developed by American naval engineer Richard T. James is successfully demonstrated at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia.

December 1945 –Black Adam in Marvel Family Comics #01 (December) – Fawcett Comics

December 1, 1945 – US Army–Navy football game is transmitted 145 kilometers (90 mi) by coaxial cable from Philadelphia to New York City.

December 2, 1945 – Final Skippy comic by Percy Crosby.

December 5, 1945 –  Bermuda Triangle Questions  Flight 19 was the designation of a group of five General Motors TBM Avenger torpedo bombers that disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle. Flight 19 is featured in the 1977 science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the film’s opening, the aircraft are discovered in the Sonoran Desert, in pristine condition with full fuel tanks, one of several mysterious events that imply extraterrestrial activity. In the film’s ending scene, the crew returns to Earth from the alien mothership, seemingly the same age as at their disappearance.

December 9, 1945 – American General George S. Patton is involved in a car accident in Germany, resulting in his death on December 21.

December 27, 1945 – Twenty-one nations ratify the articles creating the World Bank.

December 20, 1945 – A Hollywood film, Call of the Yukon, is released in Japan for the first time since July 1941.

December 22, 1945 –San Antonio, starring Errol Flynn and Alexis Smith

“Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays – Vol. 12 – It’s Only a Paper Moon”

25 Years Before I was Born

1946

1946 – Raggedy Ann in the Snow White Castle is a novel by Johnny Gruelle, illustrated by his brother, Justin.

1946 –T. H. White – Mistress Masham’s Repose

1946 – The Hollow by  Agatha Christie – The novel is an example of a “country house mystery” and was the first of her novels in four years to feature the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot—one of the longest gaps in the entire series. Agatha Christie, who often admitted that she did not like Poirot (a fact parodied by her recurring novelist character Ariadne Oliver), particularly disliked his appearance in this novel. His late arrival, jarring, given the established atmosphere, led her to claim in her Autobiography that she ruined the novel by the introduction of Poirot.

1946 – The Saint Sees it Through by Leslie Charteris featuring his creation, Simon Templar, alias The Saint. This was the final full-length novel featuring Templar to be solely written by Charteris, as the author chose to concentrate on short stories and novella-length Saint stories hereafter.

1946 – The Secret Panel by Harriet S. Adams (Franklin W. Dixon) is Volume 25 in the original The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories published by Grosset & Dunlap.

1946 – The Time Stream by John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell). -The novel was originally serialized in four parts in the magazine Wonder Stories beginning in December 1931. It is the first novel to see time as a flowing stream

1946 – Adventures in Time and Space by Raymond J. Healy, J. Francis McComas includes several books in this list and others from the 30’s and 40’s by top Golden Age Sci-Fi Authors.

1946 – The Last Books of H.G. Wells: The Happy Turning: A Dream of Life & Mind at the End of its Tether 

1946 – Come, Tell Me How You Live – It is a short book of autobiography and travel literature by crime writer Agatha Christie. It is one of only two books she wrote and had published under both of her married names of “Christie” and “Mallowan”.

1946 – Earl Tupper (1907–1983) was a chemist with DuPont who refined polyethylene and developed prototype plasticwares out of it for the company. In 1938 he founded the Tupperware Plastics Company.He created the first Tupperware product in 1946 in Leominster, Massachusetts. The airtight, food-safe plastic containers were targeted to consumers.

1946 – The Almond Joy bar was introduced in 1946 as a replacement for the Dreams Bar, which was introduced in 1934, consisting of diced almonds and coconut covered with dark chocolate.

1946 -HITS ARCHIVE: Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop – Lionel Hampton (#1 R&B hit)

January 4, 1946 – Terrytoons produces The Talking Magpies, in which Heckle and Jeckle make their debut.

January 16, 1946 – Anthony of Padua was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius XII.

February 7, 1946 – Adventure  directed by Victor Fleming and starring Clark Gable and Greer Garson. Based on the 1937 novel The Anointed by Clyde Brion Davis, the film is about a sailor who falls in love with a librarian. Adventure was Gable’s first postwar film and the tagline repeated in the movie’s famous trailer was “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!” Gable had suggested “He put the arson in Garson,” while Garson proposed “She put the able in Gable.”

March 1946 – “A Logic Named Joe” by  Murray Leinster (from Astounding Science Fiction, Mar. 1946)

The Traveller [The Elliott Family] by  Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales, March 1946 later collected in The October Country

April 1946 –Loophole • short story by Arthur C. Clarke in  Astounding Science Fiction, April 1946

April 11, 1947 – Monsieur Verdoux, directed by and starring Charles Chaplin

April 16, 1946 – The Time of Their Lives

April 22, 1946 – (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 by Nat King Cole, with the King Cole Trio.

April 20, 1946 – Make Mine Music  – During World War II, much of Walt Disney‘s staff was drafted into the army, and those that remained were called upon by the U.S. government to make training and propaganda films. As a result, the studio was littered with unfinished story ideas. In order to keep the feature film division alive during this difficult time, the studio released six package films including this one, made up of various unrelated segments set to music.

April 24, 1946 – The 1st Edgar Awards Ceremony is held at the Hotel Pierre in New York City. The inaugural awards were presented for the categories of Best First Novel, Best Motion Picture, Best Radio Drama, and Outstanding Mystery Criticism. The ceremony marked the beginning of an annual event that would honor the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television, film, and theater published or produced in the previous year. The awards have since evolved to include various genres and have recognized many talented authors who have made significant contributions to the mystery genre. -Britannica

The first winner in the only book category Best First Novel Watchful at Night by Julius Fast can hardly be found anywhere today.

April 25, 1946 – Partners in Time – Based on the radio comedy program Lum and Abner, the film stars Chester Lauck and Norris Goff.

May 1946 –  Rescue Party novelette by Arthur C. Clarke in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1946

April 29, 1946 – Trials against war criminals begin in Tokyo; the accused include Hideki Tojo, Shigenori Tōgō and Hiroshi Ōshima.

