LoveSong1950s

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 11 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (43:35). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. Two tickets torn at the door, a bag of popcorn, and an empty balcony row. The newsreel runs, the cartoon plays, the feature starts, and he loses the thread of all of it because her shoulder is leaning into his. It is the most honest thing on the record. He does not recall a single scene. He recalls the exact weight of a shoulder and the moment the music swelled and she took his hand and he never let go. Popcorn and promises, cheap as can be, worth the whole wide world to me. You said you'd be here and here you are — which is, when you strip everything else away, the entire romance. Popcorn and promises, that's what we had Popcorn and promises, and I'm awful glad You said you'd be here and here you are Prettiest thing beneath any star — from “Popcorn and Promises” Hear the whole album vol.34 runs 15 songs end...

The Space Race · July 20, 1969 Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface, with the photographer reflected in his visor · NASA photograph, public domain (PD-USGov-NASA), via Wikimedia Commons Americans remember the first step as July 20. Much of the rest of the world remembers July 21, and both are right: Armstrong stepped off the ladder at 10:56 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the 20th, which was 02:56 Universal Time on the 21st. Almost every account that gets the date wrong is quietly mixing the two. The picture everybody knows is not of Armstrong. It is Aldrin, standing on the Sea of Tranquility, with Armstrong reflected in the gold visor along with the lander and the long shadows of a lunar morning. There are very few photographs of Armstrong on the surface, because he was carrying the camera. They were outside for about two and a half hours, collected 47.5 pounds of rock and soil, and left behind a seismometer, a laser reflector still in use, and a plaque. The flag, as later photogra...

Today in 1950 · Sunday, October 15, 1950 President Truman met by General MacArthur at Wake Island, October 15, 1950 · U.S. Army Signal Corps photo, Truman Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, on a coral airstrip in the middle of the Pacific, the President of the United States and his Far East commander met face to face — for the first and only time in their lives. Truman had flown 7,000 miles; MacArthur, 1,900. The formal conference at Wake Island ran, by the official record, from 7:36 to 9:12 a.m. — ninety-six minutes — plus another hour and a half of informal talk. The exchange that history remembers took only seconds. Asked what chance the Chinese or the Soviets had of intervening in Korea, MacArthur answered: 'Very little.' He went further — 'we are no longer fearful of their intervention' — reasoning that China had missed its moment. The agenda moved briskly on: Korean reconstruction, prisoners, elections, the Japanese treaty. ...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 10 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (39:26). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. The gym is decked in crepe and gold, the punch is sweet, the floor is cold, and the hired band turns up with a broken drum. For a minute the whole evening hangs there, the way school dances do. Then somebody plugs in the jukebox, the class cheers, and the room gives in. That is how the best night anybody remembers actually gets made — not by the plan working, but by the plan failing and something better filling the gap. A nickel in the slot, no orchestra, no fancy hall, just a jukebox glowing on the wall and a corsage he picked himself. Best of all my golden days, the chorus says, and it is talking about a broken drum. Jukebox junior prom, nickel in the slot Jukebox junior prom, dancing what we've got No orchestra, no fancy hall Just a jukebox glowing on the wall — from “Jukebox Junior Prom” Hear the whole album vol.34 run...

Today in 1950 · Saturday, October 14, 1950 The 1950 Tacoma Narrows Bridge — 'Sturdy Gertie' — in a Historic American Engineering Record photograph · Historic American Engineering Record, NPS, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, ten years after the most famous bridge failure ever filmed, traffic rolled across the Tacoma Narrows again. The original span — 'Galloping Gertie' — had twisted itself to pieces in a forty-mile wind in November 1940, its death captured on newsreel film that engineering students still watch. Its replacement opened today with a gala celebration and a nickname of its own: 'Sturdy Gertie.' The new bridge was everything its predecessor wasn't. Where Gertie's shallow, solid plate girders had caught the wind like a sail, the new span breathed through a 33-foot-deep open Warren truss. Four traffic lanes replaced two; cable capacity rose from 28 to 36 million pounds; the anchor blocks weighed 54,000 tons. The ...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 9 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (35:20). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. Maple Lane is four blocks end to end, and walking her home takes an hour, because they go slow on purpose and stop at every fence and gate to find another reason to wait. Anyone who has been eighteen understands the arithmetic exactly. The song is built from small inventory: streetlamps flickering on at eight, porches counted, neighborhood dogs named, fireflies rising off the logs. Nothing happens. Everything is happening. Every leaf a lantern and every step a song — and the wish underneath the whole thing is that the road would be longer. Moonlight on Maple Lane, take me home again, down the road where it all began. Moonlight on Maple Lane, silver on the street Moonlight on Maple Lane, right beneath our feet Every leaf a lantern and every step a song And I could walk this road my whole life long — from “Moonlight on Maple Lane” ...

