text:
1954 Jan 1, Duff Cooper (b.1890), British cabinet minister and envoy, died. In 1953 he authored his autobiography "Old Men Forget." In 2005 John Julius Norwich edited "The Duff Cooper Diaries."
(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWduff.htm)(Econ, 10/1/05, p.80)
1954 Jan 2, The "Caine Mutiny" by Herman Wouk premiered in NYC.
1954 Jan 3, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind describing belief in God as "childish superstition" and saying Jews were not the chosen people. In 2008 the letter was put up for auction and sold for $404,000.
1954 Jan 4, Elvis Presley recorded a 10 minute demo in Nashville.
1954 Jan 5, Walter Edward Scott (b.1872), Death Valley con man, died. He was supported for much of his life by millionaire Albert Johnson (d.1948).
(ON, 3/04, p.8)(http://mojavedesert.net/walter-scott/)
1954 Jan 8, President Dwight Eisenhower proposed stripping convicted Communists of their U.S. citizenship.
1954 Jan 9, Former Hawaii Gov. Ingram Steinbeck said this is no time to admit the territory of Hawaii to the Union, because left wing labor unions had an economic stranglehold on the islands.
(SFC, 1/9/04, p.E2)
1954 Jan 11, Oscar Straus (83), Austrian composer (The Chocolate Soldier), died.
1954 Jan 12, Howard Stern, "Radio's Bad Boy," was born in Roosevelt, NY.
1954 Jan 12, Austria's worst avalanche killed 200. 9hrs later a 2nd one killed 115.
1954 Jan 14, NY Yankee Joe DiMaggio married actress Marilyn Monroe in SF City Hall. They were divorced in Oct.
(SFC, 1/1/99, p.A13)(SFC, 2/9/99, p.A21)(MC, 1/14/02)
1954 Jan 16, "South Pacific" closed at Majestic Theater, NYC, after 1928 performances.
1954 Jan 16, Mexico closed its borders to all farm laborers heading for the US following a breakdown in negotiations with the US over renewal of an annual agreement on labor flow.
1954 Jan 20, "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial," a play by Herman Wouk based on part of his 1951 novel "The Caine Mutiny," opened on Broadway.
1954 Jan 20, Over 22,000 anti-Communist prisoners were turned over to the UN forces in Korea.
1954 Jan 20, The CIA built a tunnel from west Berlin to East Berlin to tap Soviet and East German communications.
1954 Jan 21, The first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Conn. However, the Nautilus did not make its first nuclear-powered run until nearly a year later.
1954 Jan 21, In Czechoslovakia Frantisek Stransky died when a test prototype of the Oskar 54 microcar crashed. In 1956, the vehicle's name was changed to "Velorex - Oskar" and then just to "Velorex". In 1959 the company produced 120 vehicles per month. Beginning in 1936, the brothers Frantisek (1914 - 1954) and Mojmír (1924) Stransky, owners of a bicycle repair shop in village Parnik near Česká Třebová, started with the design of a small, cheap three-wheeled car, inspired by three-wheelers from Morgan Motor Company.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velorex)
1954 Jan 29, Oprah Winfrey, actress, TV host (Color Purple, Oprah), was born in Mississippi.
1954 Jan 31, Edwin H. Armstrong (b.1890), US radio inventor of frequency modulation (FM), committed suicide.
(www.britannica.com)(SSFC, 10/24/04, Par p.5)
1954 Jan, Leonard Moskowitz (1917-2008), whose father was the founder of Rochester Big & Tall, was kidnapped in San Francisco. He was freed when the kidnappers, who had demanded $500,000, were captured 3 days after the kidnapping.
1954 Feb 1, A television classic was born this day on CBS-TV, as the serial, "The Secret Storm", was shown for the first day of what would become a 20-year run on the network.
(440 Int'l, 2/1/1999)
1954 Feb 1, Abbe Pierre (1912-2007) told French listeners on Radio Luxembourg that a woman had frozen to death on the boulevard Sebastopol, clutching an eviction notice issued the day before. His appeal sparked an enormous response.
1954 Feb 2, President Eisenhower reported the 1952 detonation of 1st Hydrogen bomb.
1954 Feb 3, Millions greeted Queen Elizabeth in Sydney on her first royal trip to Australia.
1954 Feb 5, A US Air Force C-47 enroute from Fairbanks to Anchorage crashed on Kesugi Ridge near Byers Lake in Alaska. 10 people were killed and 6 survived.
(www.ak-prepared.com/vetaffairs/byerslake.htm)
1954 Feb 5, Carl Eric Wickman, a Swedish immigrant and founder of Greyhound Corp., died in Daytona Beach, Fla.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Wickman)
1954 Feb 8, Caryl Whittier Chessman (34), on death row at San Quentin for kidnapping and attempted rape, had his 1st book accepted for publication: "Cell 2455, Death Row." He was executed May 2, 1960.
(SFC, 2/6/04, p.E12)
1954 Feb 10, Eisenhower warned against US intervention in Vietnam.
1954 Feb 14, Sen. John Kennedy appeared on "Meet the Press."
1954 Feb 15, Matt Groening, cartoonist (The Simpsons), was born.
1954 Feb 15, The 1st bevatron went into operation in Berkeley, California.
(440 Int'l., 2/15/99)
1954 Feb 18, East and West Berlin dropped thousands of propaganda leaflets on each other after the end of a month long truce.