May 16, 1946 –Annie Get Your Gun opens on Broadway.

May 21, 1946 – Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally triggers a fission reaction at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States and, although saving his coworkers, gives himself a lethal dose of ionizing radiation, making him the second victim of a criticality accident in history (the incident is initially treated as classified information).

May 23, 1946 – Chick-fil-A,s origin can be traced to the Dwarf Grill (now the Dwarf House), a restaurant opened by S. Truett Cathy (the chain’s former chairman and CEO) in 1946 in the Atlanta suburb of Hapeville, Georgia. It was here that Cathy and his brother created the chicken sandwich that later became the signature menu item for Chick-fil-A.

June 1946 – The Million-Year Picnic by Ray Bradbury  in Planet Stories, Summer 1946

Elizabeth Goudge – The Little White Horse

The Christmas Song is recorded by The Nat King Cole Trio.

June 6, 1946 – The NBA is founded as the Basketball Association of America. Unlike the NBL, this second major professional league attempts to operate primarily in large arenas in major cities. Also this year the Boston Celtics, a major National Basketball Association club was founded in Massachusetts, United States.

June 7, 1946 – Squatter’s Rights -The cartoon is about a confrontation between Pluto and Chip and Dale who have taken up residence in Mickey Mouse‘s hunting shack. It was the 119th short in the Mickey Mouse film series to be released, and the only one produced that year.  it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 19th Academy Awards, but ultimately lost to The Cat Concerto, an MGM Tom and Jerry cartoon, which shared one of 7 Oscars for the Tom and Jerry series.

The BBC Television Service begins broadcasting again for the first time since 1939. The first words heard are “Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?”. Twenty minutes later, the Mickey Mouse cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premiere, last programme transmitted seven years earlier at the start of World War II, is reshown.

Dressed to Kill – This is the last of fourteen films starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson. The film has an original story, but combines elements of the short stories “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” and “A Scandal in Bohemia.” It is one of four films in the series which are in the public domain and is available online.

June 8, 1946 – Kitty Kornered  has the first appearance of Porky Pig with Sylvester.

June 19, 1946 – The first televised heavyweight boxing title fight between Joe Louis and Billy Conn is broadcast from Yankee Stadium. The fight is seen by 141,000 people, the largest television audience to see a boxing match to this date.

June 22, 1946 – Tonka, an American brand and former manufacturer of toy trucks is founded.

July 1946 – The Night by Ray Bradbury in Weird Tales, July 1946 and is part of the Series Dandelion Wine

July 4, 1946 -After more than 48 years of American dominance, the Philippines attains full independence as the 3rd Republic; Manuel A. Roxas is 5th President of the Philippines. It marks the end of nearly 400 years of colonial era when the Viceroyalty of New Spain took control since April 27, 1565

July 7, 1946 – Frances Xavier Cabrini is the first U.S. citizen to be canonized.

July 8, 1946 Frank Sinatra “Five Minutes More“

July 12, 1946 – The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective debuts on ABC radio.

July 28, 1946 – St. Alphonsa dies. She is the first canonized saint of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church. In the 1990s, a commemorative postal stamp was issued in her honor, marking her as the first woman from Kerala to be featured on an Indian stamp.

August 2, 1946 – Boom in the Moon  – It is a Mexican comedy science fiction film directed by Jaime Salvador and starring Buster Keaton. The film is notable both as Keaton’s only Mexican production and as the last time Keaton had star billing in a feature film.

August 4, 1946 – Children’s puppet “Muffin the Mule” debuts in an episode of the series For the Children. He is so popular he is given his own show later that same year.

August 22, 1946 – Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse. The story is another adventure of Bertie Wooster and his resourceful valet Jeeves.

Other Comic Novels

• Chloe Marr by A. A. Milne

August 30, 1946 – I Love to Eat premieres on NBC (1946–1947). It was a cooking show hosted by chef and cookbook author James Beard. The show is notable for having been the first network television cooking show to air in the United States.

August 31, 1946 – Robert McKimson‘s Walky Talky Hawky premieres, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons. It marks the debuts of Foghorn Leghorn and his arch-nemesis Barnyard Dawg, also McKimson’s first short starring Henery Hawk.

September 1946 – Vintage Season novella by  Catherine L. Moore and  Henry Kuttner, as “Lawrence O’Donnell“. It was published in Astounding Science Fiction September 1946. It was filmed in 1992 as Timescape.

September 1946  Swing and Sway With Sammy Kaye “The Old Lamp-Lighter

September 15, 1946 – DuMont Television Network begins broadcasting regularly in the United States.

October 2, 1946 – The first television network soap opera, Faraway Hill, is broadcast by DuMont.

October 10, 1946 – The Noakhali genocide of Hindus in Bengal begins, at the hands of Muslim mobs.

October 15, 1946 – Nuremberg trials: Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and recently convicted Nazi war criminal, poisons himself two hours before his scheduled execution.

October 16, 1946 -The remaining ten Nazi war criminals sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials are executed by hanging, in a gymnasium in the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg.

The United Nations‘ first meeting in Long Island is held.

October 18, 1946 – Spree For All  – A Snuffy Smith cartoon.

October 22, 1946 – Telecrime, the first television crime series from the 1930s, is resumed by the BBC, retitled Telecrimes. It was a British drama series that aired on the BBC Television Service from 1938 to 1939 and in 1946. One of the first multi-episode drama series made, it is also one of the first television dramas written especially for television rather than being adapted from theatre or radio productions. Having first aired for five episodes from 1938 to 1939, Telecrime returned in 1946, following the resumption of television after the Second World War, and aired as Telecrimes.

November 1946–February 1947   The Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery The Discovery of The Dead Sea Scrolls  was by Bedouin shepherd Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum’a Muhammed, and Khalil Musa first discover what is known today as The Dead Sea Scrolls in this time period.  They were found in a series of 12 caves around the site originally known as Ein Feshkha near the Dead Sea in the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan). All the scrolls were discovered  between 1946 and 1956 by these Bedouin shepherds and also a team of top crack amazing archeologists such as Dr. Henry Jones. The practice of storing worn-out sacred manuscripts in earthenware vessels buried in the earth or within caves is related to the ancient Jewish custom of genizah.