Today in 1950 · Friday, October 13, 1950 Bette Davis as Margo Channing in the trailer for All About Eve (1950) · 20th Century-Fox trailer screenshot, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this Friday night in 1950, at the Roxy in New York, 'All About Eve' had its world premiere — and the movies got their sharpest portrait of ambition ever put on film. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's backstage drama gave Bette Davis the role of her life as Broadway star Margo Channing, Anne Baxter as the adoring fan dismantling her idol from within, and George Sanders as the critic Addison DeWitt, narrating the whole feast of knives. The Roxy tried something novel for the run: scheduled performances with no late seating — and abandoned the policy after one week, because 1950 audiences were simply used to wandering into movies whenever they pleased. The picture itself proved harder to walk away from. It collected a record fourteen Academy Award nominations — one more than 'Gone with the ...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 8 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (30:08). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. Every afternoon at half past four he sweeps the corner store, and every afternoon at twenty past she comes in walking way too fast and buys a soda she does not need. The price is written right there on the shelf and he cannot read it. This is the funniest song on the album because it is told entirely against the singer. He is a Casanova until she smiles, and then he is dropping apples and tripping over his own feet in front of a boss who is laughing too hard to help. Just ask her, the boss finally says — the answer's clear, she's been coming in for half a year. Sweet defeat, the chorus calls it, and he would do it all again the same. I'm a corner store Casanova, smoothest in the aisle Corner store Casanova till you flash that smile Then I'm dropping all the apples and I'm tripping on my feet Corner store Casan...

The Space Race · July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 lifts off from Launch Complex 39A on July 16, 1969 · NASA photograph, public domain (PD-USGov-NASA), via Wikimedia Commons People who were at the Cape describe the sound before the sight: three and a half miles away, the ground moved, car windows flexed, and the noise arrived as pressure rather than volume. The Saturn V stood 363 feet, weighed about 6.2 million pounds fueled, and burned through most of its first-stage propellant in two and a half minutes. What it was carrying on July 16, 1969 was three men and a lander, and the whole vehicle existed to deliver a payload smaller than a delivery van to a specific patch of a place nobody had walked on. Every stage but the last was thrown away on the way. Thirteen Saturn V rockets flew and none of them lost a crew. In an era when nothing about spaceflight was routine, that record — from a machine assembled by hundreds of thousands of people who mostly never met each other — is the part engi...

Today in 1950 · Thursday, October 12, 1950 George Burns and Gracie Allen in a CBS publicity photo from the early years of their TV show · CBS Television publicity photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this Thursday night in 1950, George Burns walked out in front of the scenery at New York's Mansfield Theatre, cigar in hand, and did something television comedy had never quite seen: he talked straight to the audience about the show he was standing in. 'The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show' had arrived on CBS, live, and with it the fourth wall acquired a permanent doorway. Burns and Allen came to television as radio royalty — a husband-and-wife act polished over two decades — and Burns was careful with the new medium: the show aired live every other week (he insisted on the off-week for rehearsal), and it was the first TV series to portray the home life of a working show-business couple, with George and Gracie playing themselves. At its center, as ever, was ...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 7 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (25:57). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. He fixed the chain, shined the bell, painted the frame blue, and it turned out well. Then he rode it to her house on a Tuesday morning, and she climbed on the back like she had been waiting for the invitation. The geography is the joy of it: down the hill with the wind in their hair, past the church and the corner store, Miss Emily waving from her kitchen door. A town small enough that the whole route is a list of people who will mention it later. Hold me tighter round the middle, don't you let me go. They are the fastest thing this town will ever know, going maybe twelve miles an hour, under a big blue sky going gold and red. It's a bicycle built for loving, two wheels and a song It's a bicycle built for loving, come along Hold me tighter round the middle, don't you let me go We're the fastest thing this town...

Today in 1950 · Wednesday, October 11, 1950 An FCC chairman faces a television camera on the National Mall during early TV demonstrations, 1939 — eleven years before the commission approved CBS color · Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress, no known restrictions On this day in 1950, the FCC made it official: CBS's field-sequential color system became the authorized standard for American color television — the first color TV authorization in US history, with commercial colorcasting cleared to begin November 20. The system, developed by Peter Goldmark, was half electronics, half clockwork: the image traveled electronically, but the color came from a tricolor disk spinning rapidly in front of the screen. The catch was fatal, and everyone knew it: CBS color was incompatible with the more than 10.5 million black-and-white sets already in American homes, which could not display the broadcasts at all. RCA sued within a week to block the decision, lost all the way up —...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 6 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (21:35). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. He practiced the words for a week and a day, tore up a note, threw it away. She was the girl the whole town knew and he was the boy with the mended shoe, and none of that stopped him from walking up in the hallway light with his books held tight. The song's best moment is the sound of his own voice arriving from far away as he asks about Saturday — anyone who has ever asked anyone anything important recognizes that distance. Then the answer, the bell, the spinning hallway. A rented jacket a size too wide, a mother laughing, a father sighing, a pale pink corsage and shoes shined heel to toe. The prom queen said yes to a boy like me. Happiest fellow there could be, and he is not exaggerating. And the prom queen said yes, oh the prom queen said yes I nearly fell over, I have to confess The prom queen said yes to a boy like me Happie...