1954 Feb 19, The Crimea was ceded to Ukraine as a gift from Russia by Nikita Khrushchev. In 2004 ethnic Russians made up a majority of the population.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_transfer_of_Crimea)(WSJ, 12/21/04, p.A14)
1954 Feb 20, Patty Hearst, famous kidnap hostage (Tanya), was born in SF.
1954 Feb 20, The Ford Foundation gave a $25 million grant to the Fund for Advancement of Education.
1954 Feb 22, U.S. was to install 60 Thor nuclear missiles in Britain.
1954 Feb 23, The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine began in Pittsburgh. Jonas Salk created the Salk vaccine against polio. It used a killed virus to induce immunization. Poliomyelitis is a viral attack of the central nervous system and can cause paralysis and death by asphyxiation. [see Apr 26] In 2005 David M. Oshinsky authored "Polio: An American Story – The Crusade That Mobilized the Nation Against the 20th Century's Most Feared Disease."
(SFC, 6/21/96, p.A10)(HN, 2/23/98)(AP, 2/23/98)(Econ, 6/18/05, p.79)
1954 Feb 23, In Egypt Pres. Naguib resigned. The popular outcry was so great that Naguib was reinstated as president. Nasser, however, took the position of prime minister, previously held by Naguib, and remained president of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC).
(http://countrystudies.us/egypt/32.htm)
1954 Feb 26, Michigan Representative Ruth Thompson (R) introduced legislation to ban mailing "obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy" phonograph (rock and roll records.
(SC, 2/26/02)
1954 Feb 26, 1st typesetting machine (photo engraving) used at Quincy, MA.
1954 Feb 26, William R. Inge (93), English theologist, philosopher, died.
1954 Mar 1, The US Senate confirmed the Earl Warren for Chief Justice of the US. He had been serving as the Interim chief Justice since Oct 5, 1953.
(www.supremecourthistory.org/history/supremecourthistory_history_chief_014warren.htm)
1954 Mar 1, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. In 1998 the granddaughter of one of the nationalists published a family memoir. Lolita Lebron (1919-2010), Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andres Figueroa Cordero all received lengthy prison sentences. President Jimmy Carter granted them clemency in 1979 and they were released.
(WUD, 1994, p.1685)(AP, 3/1/98)(NPR, 2/28/98)(AP, 8/1/10)
1954 Mar 1, The Bravo hydrogen bomb test exploded across Bikini atoll (Marshall Islands) with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. A Nuclear Claims Tribunal, established in 1986, later awarded Bikini and Enewetak 500 million dollars but only a fraction of the amount was received. A Nov 30, 2004, deadline limited further suits.
(AP, 10/17/04)(www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX51.html)
1954 Mar 1, The No. 5 Fukuryu-maru was trolling for tuna off the Bikini atoll in the Pacific during the Bravo hydrogen bomb test. 11 crew members died in the half-century since the exposure, at least six of them from liver cancer. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 66 nuclear tests at Bikini as part of "Operation Crossroads."
1954 Mar 1, Ted Williams fractured a collarbone in 1st game of spring training after flying 39 combat missions without injury in Korean War.
(SC, 3/1/02)
1954 Mar 1, Rebellion during visit of President Naguib in Khartoum Sudan, 30 die.
1954 Mar 4, JE Wilkins was appointed 1st Black US sub-cabinet member.
1954 Mar 4, In Bulgaria Communist ruler Todor Zhivkov began a 35-year dictatorship. During his rule he authorized a forced assimilation drive against the 1 million ethnic Turks. Over 100 were killed and some 310,000 forcibly expelled.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todor_Zhivkov)(SFC, 8/7/98, p.D3)
1954 Mar 5, "Girl in Pink Tights" opened at Mark Hellinger in NYC for 115 performances.
1954 Mar 6, The TV show "See It Now" broadcast its "Report on Senator McCarthy," and examined the senator and his red-baiting tactics. [see Mar 9]
1954 Mar 8, The U.S. signed a mutual defense pact with Japan, offering them $100 million in aid within the next three months.
(WUD, 1994, p.1685)(HN, 3/8/98)
1954 Mar 9, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow critically reviewed Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communism campaign on "See It Now." [see Mar 6]
1954 Mar 10, Pres. Eisenhower called Sen. Joseph McCarthy a peril to the Republican Party.
1954 Mar 11, The U.S. Army charged that Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and his subcommittee's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had exerted pressure to obtain favored treatment for Pvt. G. David Schine, a former consultant to the subcommittee. The confrontation culminated in the famous Senate Army-McCarthy hearings.
1954 Mar 13, Viet Minh General Giap opened an assault on French forces at Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam. In 2010 Ted Morgan (aka Sanche Armand Gabriel de Gramont) authored "Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War."
(HN, 3/14/98)(Econ, 4/3/04, p.86)(Econ, 2/20/10, p.80)
1954 Mar 15, The "CBS Morning Show" premiered with Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) and Jack Paar (1918-2004).
(NYT, 3/14/54, p.x15)(www.imdb.com/title/tt0046627/episodes)
1954 Mar 18, Howard Hughes paid $23.5 million for the RKO motion picture company.
1954 Mar 19, The 1st rocket-driven sled on rails was tested in Alamogordo, NM.
1954 Mar 20, "King and I" closed at St. James Theater in NYC after 1246 performances.
1954 Mar 21, Paul Selenyi (b.1884), Hungarian physicist, died in Budapest. He was the first to record images with an electrostatic marking process. This was the foundation for Chester Carlson's Xerox copiers.
(www.thehungarypage.com/sciencemathandtech.htm)
1954 Mar 22, The 1st shopping mall opened in Southfield, Mich.
1954 Mar 22, The London gold market reopened for the first time since 1939.
1954 Mar 24, Britain opened trade talks with Hungary.
1954 Mar 25, RCA manufactured its first color TV set and began mass production. The 1953 RCA design for color TV was adopted as the national standard. The 12" screen TV was priced at $1000. Westinghouse had introduced a color model a few weeks earlier, but only 1 set was sold in the 1st month.