November 1, 1946 –Pope Saint John Paul II is ordinated.

November 4, 1946 – UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is established as a specialized agency of the United Nations.

November 10, 1946 – Life Magazine 10th anniversary issue with Nancy Maloney.

November 12, 1946 – Song of the South Produced by Walt Disney, and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It is based on the Uncle Remus stories as adapted by Joel Chandler Harris, stars James Baskett in his final film role, and features the voices of Johnny Lee, Baskett, and Nick Stewart.

Disney has not released Song of the South on any home video format in the United States, and the film has never been available on its streaming platform Disney+. Some of the musical and animated sequences have been released through other means, and the full film has seen home video distribution in other countries. The cartoon characters from the film continued to appear in a variety of books, comics, and other Disney media for many decades after the film’s release. The theme park ride Splash Mountain, located at Tokyo Disneyland and formerly located at Disneyland and Magic Kingdom, is based on the film’s animated sequences.

December 1946 – Johnny Mercer & the Pied Pipers had a No. 8 hit with their rendition of the song in December 1946. The flip side of the record was “Everybody Has a Laughing Place”, from the same movie and by the same composers. As a result, Mercer had to correct listeners who mistakenly assumed that he wrote it

December 18, 1946 – Steven Spielberg is born.

The Yearling

December 20, 1946 –Spoon Bending?  Uri Geller  (December  20, 1946) is born. He is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller uses conjuring tricks to simulate the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller’s career as an entertainer has spanned more than four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries. Magicians have called Geller a fraud due to his claims of possessing psychic powers

December 20, 1946 – Frank Capra‘s It’s a Wonderful Life, featuring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Henry Travers, and Thomas Mitchell opens in New York.

December 21, 1946 – Dick Tracy (also known as Dick Tracy, Detective) is a 1945 American action film based on the Dick Tracy comic strip created by Chester Gould. The film is the first of four installment of the Dick Tracy film series, released by RKO Radio Pictures.

December 24, 1946 – The first Christmas church service is telecast, Grace Episcopal Church in New York, on WABD.

December 25, 1946 – Love Laughs at Andy Hardy directed by Willis Goldbeck and starring Mickey Rooney, Lewis Stone and Bonita Granville. This was the fifteenth and penultimate film in the Andy Hardy series. The final installment, Andy Hardy Comes Home (1958), would be released 12 years later.

This film was also noteworthy for being the last in the Andy Hardy series to feature veteran character actor Lewis Stone as Judge Hardy. Stone continued his career for the next seven years, appearing in 10 more films until his death in 1953 at age 73.

December 31, 1946 – U.S. President Harry S. Truman delivers Proclamation 2714, which officially ends hostilities in World War II.

24 Years Before I was Born

1947

1947 – Raytheon built the “Radarange”, the first commercially available microwave oven.

1947 – The Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis was founded by Mother Benedict Duss, O.S.B. and Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, O.S.B. in Bethlehem, Connecticut. This monastic foundation was one of the first houses of contemplative Benedictine nuns in the United States. This is the convent the former actress Sister Dolars Hart ends up in.

1947 – The Madonna House Apostolate  is founded by Servant of God by Catherine Doherty in Combermere, Ontario, and has established mission houses throughout the world. It is recognized by the Catholic Church as an association of the Christian faithful.

1947 – Arthur Ransome – Great Northern? – It is the twelfth and final completed book of Arthur Ransome‘s Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books.

1947 – The Bobbsey Twins in Mexico  (Original Bobbsey Twins #40) by Laura Lee Hope

1947 – McElligot’s Pool –Dr. Seuss  In the story, a boy named Marco, who first appeared in Geisel’s 1937 book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, imagines a wide variety of fantastic fish that could be swimming in the pond in which he is fishing. It later became one of the Seuss books featured in the Broadway musical Seussical where its story is used for the song “It’s Possible”. It was his first book in seven years and became a Junior Literary Guild selection and garnered Geisel his first Caldecott Honor. On March 2, 2021, Dr. Seuss Enterprises withdrew McElligot’s Pool and five other books from publication because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong”.

1947– Addams and Evil is a collection of Cartoons by Charles Addams. It is his second anthology of drawings of The Addams Family.

1947 – Tarzan and the Foreign Legion by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the twenty-second in his series of twenty-four books about the title character Tarzan. The book, written June–September 1944 while Burroughs was living in Honolulu and published in 1947, was the last new work by Burroughs to be published during his life,

1947 – The Mightiest Machine  by  John W. Campbell, Jr. The novel was originally serialized in 5 parts in Astounding Stories magazine from December 1934 to April 1935. The Incredible Planet, is a fix-up novel, also by Campbell, published in 1949.

1947 – Rocket Ship Galileo by  Robert A. Heinlein -It was the first in the Heinlein juveniles, a long and successful series of science-fiction novels published by Scribner’s. Heinlein originally envisioned the novel as the first of a series of books called “Young Rocket Engineers”. Publishers initially rejected the script, judging going to the Moon as “too far out”.

1947 -The Condamine Case (A book in thebradseries) A novel by Moray Dalton

1947 – The Legion of Space  by Jack Williamson. It was originally serialized in Astounding Stories in 1934.

1947 – Miracles: A Preliminary Study (revised 1960)  by C. S. Lewis

1947 – Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed

January 1947 – The Fourth Book of Jorkens  by Lord Dunsany.

January 1, 1947 – Lieutenant Commander Thompson and Chief Petty Officer John Marion Dickison utilized “Jack Browne” masks and DESCO oxygen rebreathers to log the first dive by Americans under the Antarctic. Paul Siple was the senior U.S. War Department representative on the expedition. Siple was the same Eagle Scout who is one of a very few individuals to participate in all five of the Antarctic expeditions conducted by Richard E. Byrd.