Today in 1950 · Tuesday, October 10, 1950 The Convair XF-92A delta-wing research jet — exploring the same radical planform as the Boulton Paul P.111 · San Diego Air & Space Museum archive, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, at Boscombe Down in England, Squadron Leader Bob Smyth lifted a strange little aircraft off the runway for the first time: the Boulton Paul P.111, a stubby jet with no tail and wings shaped like a pure triangle. It was one of the first aircraft anywhere designed for a single purpose — to find out how a tailless delta wing actually behaves in the air. The answer, it turned out, was: nervously. Test pilots found the P.111's controls hair-trigger sensitive, its trim changing sharply with the landing gear, its landing speed alarmingly high. Boulton Paul's chief test pilot, Alexander 'Ben' Gunn, who flew it for years, described the experience as 'like flying a razor's edge.' Every twitch was data: the P.111 w...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 5 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (17:31). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. A full tank, a map nobody is reading, and a county road that goes where it wants. If the album has an afternoon of pure freedom, this is it: no place to be, no time to keep, and the whole blue sky to sweep with the windows down. They stop at a bridge where the water runs clear. She throws a stone and tells him to make a wish; he says he already did, and when she asks what it was he keeps it to himself. Everyone listening knows what it was. That is the joke and the tenderness at once. Fields of gold, a lemonade stand, her fingers laced up in his hand. The best road I know, the chorus says, and then corrects itself — the only road I know. Sunday drive with you, windows rolled down low Sunday drive with you, nowhere we gotta go Fields of gold and a lemonade stand And your fingers laced up in my hand — from “Sunday Drive with You” H...

The Space Race · December 24, 1968 Earthrise, photographed from lunar orbit by the crew of Apollo 8 on December 24, 1968 · NASA photograph, public domain (PD-USGov-NASA), via Wikimedia Commons Apollo 8 was not supposed to be the famous one. It was a test — the first crewed flight of the Saturn V beyond Earth orbit, sent to the moon and back without a lander, in a year that had already delivered two assassinations and a convulsive election. On the fourth orbit the spacecraft rolled, and the crew saw the Earth come up over the lunar horizon. There was a scramble for color film, and the photograph credited to Bill Anders is the one that got printed everywhere: a blue-and-white planet, small, unlabeled, with no borders visible from that distance. That evening the three of them read from Genesis to the largest television audience yet assembled, and came home. The environmental movement adopted the picture almost immediately, which is a strange fate for a photograph taken by a milit...

Today in 1950 · Monday, October 9, 1950 Officers post a sign marking the 38th parallel crossing as UN forces advance north, autumn 1950 · U.S. Army Signal Corps photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons On this day in 1950, the US 1st Cavalry Division crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea — the spearhead of the main American ground advance beyond the line where the war had begun three and a half months earlier. South Korean units had crossed on October 1; now the weight of the Eighth Army followed, with the UN General Assembly's resolution of October 7 as its diplomatic cover. The moment carried enormous stakes largely invisible to the men in the column. Zhou Enlai had warned through India's ambassador, six days earlier, that China would intervene if American troops crossed the parallel. Washington had weighed the warning and discounted it. The 1st Cavalry Division rolled north toward Pyongyang — it would be the first American unit into the North Korean capital t...

Story Behind the Song · vol.34 , Track 4 of 15 ▶ The player starts right at this track (12:52). Let it keep rolling for the whole album. He found a penny on the schoolyard the same day she first came around — heads up, shining in the morning sun — and decided on the spot that his luck had arrived. He kept it in his pocket for a year, and the copper wore thin from being touched. It is superstition, and the song knows it. Her mother says fortune is what you make of it; her father says be careful, for goodness sake. Both are right, and neither has any effect on a boy who has already decided which road he wants. Copper in my pocket, gold inside my heart. The luckiest boy right from the start — and the beauty of the line is that he means the finding, not the winning. My lucky penny girl, brighter than the rest My lucky penny girl, you're the treasure I love best Copper in my pocket, gold inside my heart I've been the luckiest boy right from the start — from “My Lu...