(HN, 3/24/98)(WSJ, 11/4/99, p.B6)(MC, 3/25/02)(SFC, 3/18/04, p.E1)
1954 Mar 25, At the Academy Awards, "From Here to Eternity" won eight Oscars, including best picture, best director (Fred Zinnemann), best supporting actor (Frank Sinatra) and best supporting actress (Donna Reed). Audrey Hepburn won best actress for "Roman Holiday" and William Holden best actor for "Stalag 17."
1954 Mar 26, The U.S. set off the second H-bomb blast in four weeks in the Marshall Islands at Bikini Island. The 15-megaton device was 750 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The blast contaminated the neighboring island of Rongelap and nearly 100 people on the island and other downwind atolls.
(HN, 3/25/98)(SFC, 12/7/99, p.A10)(SS, 3/26/02)
1954 Mar 28, In the 8th Tony Awards: Teahouse of the August Moon and Kismet won
1954 Mar 29, Karen Anne Quinlan, famous comatose patient (right to die case), was born in NJ.
1954 Mar 30, Canada's first subway line opened in Toronto.
(CFA, '96, p.42)(HN, 3/30/98)
1954 Mar 31, Moscow offered to join NATO on the condition that the West join the Soviet European security treaty.
1954 Mar 31, The siege of Dien Bien Phu, the last French outpost in Vietnam, began after the Viet Minh realized it could not be taken by direct assault.
1954 Mar, US CIA official Donald N. Wilber wrote a history of the CIA sponsored 1953 coup in Iran.
1954 Mar, Dorothy Gay Howard (18) of Phoenix, Arizona, was reported missing. Her nude and battered body was found on April 8 along a creek in Boulder, Colorado. She was buried as Jane Doe until her identity was established by DNA testing in 2009.
(www.dailycamera.com/ci_13658937?source=most_viewed)
1954 Apr 1, U.S. Air Force Academy was founded in Colorado. President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill authorizing the establishment of an Air Force Academy, similar to West Point and Annapolis. On July 11, 1955, the first class was sworn in at Lowry Air Force Base. The academy moved to a permanent site near Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1958.
(HN, 4/1/98)(HNQ, 2/22/99)(MC, 4/1/02)
1954 Apr 3, Aristides de Sousa Mendes (b.1885), former Portuguese consul general in Bordeaux, France, died in poverty. He is credited with defying his government's orders and saving 10,000 European Jews and some 20,000 other nationals by issuing transit visas to "undesirables" fleeing the Nazis during WW II.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristides_de_Sousa_Mendes)(SFC, 2/19/09, p.B5)
1954 Apr 6, Four weeks after being attacked on the air by Edward R. Murrow, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., delivered a filmed response on CBS' "See It Now" in which he charged that Murrow had, in the past, "engaged in propaganda for Communist causes."
1954 Apr 7, Jackie Chan, martial art actor (Rumble in the Bronx), was born.
1954 Apr 7, Pres. Eisenhower spoke at a press conference about why we needed to protect Vietnam and mentioned his fear of a "domino-effect" in Indochina.
(www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=2630)
1954 Apr 7, The West German government refused to recognize DDR (East Germany).
1954 Apr 9, Dennis Quaid, actor (Big Easy, Dreamscape, Right Stuff), was born in Houston, TX.
1954 Apr 12, Bill Haley & the Comets recorded "Rock Around the Clock" at NYC's Pythian Temple. It was written by Max C. Freedman and Jimmy de Knight. Haley's "Rock Around the Clock," was originally released as the B side of "Thirteen Women." Haley died in 1981.
(www.rockabillyhall.com/RockClockTribute.html)(WSJ, 4/8/04, p.D8)
1954 Apr 12, Joe Turner released "Shake, Rattle & Roll."
1954 Apr 12, AEC hearings began on Robert Oppenheimer. Lewis Strauss, head of the AEC, had accused Oppenheimer on Dec 21, 1953, of disloyalty and presented a list of the charges against him. Oppenheimer refused to resign, demanded a hearing, and hired a lawyer.
(http://tinyurl.com/8e8lf)
1954 Apr 18, The US held a nationwide test of its disaster radio system known as Conelrad. In SF a simulated 10-megaton bomb, exploding over Hunters Point, was estimated to kill 500,000 Bay Area citizens.
(SSFC, 4/12/09, DB p.43)
1954 Apr 18, Colonel Nasser seized power in Egypt.
1954 Apr 21, USAF flew a French battalion to Vietnam.
1954 Apr 21, Gyorgy Malenkov became premier of USSR.
1954 Apr 22, The publicly televised US Senate Army-McCarthy hearings began.
1954 Apr 23, The Army-McCarthy hearings began. [see Apr 22]
1954 Apr 23, Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves hit the first of his record 755 major-league home runs against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Braves won, 7-5.
1954 Apr 25, Bell Labs in NYC announced the 1st solar battery.
1954 Apr 29, Jerry Seinfeld, actor, was born in Brooklyn, NY.
(SFEC, 4/19/98, DB p.36)
1954 Apr 29, India's Jawaharla Nehru and China's Zhou Enlai signed the "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence." In India this became known as the as the as the Panchsheel Treaty. It entered into force on June 3.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Principles_of_Peaceful_Coexistence)(Econ, 7/31/04, p.36)
1954 Apr 30, Jane Campion, New Zealand film director (The Piano, A Portrait of a Lady), was born.
1954 Apr 30, KQED, SF-based public television, began broadcasting.
1954 Apr, In Pakistan the government issued the Munir Report, an eloquent expression of the state's position on religion. This was made in response to Muslim leaders in the Punjab who agitated in 1953 to have a rival group declassified as Muslims.