All persons born in Canada automatically were granted Canadian citizenship at birth. Persons with the previous Canadian citizenship (being a class of British subject) were also granted the new citizenship under most conditions. “Status Indians” (see the Indian Act) born before this date were retroactively given Canadian citizenship in 1956. They had not been “enfranchised” citizens before 1947.

January 2, 1947 -After nearly three years in the monastery, Sister Mary Angelica of the Annunciation”. made her first profession of vows. She would be later be referred to as Mother Angelica who went on to found EWTN.

January 9, 1947 – Half-Wits Holiday starring the Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard in his final starring role). It is the 97th entry in the series.

January 13, 1947 – Sinbad the Sailor

January 15, 1947 – Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress nicknamed the “Black Dahlia“, is found brutally murdered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles; the mysterious case is never solved.

January 25, 1947 Arthur Davis‘ The Goofy Gophers, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons is first released where the Goofy Gophers make their debuts.

January 26, 1947 –  The Greatest Story Ever Told debuts on ABC.

February 1947 – The Apocryphal Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the First Class Carriage is a British Sherlock Holmes pastiche written by Ronald A. Knox published in The Strand Magazine in February 1947.

February 8, 1947 – St. Josephine Bakhita  (1869 – February 8, 1947) dies.

Struttin is an album by Louis Armstrong with Edmond Hall‘s All Stars, recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1947, but not released until 1996, 25 years after Armstrong’s death in 1971.

I Wonder, I Wonder, I Wonder is a song he did release in 1947

February 13, 1947, to September 11, 1957 – Family Theater (1947–1957) debuts on Mutual. With the help of Hollywood personalities, Fr.  Patrick Peyton began to produce from Hollywood, family values-oriented radio dramas for Mutual under the banner of “Family Theater of the Air”. The first broadcast was made  with guest artists Loretta Young, James Stewart (who was not a Catholic) and Don Ameche.

March 1947 – Tomorrow’s Children • [Tomorrow’s Children • 1] • novelette by Poul Anderson and F. N. Waldrop in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1947

March 6, 1947 – Fright Night The Three Stooges (Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Shemp Howard, in his first starring role after returning to the act). It is the 98th entry in the series released by Columbia Pictures starring the comedians, who released 190 shorts for the studio between 1934 and 1959.

March 11, 1947 – The first successful American children’s television series, Movies for Small Fry debuts on the DuMont Network.

March 12, 1947 – The Cold War begins: The Truman Doctrine is proclaimed, to help stem the spread of Communism.

March 21, 1947 –The Egg and I, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray. It is based on the book of the same name by Betty MacDonald. The box office success of The Egg and I influenced the production of Universal-International‘s Ma and Pa Kettle series, which consists of nine feature films

April, 1947 – The previous discovery of the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls‘ in the Qumran Caves (above the northwest shore of the Dead Sea) by Bedouin shepherds, becomes known.

Time and Time Again • (1947) • short story by H. Beam Piper in Astounding Science Fiction, April 1947

April 1, 1947 –Jackie Robinson, the first African American in Major League Baseball since the 1880s, signs a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

April 7, 1947 – 1st Tony Awards Ceremony takes place. Presented by the ATW, the Awards celebrated “outstanding contributions to the current American theatre season.”^[3] According to The New York Times, these awards “do not designate their recipients as ‘best’ or ‘first’ but the classifications in which they are given will be elastic from year to year.” The ceremony, hosted by Brock Pemberton, was broadcast on radio station WOR and the Mutual Network.

The awards got their nickname, “Tonys“, during the ceremony itself when Pemberton handed out an award and called it a “Toni”, referring to the nickname of Antoinette Perry, co-founder of the American Theatre Wing.

 April 26, 1947 –  The Cat Concerto  It was the 29th Tom and Jerry shortWith an early showing in 1946 it qualified for and won the 1946 Oscar for Best Short Subject: Cartoons. In 1994, it was voted #42 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time by members of the animation field.

April 27, 1947 –Saint Maria Goretti is beautified.

May 1947 –  E for Effort • (1947) • novelette by T. L. Sherred in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1947

May 7, 1947 -1958 – Kraft Television Theater premiers on NBC.

May 3, 1947 – Friz Freleng‘s Tweetie Pie premieres, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons. Bob Clampett‘s character Tweety Bird and Freleng’s Sylvester the Cat are first paired together, thus marking the start of the Tweety & Sylvester series.

May 15, 1947 – Bulldog Drummond at Bay -Directed by Sidney Salkow and starring Ron Randell for the first time as the British sleuth and adventurer Bulldog Drummond.

June 1947 – The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is introduced

June 11, 1947 – Miracle on 34th Street

June 14, 1947 – Along Came Daffy –Along Came Daffy is one of only two Warner Bros. shorts (the other being Honey’s Money from 1962), where Yosemite Sam is not paired with his usual antagonist, Bugs Bunny.

June 24, 1947 – Kenneth Arnold and the First UFOs  Kenneth Albert Arnold (March 29, 1915 – January 16, 1984) makes the first widely reported modern unidentified flying object sighting in the United States, after claiming to have seen nine unusual objects flying in tandem near Mount Rainier, Washington. After his alleged sighting, Arnold investigated reports of UFOs, writing and speaking about the topic for years to come.

June 25, 1947 – The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is published for the first time as Het Achterhuis: Dagboekbrieven 14 juni 1942 – 1 augustus 1944 (“The Annex: Diary Notes from 14 June 1942 – 1 August 1944”) in Amsterdam, two years after the writer’s death in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

July 1947 – With Folded Hands … • [Humanoids] • (1947) • novelette by Jack Williamson in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947

The People of the Crater • [Garan] • (1947) • novelette by Andre Norton in Fantasy Book, Vol. 1, No. 1

July 8, 1947 –The Roswell UFO Crash (Overview)   Roswell UFO incident: A supposedly downed extraterrestrial spacecraft is reportedly found near Roswell, New Mexico. The Roswell incident took place during the flying disc craze of 1947, sparked by widespread media coverage of pilot Kenneth Arnold‘s alleged sighting.