(WSJ, 4/4/08, p.W5)(http://aaiil.info/misconceptions/fatwas/munir.htm)
1954 May 1, Ray York rode Determine to victory in the Kentucky Derby.
1954 May 1, Legos, founded by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, became a registered trademark in Denmark.
(http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bllego.htm)
1954 May 2, Walt Disney and associates announced plans to build a $9 million Disneyland on a 160-acre tract, once part of the Rancho San Juan Cajon de Santa Ana, in Orange County.
(SFC, 4/30/04, p.F5)
1954 May 3, Pulitzer prize was awarded to Charles A. Lindbergh and John Patrick.
1954 May 5, There was a military coup by General Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay. Thomas Romero Pereira came to power in a military coup that lasted for three days. He is best known for giving up power three months later to Alfredo Stroessner who then became the dictator of Paraguay for 35 years.
(SFC, 5/11/98, p.A10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1s_Romero_Pereira)
1954 May 6, Medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile during a track meet in Oxford, England, finishing in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. In 2004 Neal Bascomb authored "The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It."
(TMC, 1994, p.1954)(AP, 5/6/97)(SSFC, 4/18/04, p.A1)
1954 May 7, A San Francisco jury decided that Harold Jackson and Joseph Lear should be executed for the January kidnapping of Leonard Moskovitz. Their sentences were later changed to life in prison and both men died in San Quentin.
(SFC, 5/7/04, p.F2)(SFC, 7/3/08, p.B5)
1954 May 7, US, Great Britain and France rejected Russian membership in NATO.
1954 May 7, The Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam ended after 55 days with Vietnamese insurgents overrunning French forces and the US began to get involved. French Gen. Marcel Bigeard (1916-2010) and some 12,000 defenders were captured. Vietnamese insurgents expelled the French but the country was divided into a communist north and a pro-US south. In the 8 years of the French Indochina War some 52,000 French soldiers were killed. Vietnam was soon partitioned between a regime in Hanoi led by Ho Chi Minh and an anti-communist regime in Saigon under Ngo Dinh Diem. Howard Simpson later wrote: "Dien Bien Phu: The Epic Battle America Forgot." In 2004 Martin Windrow authored "The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam."
(TL, 1988, p.114)(SFC, 12/27/96, p.A24)(SFC, 2/22/96, p.B3)(AP, 5/7/97)(SFC, 5/24/99, p.C4)(Econ, 11/27/04, p.86)(AP, 6/18/10)
1954 May 13, The musical play "The Pajama Game" opened on Broadway for 1063 performances.
1954 May 13, Robin Roberts gave up a HR then retired the next 27 men in a row.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1954 May 13, President Eisenhower signed into law the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Act.
1954 May 13, Labour Party won British municipal elections.
1954 May 14, The US military unveiled a Nike guided missile at the SF Presidio. Plans were to ring 13 critical areas in the US with such missiles.
1954 May 17, The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled for school integration in the landmark initiative of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. It helped abolish de facto and de jure segregation that persisted throughout the US. The Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The 12-page historic opinion was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. The result overturned the 1896 decision of Plessy vs. Ferguson that proclaimed a doctrine of separate but equal. The Plessy decision had allowed that as long as accommodation existed, segregation did not constitute discrimination, establishing the doctrine of "separate but equal." In the Brown case, which involved elementary education, the Court ruled unanimously that segregation in public education was a denial of the equal protection of the laws.
(www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html)(SFC, 5/12/96, p.A-6)(SFEC, 6/8/97, BR p.8)
1954 May 17, Blacks hailed the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Whites in the Deep South called the day "Black Monday." A movement called Citizens' Councils, led by Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Tom P. Brady, grew to encompass virtually the state's entire white business class. Council members published a book entitled "Black Monday" which outlined their simple beliefs: African Americans were inferior to whites and the races must remain separate. "If in one mighty voice we do not protest this travesty on justice, we might as well surrender," Brady wrote.
(www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/e_councils.html)(MT, summer 2003, p.19)
1954 May 17, In Romania Monsignor Vladimir Ghika (b.1873) died in Jilava Communist prison. He had been born into a family of Moldovan nobles in Constantinople and spent decades traveling around the world helping the sick and the poor. On Aug 31, 2013, he was beatified.
(AP, 8/31/13)(http://tinyurl.com/kcj67sc)
1954 May 18, European Convention on Human Rights went into effect.
1954 May 19, Postmaster General Summerfield approved a CIA mail-opening project.
1954 May 19, American composer Charles Ives died in New York.
1954 May 20, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek became president of Nationalist China.
1954 May 25, Robert Capa (40), war photographer for Life Mag., was accidentally killed in Vietnam when he stepped on a land mine. Capa authored a memoir in 1947: "Slightly Out of Focus." A collection of his work was published in 1997: "Robert Capa, Photographs," with an introduction by Richard Whelan. Capa was born Endre Friedman in Budapest. In 2003 Alex Kershaw authored "Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa."
(SFEM, 1/12/97, BR p.9)(SFEM, 12/21/97, p.7)(WSJ, 4/20/98, p.A20)
1954 May 27, The security board of the Atomic Energy Commission affirmed Robert Oppenheimer's loyalty but denied him security clearance. The AEC canceled his contract.
(SSFC, 7/31/05, p.F2)(http://tinyurl.com/8e8lf)
1954 May 28, George E. Mahlberg, Astrophysicist, Mt Palomar, Mt Wilson CA (1974-78), was born.
1954 May 28, Achille Longo (54), composer, died.
1954 May 29, Pope Pius XII, born as Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Pacelli (1876-1958), canonized Pope Pius X, born as Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto (1835-1914). It was the first canonization of a Pope since 1712.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_canonized_by_Pope_Pius_XII)
1954 May, The US Coast Guard began around the clock patrols outside the San Francisco's Golden Gate to guard against ships that might smuggle nuclear bombs into SF Bay. The patrols were made public in Feb 2, 1955.
1954 Jun 2, Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that there are communists working in the CIA and atomic weapons plants.
1954 Jun 4, French Premier Joseph Laniel and Vietnamese Premier Buu Loc initialed treaties in Paris according "complete independence" to Vietnam.
1954 Jun 7, Louise Erdrich, American author, was born.
1954 Jun 7, The 1st microbiology laboratory was dedicated in New Brunswick, NJ.
1954 Jun 7, Alan Turing (b.1912), English mathematician, died of suicide. Turing, a homosexual, was convicted in 1952 of gross indecency and forced to take estrogen injections. In 2006 David Leavitt authored "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer." In 2009 British PM Gordon Brown apologized for the "inhumane" treatment of Alan Turing.
(www.turing.org.uk/turing/)(Econ, 7/8/06, p.79)(AP, 9/11/09)
1954 Jun 9, Army counsel Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy during the Senate-Army Hearings over McCarthy's attack on a member of Welch's law firm, Frederick G. Fisher. Said Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
(AP, 6/9/97)(HN 6/9/98)
1954 Jun 12, Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock," was originally released.
1954 Jun 14, Americans took part in the first nation-wide civil defense test against atomic attack.
1954 Jun 14, President Eisenhower signed an order adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. On Feb 7 Eisenhower had attended a service where Rev. George M. Docherty (d.2008 at 97), a Scotland-born pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, in Washington, DC, repeated his 1952 sermon saying the pledge should acknowledge God.
(AP, 6/14/97)(SFC, 6/29/98, p.A4)(AP, 11/30/08)
1954 Jun 16, In San Francisco the 13-foot neon schooner atop the new Hamm's Brewery building at 1550 Bryant St. was turned on. Brewing at the facility ended in 1974.
1954 Jun 17, The Army-McCarthy hearings ended. In 1964 a film of the hearings was made by Daniel Talbot and Emile de Antonio and titled "Point of Order."
1954 Jun 18, Albert Patterson was assassinated in Phenix, Ala. He had recently been elected as attorney general on a platform to crack down on vice. His murder led the governor to call in the National Guard to replace local law enforcement and cleanup the vice. Patterson's son John filled the attorney general position and soon became the subject of the movie "The Phenix City Story." He was elected governor in 1958.
(USAT, 6/29/04, p.7A)
1954 Jun 18, Pierre Mendes-France (1907-1982) became Premier of France. His political signature was a glass of milk. After the war, some French leaders were concerned that French people were drinking too much wine and starting to drink at too early an age. When Mendes-France would appear in public, there invariably was a glass of milk on the lectern, which he made a point of sipping some time during the presentation
(http://thisdayinjewishhistory.blogspot.com/2007/06/this-day-june-18-in-jewish-history.html)
1954 Jun 19, Kathleen Turner (actress: Body Heat, Peggy Sue Got Married, Romancing the Stone, voice of Jessica Rabbit in Roger Rabbit), was born.
1954 Jun 19, The Tasmanian Devil, a Cartoon Character, made its debut in 'Devil May Hare' by Warner Bros.
(DT, 6/19/97)
1954 Jun 20, Ilan Ramon, Israeli pilot and astronaut, was born in Tel Aviv. He was among the 7 astronauts killed in the US Columbia space shuttle tragedy Feb 1, 2003.
1954 Jun 27, CIA-sponsored rebels overthrew the elected government of Guatemala. A US supported force of Guatemalan mercenaries invaded from Honduras. Sam Zemurray, head of United Fruit, helped fund the rebels. Pres. Arbenz was toppled and replaced by 30 years of military rule. He spent much of his exile in Cuba. Arbenz died in 1971 in Mexico City. It was disclosed in 1997 to have been motivated by US economic interests with 58 Guatemalan politicians put on a list of potential targets for political killing. In 1982 "Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala" by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, was published by Doubleday. In 2011 Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom acknowledged the state's responsibility in overthrowing Arbenz and apologized to his family.
(NG, 6/1988, p.783)(SFC, 5/24/97, p.A1)(WSJ, 3/3/99, p.A18)(AP, 10/21/11)(SSFC, 7/8/12, p.F5)
1954 Jun 27, The 1st atomic power station opened near Moscow at Obninsk, Russia.
1954 Jun 28, US Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote a letter to Gunilla von Post, a Swedish woman he had met on the French Riviera in August 1953, and suggested sailing with her for 2 weeks around the Mediterranean. Kennedy was 36 when he met Post (21). In 1997 Post authored a book, "Love, Jack," that detailed her long-distance affair with Kennedy. In 2010 an auction house put 11 letters and 3 telegrams of their correspondence up for sale.
1954 Jun 28, French troops began to pull out of Vietnam's Tonkin Province.
1954 Jun, China's Premier Zhou Enlai visited India and Burma. The joint Statement of the Prime Ministers of China and India issued on 28 June and the Joint Statement of the Prime Ministers of China and Burma issued on 29 June both affirmed that the Five Principles of Peaceful Existence as guiding principles in their bilateral relations and the Five Principles were formally proposed as the norms governing international relations.
(http://tinyurl.com/l7txqyu)
1954 Jul 2, Wendy Schaal, actress (It's a Living, Julie-Fantasy Is), was born in Chicago, Ill.
1954 Jul 3, In Salem Mass., champion female athlete Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias (1911-1956) won the US Women's Open. She had just come back from a battle with cancer, yet won the event by 12 strokes.