Major League Baseball on NBC (1947–2000)

July 20, 1947 – Louis de Montfort is canonized.

July 27, 1947 – Catherine Labouré is canonized.

September 1, 1947 – The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer

September 13–21, 1947 -The first Billy Graham Crusade was held at the Civic Auditorium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was attended by 6,000 people.

September 18, 1947 – Brick Bradford, a 15-chapter serial film starring Kane Richmond, was produced by Columbia Pictures

September 25, 1949 – U.S. Christian evangelist Billy Graham starts his Los Angeles Crusade, his first great evangelistic campaign. It runs for eight weeks during which Graham speaks to 350,000 people and the event is subsequently described as the greatest revival since the time of Billy Sunday. After this, Graham becomes a national figure in the United States.

September 27, 1947 – Mickey and the Beanstalk — segment of Fun and Fancy Free, Jimmy MacDonald‘s first role as Mickey (filling in for parts not voiced by Walt Disney). It is narrated by Edgar Bergen. It reunites the comic trio of  Mickey, Donald, and Goofy  The other segment in the film is Bongo, narrated by Dinah Shore and loosely based on the short story “Little Bear Bongo” by Sinclair Lewis.

September 30, 1947 – The opening game of the World Series is the first World Series game to be telecast. The 1947 World Series is watched by an estimated 3.9 million people (many watching in bars and other public places), becoming television’s first mass audience.

The 1947 World Series matched the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Yankees won the Series in seven games for their 11th World Series championship in team history. Yankees manager Bucky Harris won the Series for the first time since managing the Washington Senators to their only title in 1924, a gap of 23 years, the longest between World Series appearances in history.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson, a Brooklyn Dodger, desegregated major league baseball. For the first time in World Series history, a racially integrated team played.

In Game 3 in the second inning the Dodgers rang up six runs. After a one-out walk, Bruce Edwards‘s double and Pee Wee Reese‘s single scored a run each.

Joe DiMaggio hit a two-run home run in the fifth after a walk.

Yankee Yogi Berra pinch-hit for Sherm Lollar in the seventh inning of Game 3 and hit the first pinch-hit home run in World Series history. Ralph Branca served the pitch.

October 1947 Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra Ballerina

October 1, 1949 – The People’s Republic of China is officially proclaimed.

October 5, 1947 – The first telecast of a presidential address from the White House. President Truman speaks about the world food crisis.

October 6, 1947 –Here Comes Santa Claus  by Gene Autry 

October 13, 1947 – The puppet show series Junior Jamboree, later known as Kukla, Fran and Ollie, premieres on WBKB in Chicago, Illinois. It was created for children, but was soon watched by more adults than children. It did not have a script and was entirely ad-libbed.

October 14, 1947 – United States Air Force test pilot Captain Chuck Yeager flies a Bell X-1 rocket plane faster than the speed of sound, the first time it has been accomplished.

November 1947 –George Beverly Shea sang at the unofficial launching of Graham’s crusades in the old Armory in Charlotte, North Carolina. His first song was “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story.” In the early days of his association with Graham, Shea earned a wage for each meeting.

November 6, 1947 – Meet the Press first appears as a local program in Washington, D.C.

November 24, 1947 – McCarthyism: The United States House of Representatives votes 346–17 to approve citations of Contempt of Congress against the “Hollywood Ten“, after the screenwriters and directors refuse to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee concerning allegations of communist influences in the movie business. The ten men are blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios on the following day.

November 25, 1947 (Premiere) – The Bishop’s Wife

November 28, 1947 – Jack Hannah‘s Donald Duck cartoon Chip an’ Dale, produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, premieres, in which Chip ‘n’ Dale are first paired with Donald Duck.

November 29, 1947 – The United Nations General Assembly votes for the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine which will partition Mandatory Palestine between Arab and Jewish regions, resulting in the creation of the State of Israel.

December 5, 1947 – Little Audrey debuts in the short film Santa’s Surprise, produced by Famous Studios.

December 18, 1947 Brick Bradford 1947

December 27, 1947 – Puppet Television Theater (later called Howdy Doody), a children’s television program on NBC (1947–1960)

“Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays – Vol. 13 – Spies and Counterspies”

23 Years Before I was Born

1948

1948 – The Board game Scrabble is first sold.

1948 – The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer is published.

1948 – Bill Rosenberg opened the Open Kettle in 1948, a restaurant selling doughnuts and coffee in Quincy, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston), but two years later in late May 1950, he changed the name to Dunkin’ Donuts after discussions with company executives.

1948 –Reddi-Whip: Pre-whipped cream in a can is developed by Aaron S. “Bunny” Lapin.

1948 – ”Earl Shaffer is best known as the first person to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one, continuous journey. Such hikes have come to be known as “thru-hikes” from the words, “hiking through. He began the journey from Mt. Oglethorpe, in Georgia (the trail’s southern end at that time). With sparse equipment that would be regarded as grossly inadequate by most of the through-hikers since – he used worn boots, his army rucksack, and no stove or tent – he reached Mt. Katahdin in Maine, in 124 days, averaging 17 miles per day. Especially after he overcame the skepticism of Appalachian Trail Conference officials (who initially believed his claim of completing the route was obviously fraudulent), his trip raised public awareness of the Trail.

Milly-Molly-Mandy #4 Milly-Molly-Mandy Again by Joyce Lankester Brisley

1948 – Freddy Goes Camping – The 15th book in the humorous children’s series Freddy the Pig written by American author Walter R. Brooks, and illustrated by Kurt Wiese. When a hotel owner is forced to sell under mysterious circumstances, Freddy and his friend Mr. Camphor pose as campers to investigate.

1948 – Just William’s Luck -Book 26 in the  Just William series by Richmal Crompton

1948 – The Ghost of Blackwood Hall is the twenty-fifth volume in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The actual author was ghostwriter Mildred Wirt Benson

1948 – Biggles on the Hunt -Book 34 in the Biggles series(Biggles, Special Air Detective Book 3)

1948 – The Shadow of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer(Book 11 in the Fu Manchu series)

1948 – Triplanetary  by E. E. Smith. It was first serialized in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1934. After the original four novels of the Lensman series were published, Smith expanded and reworked Triplanetary into the first of two prequels for the series.

1948 – The World of Null-A 

1948 – And Some Were Human  by Lester del Rey

1948 – The Wheels of If and Other Science Fiction by L. Sprague de Camp

1948 – Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake  by Hugh Lofting. The book was published posthumously in 1948, 15 years after its predecessor Doctor Dolittle’s Return.

1948 – The Heart of the Matter by  Graham Greene

1948 – “I’m My Own Grandpaw” –Guy Lombardo

January 1948 – It Wasn’t Syzygy by Theodore Sturgeon in Weird Tales, January 1948

January 5, 1948 Superman  

Warner Brothers shows the first color newsreel (Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl Game).

January 7, 1948 – Mantell UFO incident: Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of an unidentified flying object.

January 18, 1948 – The Original Amateur Hour premiers on DuMont Television Network. The show would move to various networks and last till 1970

January 24, 1948 – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

January 29, 1948 – A DC-3 aircraft crash at Los Gatos Creek, near Coalinga, California, kills 4 US citizens and 28 deportees, commemorated in a protest song (“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)“) by Woody Guthrie.

January 30, 1948 – Mahatma Gandhi, Indian activist and leader of the Indian independence movement is killed by Nathuram Godse.

The 1948 Winter Olympics open in St Moritz, Switzerland

February 1, 1948 – The Soviet Union begins to jam Voice of America broadcasts.

February 16, 1948 – Miranda, innermost of the large moons of Uranus, is discovered by Gerard Kuiper

March 4, 1948 – First American television ratings are released by C. E. Hooper

March 8, 1948 – McCollum v. Board of Education: The United States Supreme Court rules that religious instruction in public schools violates the U.S. Constitution.

March 10, 1948 – Sitting Pretty

March 16, 1948 – The Miracle of the Bells directed by Irving Pichel and Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli and Frank Sinatra.

April 1, 1948 – Physicists Ralph Asher Alpher and George Gamow publish the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper, about the Big Bang. Fr. Georges Lemaître originally proposed what he called the “hypothesis of the primeval atom”, now regarded as the first formulation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

 

April 3, 1948 – Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 is played on television in its entirety for the first time in a concert featuring Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The chorus is conducted by Robert Shaw.

April 7, 1948 – State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Adolphe Menjou, Van Johnson and Angela Lansbury.

The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations.

April 18, 1948 – Italian general election, 1948: The first democratic general election with universal suffrage is held in Italy. The Christian Democracy party achieves a majority over the Popular Democratic Front Communist-Socialist coalition.

April 19, 1948 – The American Broadcasting Company (otherwise known as ABC) begins television services, on WFIL-TV in Philadelphia (later WPVI-TV).

April 30, 1948 – The English-built Land Rover is unveiled at the Amsterdam Motor Show.

May 3, 1948 – The first network nightly newscast, CBS Television News, debuts on CBS with Douglas Edwards as journalist.

May 9, 1948 – Solar eclipse of May 9, 1948: An annular solar eclipse is visible in Japan and South Korea, and is the 32nd solar eclipse of Solar Saros 137. This eclipse is very short, lasting just 0.3 seconds. The path width is just about 200 meters wide (approximately 218 yards).

May 12, 1948 – World’s first stored-program computer operates, the mechanical ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator) at Birkbeck College, University of London (largely built by Kathleen Booth).

May 14, 1948 – The Israeli Declaration of Independence is made. David Ben-Gurion becomes the first prime minister, a provisional position that will become formalized on February 14, 1949.

May 15, 1948 – The murder of June Anne Devaney a 3-year-old girl in Blackburn, England. To solve the crime, officers take 46,253 sets of fingerprints before identifying her murderer.

Servant of God Edward J. Flanagan (July 13, 1886 – May 15, 1948) founder of Boys Town dies.

May 16, 1948 – New York City Fire Department Rescue 5 is founded for Staten Island.

May 17, 1948 – The Dewey–Stassen debate becomes the first presidential primary debate to be broadcast on American radio stations.

May 27, 1948 – Melody Time produced by Walt Disney.

June 1948 – The Fuller Brush Man

That Only a Mother • (1948) • short story by Judith Merril in Astounding Science Fiction, June 1948

June 1, 1948 – Puma, a global sports goods brand, is founded in Bavaria, West Germany, by Rudolf Dassler, having split from his brother “Adi“.

June 8, 1948 – Milton Berle becomes the first United States television star with the debut of Texaco Star Theater (later The Milton Berle Show) broadcast by NBC (1948–1953).

June 11, 1948 – The first monkey astronaut, Albert I, is launched into space from White Sands, New Mexico.

June 15, 1948 – Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello is released.

June 20, 1948 – Toast of the Town, a variety series hosted by Ed Sullivan, premieres on CBS, with guests Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (later renamed, The Ed Sullivan Show) (1948–1971).

June 21, 1948 -The Deutsche Mark becomes the official currency of the future Federal Republic of Germany.

June 30, 1948 – Easter Parade starring Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Peter Lawford, and Ann Miller. The film contains some of Astaire’s and Garland’s best-known songs, including “Easter Parade“, “Steppin’ Out with My Baby“, and “A Couple of Swells“, all by Irving Berlin.

July 13, 1948 – The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Churches reach an agreement, leading to the promotion of the Ethiopian church to the rank of an autocephalous Patriarchate. Five bishops are immediately consecrated by the Patriarch of Alexandria and the successor to Abuna Qerellos IV is granted the power to consecrate new bishops, who are empowered to elect a new Patriarch for their church.

July 24, 1948 – Chuck Jones‘ Bugs Bunny cartoon Haredevil Hare premieres, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons in which Marvin the Martian & his dog K-9 make their debuts.

July 19, 1948 – Our Miss Brooks premiers on CBS.