(www.uswomensopen.com/2004/press/whatta-gal.html)y
1954 Jul 3, Food rationing ended in Great Britain almost 9 years after the end of World War II.
1954 Jul 4, WMSL (WYUR, now WAFF) TV channel 48 in Huntsville, AL (ABC) began.
(Maggio)
1954 Jul 4, West Germany beat Hungary 3-2 to win the 5th World Cup soccer match in Bern, Switz.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_World_Cup)
1954 Jul 4, Marilyn Sheppard (31 and pregnant) was killed at her home near Cleveland and her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard (d.1970), was later accused, tried and jailed for the murder. Sam was released from jail in 1964. His story inspired the TV series "The Fugitive" and a film in 1993. DNA evidence in 1997 indicated a third person was involved. Cleveland's chief prosecutor ruled in 1998 that the DNA samples were too old. A civil trial in Cleveland in 2000 rejected the claim of Sam Reese Sheppard that his father was innocent. [see Dec 21]
(SFC, 2/5/97, p.A6)(SFC, 3/5/98, p.A3)(SFC, 3/6/98, p.A3)(SFC, 4/13/00, p.A2)
1954 Jul 5, Elvis Presley's first commercial recording session took place at Sun Records in Memphis, Tenn.; the song he recorded was "That's All Right (Mama)."
1954 Jul 5, The B-52A bomber made its maiden flight. As of 2012 nearly 100 B-52s remained in service.
(MC, 7/5/02)(AP, 11/5/12)
1954 Jul 7, Elvis Presley made his radio debut as Memphis, Tennessee, station WHBQ played his first recording for Sun Records, "That's All Right (Mama)."
1954 Jul 8, The raft Lehi with 5 amateur sailors was towed out of SF Bay to attempt a 2,200 drifting voyage to Hawaii. Mormon elder DeVere Baker (38) led the expedition. The freighter Metapan rescued the crew on July 14.
1954 Jul 8, Carlos Castillo Armas of Guatemala became president. He was assassinated in 1957.
(WUD, 1994, p.1685)
1954 Jul 10, Pres. Eisenhower signed Public Law 480, the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954, which later became known as the "Food for Peace" program.
(http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r103:H10MY4-223:)(WSJ, 10/26/05, p.A1)
1954 Jul 12, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a highway modernization program, with costs to be shared by federal and state governments.
1954 Jul 13, In Geneva, the United States, Great Britain and France reached an accord on Indochina, dividing Vietnam into two countries, North and South, along the 17th parallel.
1954 Jul 13, Frida Kahlo (b.1907), artist, died in Mexico City. Her final painting was an incomplete portrait of Joseph Stalin. Hayden Herrera authored her biography in 1983. Raquel Tibol later authored "Frido Kahlo: An Open Life."
(SFC, 4/22/01, p.D3)(WSJ, 7/6/01, p.W11)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo)
1954 Jul 15, The Boeing "Dash 80," a prototype of the 707, made its first test flight.
(NPub, 2002, p.17)
1954 Jul 17, The 1st major league baseball game was played where a majority of a team was black (Dodgers).
1954 Jul 17, Gen. Joseph Swing, appointed by Pres. Eisenhower to head the INS, began "Operation Wetback." Because political resistance was lower in California and Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.
(CSM, 7/6/06)
1954 Jul 18, Coded messages were delivered to Israeli agents via Israel Radio to blow up a number of buildings in Egypt in order to delay Britain's departure from the Suez Canal. They planned to blame the acts on Muslim radicals but the plan was uncovered. This came to be known as the Lavan Affair after Pinhas Lavan, leader of Unit 13, refused to accept responsibility on the grounds that the operation was conducted without his knowledge. The events are documented in "Ben Gurion's Spy" (1996) by Shabtai Teveth.
(WSJ, 8/9/96, p.A5c)
1954 Jul 20, An armistice for Indo-China was signed and Vietnam separated into North & South. [see Jul 21]
1954 Jul 20, West German secret service head Otto John defected to German DR.
1954 Jul 21, France surrendered North Vietnam to the Communists at Geneva. The French signed an armistice, the Geneva Accords, with the Viet Minh that ended the war but divided Vietnam into two countries. This led to almost a million anti-Communists in the north to flee to the south.
(AP, 7/21/97)(HN, 7/21/98)(OGA, 11/24/98)(SFEC, 4/23/00, p.A19)
1954 Jul 25, Walter Payton, Chicago Bear football running back, was born in Columbia, Miss.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Payton)
1954 Jul 25, Lynn Frederick, actress (Schizophrenia), was born in Middlesex, England.
1954 Jul 28, Hugo Chavez, later president of Venezuela, was born in Sabaneta, Venezuela.
(SSFC, 8/26/07, p.M2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Ch%C3%A1vez)
1954 Jul 31, Italians Lino Lacedelli (1925-2009) and Achille Compagnoni (1915-2009) first scaled Pakistan's K-2, the world's second-highest mountain. In 2004 Lacedelli authored "K2: The Price of Conquest."
(AP, 7/27/04)(SSFC, 11/29/09, p.C8)
1954 Aug 1, The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam into two countries at the 17th parallel. U.S. complicity in the overthrow of South Vietnam's president made it impossible to stay uninvolved in the war. The Geneva Accords called for elections by July, 1956, and put a limit on the presence of foreign advisors. US military advisors were limited to 685. While the Geneva Agreements ended the war and established the 17th parallel as a temporary military demarcation between the Vietminh-administered North and the Bao Dai government in the South, the reunification elections were never held and within a few years there was a large-scale infusion of foreign assistance in men and arms. The signatories were France, the Vietminh, China, Great Britain, Cambodia, Laos and the Soviet Union. The United States and the government of Bao Dai in the South did not sign the agreement.