July 29, 1948 – The 1948 Summer Olympics begin in London, the first since the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The BBC Television Service begins its coverage of the 1948 Olympic Games in London by broadcasting the opening ceremony

August 1948 – Jor-El in Superman #53 (August), created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – DC Comics

August 1948 – Time Trap • novelette by Charles L. Harness in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1948

August 5, 1948 – A Southern Yankee 

August 10, 1948 –Candid Camera – The show was created, developed, and presented by Allen Funt. Various versions of the show have appeared on television from 1948 to 2014. The program got its start on radio as The Candid Microphone on June 28, 1947.

August 11, 1948 – Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid

August 14, 1948 – Beaver drop, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game program to relocate beavers from Northwestern Idaho to the Chamberlain Basin in Central Idaho. The program involves parachuting beavers into the Chamberlain Basin.

August 16, 1948 –Pearl Harbor Conspiracy?  Harry Dexter White (October 29, 1892 – August 16, 1948) dies. He was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II. He was later accused of espionage by passing information to the Soviet Union.

August 15, 1948  – Republic of Korea (South Korea) proclaimed (National Day).

August 26, 1948 – Rope, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring James Stewart

August 27, 1948 – Wet Blanket Policy  with Woody Woodpecker and the first appearance of Buzz Buzzard.

September 1948 –

• Mars Is Heaven! by Ray Bradbury 
• Brooklyn Project • short story by William Tenn

in Planet Stories, Fall 1948

September 15, 1948 – The Luck of the Irish 

September  18, 1948, Nestlé launched a drink mix for chocolate-flavored milk called Nestlé Quik in the United States; this was released in Europe during the 1950s as Nesquik

September 29, 1948 – Laurence Olivier‘s film of Hamlet opens in the U.S.

October 1948 –Riddler in Detective Comics #140 (October), created by Bill Finger and Dick Sprang – DC Comics

Tiger Ride • short story by James Blish and Damon Knight in Astounding Science Fiction, October 1948

October 4, 1948 Christmas Songs by Sinatra – Frank Sinatra

October 8, 1948 – Strange Gamble is the 66th and final of the series based on the Clarence E. Mulford character, Hopalong Cassidy.

October 11, 1948 –Thomas Merton – The Seven Storey Mountain

October 13, 1948 – Junior Jamboree (later named Kukla, Fran and Ollie), on WBKB in Chicago (1947–1957)

November 26, 1948 – The Three Musketeers

November 29, 1948 – So Dear to My Heart produced by Walt Disney. It is based on the 1943 Sterling North book Midnight and Jeremiah. The film was a personal favorite of Walt Disney, since it re-created on film one of the most memorable times of his life, growing up on a small farm in the American Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century.

December 1, 1948 – The Mysterious Death of Somerton Man The Somerton Man was an unidentified man whose body was found on  on the beach at Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. The case is also known after the Persian phrase tamám shud  meaning “is over” or “is finished”, which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man’s trousers. The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyám.

3 Godfathers directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and Harry Carey Jr. The screenplay was written by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings based on the 1913 short story The Three Godfathers by Peter B. Kyne. The story is a loose retelling of the biblical Three Wise Men in an American Western context.

December 4, 1948 – Call This Land Home” by Ernest Haycox in the Saturday Evening Post December 4, 1948. Two of 3 stories that features the Mercy family. These stories are Haycox’s “tribute to the pioneer mother.

December 9, 1948 – The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Genocide Convention.

December 10, 1948 – The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

December 15, 1948 – Jungle Jim based on Alex Raymond‘s Jungle Jim comic strip and was distributed by Columbia Pictures. It is the first picture in the Jungle Jim series that consists of 16 films originally released between 1948 and 1955.

December 17, 1948 – Dean Martin – Powder Your Face with Sunshine 

December 30, 1948 – Kiss Me, Kate opens on Broadway.

“Little Orphan Annie: The Complete Dailies & Color Sundays – Vol. 14 – Sunshine and Shadow”

22 Years Before I was Born

1949

1949 – Salvador Dalí – The Madonna of Port Lligat -Dalí presented it to Pope Pius XII in an audience for approval, which was granted.

1949 – Cluedo was originally marketed as “The Great New Detective Game” upon its launch in 1949 in North America.

1949 – The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks.

1949 – Nancy and Sluggo #16

1949 – The Shaggy Man of Oz  is the thirty-eighth book in the Oz series created by L. Frank Baum and his successors, and the second and last by Jack Snow.

1949 – The Greatest Story Ever Told: A Tale of the Greatest Life Ever Lived by Fulton Oursler

1949 – Saints are not sad : forty biographical portraits by Frank Sheed

1949 – The Passion of the Infant Christ by Caryll Houselander 

1949 – Googies coffee shop, West Hollywood, California, designed by John Lautner.

1949 – Church of Saint Francis Xavier, Kansas City, Missouri, designed by Barry Byrne.

1949 – Bob Hope suggests that Anthony Benedetto change his stage name from “Joe Bari” to “Tony Bennett“

1949 – Country singer Bill Haley enters into a partnership with musicians Johnny Grande and Billy Williamson to form Bill Haley and His Saddlemen; in 1952 the group is renamed Bill Haley & His Comets.

1949 – Frankie Laine – Frankie Laine

1949 – The Return of the Wayfaring Stranger – Burl Ives

1949 – For the first time, the Sears & Roebuck catalog includes televisions.

1949 – Candy Land is a simple racing board game created by Eleanor Abbott and published by Milton Bradley

1949 – Junior Mints were introduced in 1949 by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based James O. Welch Company

January 1949 – Our Fair City by  by Robert A. Heinlein in Weird Tales, January 1949

January 2, 1949 –  The Jack Benny Program first appears on CBS radio after 16 years on NBC – one of the most visible results of CBS’ “talent raids.

Bozo the Clown premieres on TV

(1949–present)

January 3, 1949–  Colgate Theatre premieres on NBC.

January 11, 1949 – A two-hour special on all American networks celebrates the linking of the eastern and midwestern networks via coaxial cable.