(WSJ, 11/30/95, p.A-23)(HN, 8/1/98)(HNQ, 2/23/00)
1954 Aug 3, The 1st VTOL (Vertical Take-off & Land) aircraft was flown.
1954 Aug 3, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (b.1873), French actress, librettist, novelist (Claudine) and critic, died. Her novels included "Le Ble en herbe" (The Ripening Seed) and "Julie de Carneilhan (1941). In 1999 Judith Thurman authored "Secrets of the Flesh," a biography of Colette.
(WSJ, 10/14/99, p.A24)(SC, 8/3/02)
1954 Aug 4, A uranium rush began in Saskatchewan, Canada.
1954 Aug 9, Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia signed a 20-year treaty of military and political cooperation.
1954 Aug 11, After Chinese Nationalists placed 58,000 troops on Quemoy and 15,000 troops on Matsu the ROC began building defensive structures and the PRC began shelling ROC installations on Quemoy. Zhou Enlai, Premier of the People's Republic of China responded with a declaration that Taiwan must be "liberated." He dispatched the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and began shelling both Quemoy and Matsu.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis)
1954 Aug 11, A formal peace took hold in Indochina, ending more than seven years of fighting between the French and Communist Vietminh.
1954 Aug 12, Sam J. Jones, actor (Chris-Code Red, The Highway Man), was born in Chicago, Ill.
1954 Aug 12, Pat Metheny, jazz guitarist (As Wichita Falls), was born.
1954 Aug 15, Alfredo Stroessner (b.1912) named himself president of Paraguay. This ended a 27-year chaotic period in which 22 presidents came and went.
1954 Aug 16, Sports Illustrated was first published by Time Inc.
1954 Aug 18, Assistant Secretary of Labor James E. Wilkins became the first black to attend a meeting of a president's Cabinet as he sat in for Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell.
1954 Aug 19, Ralph J. Bunche was named undersecretary of UN.
1954 Aug 23, The small community of Charleston, Arkansas, became the first in the South to end segregation in its schools. This was in response to the May 17 US Supreme Court ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education.
(Econ, 9/22/07, p.44)(http://ideas.aetn.org/productions/virtualtours/lrcentral/10)
1954 Aug 24, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, virtually outlawing the Communist Party in the United States.
(WUD, 1994, p.1685)(AP, 8/24/07)
1954 Aug 24, In Brazil Pres. Getulio Vargas killed himself in the midst of a scandal.
(http://historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=428)(WSJ, 4/6/06, p.D8)
1954 Aug 29, The SF International Airport's (SFO) Terminal 2 opened with a ceremony led by Mayor Robinson. Mills Field became SF Airport.
(SFEC, 5/16/99, Z1 p.4)(SSFC, 8/22/04, p.F8)
1954 Aug 31, Hurricane Carol hit the northeastern United States, resulting in nearly 70 deaths and millions of dollars in damage.
1954 Aug, The French National Assembly rejected the European Defense Community with a vote of 319 to 264.
1954 Sep 1, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) became pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
(SFEM, 2/2/97, p.8)(ON, 4/2011, p.2)
1954 Sep 3, The US Espionage & Sabotage Act of 1954 signed.
1954 Sep 3, China began artillery bombing on Quemoy. Despite warnings from the US against any attacks on the Republic of China, the People's Liberation Army unleashed a heavy artillery bombardment of Quemoy, and intensified its actions in November by bombing the Tachen Islands.
1954 Sep 4, The 1st passage of McClure Strait, fabled Northwest Passage, completed.
1954 Sep 6, Carly Fiorina, later CEO of Hewlett Packard (199-2005), was born.
(WSJ, 2/10/05, p.)
1954 Sep 6, A US plane was shot down above Siberia.
1954 Sep 7-8, Integration of public schools began in Washington DC and Maryland.
(HN, 9/7/98)(www.courtinfo.ca.gov/presscenter/timeline.htm)
1954 Sep 8, SEATO (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), a sister organization to NATO, was created under the Manila Pact by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, to stop communist spread in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). The United States, Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand signed the mutual defense treaty. SEATO dissolved in 1977.
(HNQ, 4/2/01)(http://tinyurl.com/hpawj)
1954 Sep 8, Andre Derain (b.1880), French painter, died. He and Henri Matisse co-founded the Fauvist movement, marked by vivid, unnatural colors.
(SFC, 9/15/12, p.E)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Derain)
1954 Sep 10, A 12 second earthquake killed 1,460 in Orleansville, Algeria.
1954 Sep 10, Peter Anders, German opera singer, died.
1954 Sep 11, The Miss America pageant made its network TV debut on ABC; Miss California, Lee Ann Meriwether of San Francisco, was crowned the winner.
(AP, 9/11/97)(SFC, 11/16/99, p.G9)
1954 Sep 12, Lassie premiered on CBS-TV.
1954 Sep 11, Category 3 Hurricane Edna made landfall at Martha's Vineyard. This 2nd storm of 1954 hit NYC with $50 million damage and caused 21 deaths in the region.
(www.nhc.noaa.gov/HAW2/english/history.shtml#carol)
1954 Sep 17, Rocky Marciano retained possession of the world heavyweight boxing title. He knocked out Ezzard Charles in the 8th round of their championship bout.