January 17, 1949 – The first VW Type 1 to arrive in the United States, a 1948 model, is brought to New York by Dutch businessman Ben Pon. Unable to interest dealers or importers in the Volkswagen, Pon sells the sample car to pay his travel expenses. Only two 1949 models are sold in America that year, convincing Volkswagen chairman Heinrich Nordhoff the car has no future in the U.S. (The Type 1 goes on to become an automotive phenomenon.)

The Goldbergs, a situation comedy, debuts on CBS (1949–55).

January 20, 1949 – The second inauguration of President Truman becomes the first presidential inauguration to be broadcast on television.

January 21, 1949 – Your Show Time becomes the first filmed dramatic series on American network television.

January 22, 1949 – Tex Avery‘s cartoon Bad Luck Blackie premieres, produced by MGM. It marks the debut of a prototypical version of Spike the Bulldog. The Tex Avery-directed short was voted the 15th-best cartoon of all-time in a 1994 poll of 1,000 animation industry professionals, as referenced in the book The 50 Greatest Cartoons.

January 31: The first Emmy Awards are presented and broadcast on television from Los Angeles.

February 11, 1949 – Scrappy Birthday is The last Andy Panda short distributed by United Artists and the First and only appearance of Miranda Panda.

February 19, 1949 – John Loves Mary  starring Ronald Reagan, Patricia Neal and Jack Carson. It’s based on a Broadway play of the same name written by Norman Krasna, which ran from February 4, 1947, to February 7, 1948, at the Booth Theatre and Music Box Theatre in New York City.

February 24, 1949 – The Bumper-WAC became the first human-made object to enter space’ reaching an altitude of 393 kilometers (244 miles).

March 1949 –Something in a Cloud • short story by Jack Finney in Good Housekeeping, March 1949

March 1, 1949- Ripley’s Believe It or Not debuts on NBC (1949-1950)

March 24, 1949 – Ghost of Zorro starring Clayton Moore as Ken Mason/Zorro.

March/April 1949 –Superboy, cover-dated March/April, published by DC Comics

April 1949 – Alien Earth • novelette by Edmond Hamilton in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1949

April 7, 1949 –South Pacific opens on Broadway.

April 9, 1949 – The first telethon, benefitting the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, is hosted by Milton Berle and lasts for 24 hours. The first published appearance of the word “telethon” was in the prior day’s newspapers

April 22, 1949 – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a musical adaptation of the novel starring Bing Crosby.

April 26, 1949 – Sculptor Peter Ganine created a sculpture of a duck he then patented it and reproduced it as a floating toy, of which over 50 million were sold.

May 1949 -“History Lesson” (a.k.a. “Expedition to Earth”) by Arthur C. Clarke– Startling Stories, May 1949

May 26, 1949 Batman and Robin 1949

June 13, 1949 – Kind Hearts and Coronets 

June 14, 1949 – Albert II, a rhesus monkey aboard U.S. Hermes project V-2 rocket Blossom IVB, becomes the first primate to enter space. He is killed on impact at return.

June 24, 1949 – The first television western, Hopalong Cassidy, airs on NBC in the United States.

June 30, 1949 – Mickey Mantle hit his first professional home run on , at Shulthis Stadium in Independence, Kansas. The ball went over the center field fence, which was 460 feet from home plate.

July 1949 – The Only Thing We Learn • short story by C. M. Kornbluth in  Startling Stories, July 1949

July 27, 1947 – Come to the Stable

Captain Video and His Video Rangers, apparently the first science fiction series televised, debuts.

July 29, 1949 – In the Good Old Summertime, starring Judy Garland and Van Johnson and Buster Keaton in his first featured film role at MGM since 1933.

July 31, 1949 – Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin (October 6, 1888 – October 20, 1922) is venerated.

August 1, 1949 You’re My Thrill – – Doris Day

August 3, 1949 – The Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League finalize the merger that will create the National Basketball Association.

August 25, 1949 –  Father Knows Best debuts on NBC radio.

August 20, 1949 – Las Lajas Shrine in Colombia, begun in 1916.

September 1949 – Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer sung by Gene Autry 

September 15, 1949 – “Enter the Lone Ranger” Episode 1 of The Lone Ranger – Starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, except for season three when John Hart played the role of the Lone Ranger.

December 15, 1949 Leaf Brands reintroduced malted milk balls under the name of “Whoppers”.

September 17, 1949 – Chuck Jones‘ Fast and Furry-ous premieres, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, which marks the debuts of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

September 21, 1949 – Samson and Delilah produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille  It stars Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr in the title roles, George Sanders as the Saran, Angela Lansbury as Semadar, and Henry Wilcoxon as Prince Ahtur.

September 29, 1949 –John Hubley’s The Ragtime Bear premieres produced by UPA which marks the debut of Mr. Magoo.

September 30, 1949 – Father Was a Fullback

October 1949 – Time Heals • novelette by Poul Anderson in  Astounding Science Fiction, October 1949

October 1, 1949 – The People’s Republic of China is officially proclaimed.

October 5, 1949 – The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad produced by Walt Disney.

October 13, 1949 (San Francisco) – Love Happy starring the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo and Chico) in their 13th and final feature film. The screenplay was written by Frank Tashlin and Mac Benoff, based on a story by Harpo. Love Happy was the final film to be produced by Mary Pickford. There is a cameo appearance by a relatively unknown Marilyn Monroe.

November 7, 1949  – Oil is discovered beneath the Caspian Sea, off the coast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.

November 12, 1949 – The Story of Seabiscuit

Winter 1949 – Dear Pen Pal • short story by A. E. van Vogt in The Arkham Sampler, Winter 1949

December 16, 1949 – The Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, designed by Gerard Moerdijk.

December 21, 1949 – Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin‘s 70th Birthday is Held in Moscow.

December 29, 1949 -KC2XAK of Bridgeport, Connecticut, becomes the first Ultra high frequency (UHF) television station to operate a daily schedule.

December 31, 1949 – The Inspector General

1949 – Blue Skirt Waltz – Frankie Yankovic and his Yanks  and  The Marlin Sisters.