1954 Sep 20, The live TV drama "Twelve Angry Men" was presented as an episode of CBS' "Studio One" anthology series.
1954 Sep 20, The 1st FORTRAN computer program was executed.
1954 Sep 20, Roger Bannister was awarded Britain's Silver Pears Trophy for cracking the 4-minute mile.
1954 Sep 21, The 1st nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, commissioned. [see Sep 30]
1954 Sep 23, East German police arrested 400 citizens as U.S. spies.
1954 Sep 25, Francois "Doc" Duvalier won the Haitian presidential election.
1954 Sep 26, Ronald Reagan made his 1st appearance as host of the "General Electric Theater," and continued on for 8 years.
(SSFC, 6/6/04, A14)
1954 Sep 26, A typhoon hit Japan. 5 ferryboats sank killing about 1,600. The Japanese ferry boat Toya Maru sank in the Strait of Tsugaru and 1172 died.
1954 Sep 27, "Tonight!" hosted by Steve Allen, made its debut on NBC-TV.
(AP, 9/27/97)(www.nbc.com/the-tonight-show-experience/timeline/)
1954 Sep 28, Patrick McCarran (b.1876), Nevada US Senator since 1932, died in Hawthorne, Nevada. In 2004 Michael J. Ybarra authored "Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt."
(www.aoc.gov/cc/art/nsh/mccarran.htm)
1954 Sep 29, The movie musical "A Star Is Born," starring Judy Garland and James Mason, had its world premiere at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood.
1954 Sep 29, The New York Giants beat the Cleveland Indians in the 1st game of this year's World Series. NY went on to win 4 games in a row. Willie Mays made a spectacular catch and throw in the 8th inning. In 1955 Arnold Hano authored "A Day in the Bleachers," a classic account of this game.
(www.baseball-almanac.com/ws/yr1954ws.shtml)(SSFC, 9/17/06, p.D1)
1954 Sep 30, "Boy Friend" opened at the Royale Theater NYC for 483 performances.
1954 Sep 30, The first atomic-powered vessel, the submarine Nautilus, was commissioned by the Navy in Groton, Connecticut. It was launched Jan 21. [see Sep 21]
(AP, 9/30/97)(AP, 1/21/98)(HN, 9/30/98)
1954 Sep 30, NATO nations agreed to arm and admit West Germany.
1954 Oct 2, Elvis Presley sang his upbeat version of the Bill Monroe tune "Blue Moon of Kentucky" at the Grand Ole Opry.
1954 Oct 3, Al Sharpton, 2004 Democrat presidential candidate, was born in Brooklyn, NY.
1954 Oct 4, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio separated after 9 months of marriage.
(SFC, 10/1/04, p.F5)
1954 Oct 5, Italy and Yugoslavia ended their dispute over Trieste. Zone A was given to Italy, Zone B to Yugoslavia.
1954 Oct 7, Marian Anderson became the first black singer hired by the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
1954 Oct 7, Marilyn Monroe divorced Joe DiMaggio. They had just married Jan 14 in SF City Hall.
(WSJ, 11/6/97, p.A20)(SFC, 1/1/99, p.A13)
1954 Oct 10, Ho Chi Minh entered Hanoi in Vietnam after French troops withdraw.
1954 Oct 13, R.P. Smith's and M. Shulman's "Tender Trap," premiered in NYC.
1954 Oct 14, American Samoa Government's vessel Manu'atele sighted William Willis's raft The Seven Little Sisters, and towed it into Pago Pago Harbor. William Willis (1893-1968) sailed a raft from Peru to Samoa. In 2006 T.R. Pearson authored "Seaworthy: Adrift With William Willis in the Golden Age of Rafting."
(WSJ, 6/24/06, p.P12)(www.asg-gov.net/026HISTORICALCAL_OCTOBER.htm)
1954 Oct 14, An Israeli act of revenge in Qibiya, Jordan, killed 53.
1954 Oct 15, Hurricane Hazel struck US and Canada and 348 people died. 81 people were killed in Ontario where damages were estimated at $24 million.
1954 Oct 18, Hurricane Hazel, the 3rd of 1954, became the most severe to hit US. [see Oct 15]
1954 Oct 19, Egypt and Britain concluded a pact on the Suez Canal, ending 72 years of British military occupation. Britain agreed to withdraw its 80,000-man force within 20 months, and Egypt agreed to maintain freedom of canal navigation.
(HN, 10/19/98)
1954 Oct 21, Dorothy Parker's Arnaud d'Usseau's "Ladies of the Corridor," premiered.
1954 Oct 22, As a result of the Geneva accords granting Communist control over North Vietnam, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized a crash program to train the South Vietnamese Army. (about this time) President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first to publicly state the Domino Theory while discussing the need to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnamese Communists. The analogy of a row of dominos, arranged so that when one falls it causes the rest to fall one after the other, was used to express the notion that when one country in a region becomes Communist, neighboring nations will then begin to fall under Communist rule. This was an operative theory that guided U.S. policy in Southeast Asia during the 1950s and '60s.
(HN, 10/22/98)(HNQ, 12/31/99)
1954 Oct 22, West Germany joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The country had no standing army.
(AP, 10/22/97)(SFC, 4/22/98, p.A8)
1954 Oct 23, In Paris, an agreement was signed providing for West German sovereignty and permitting West Germany to rearm and enter NATO and the Western European Union. Britain, England, France and USSR agreed to end occupation of Germany. [see Oct 22]
(HN, 10/23/98)(MC, 10/23/01)
1954 Oct 25, President Eisenhower conducted the first televised Cabinet meeting.
1954 Oct 26, Chevrolet introduced the V-8 engine.
1954 Oct 26, In Egypt a member of the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to kill PM Nasser.
1954 Oct 27, Walt Disney's first television program, titled "Disneyland" after his yet-to-be completed theme park, premiered on ABC.
(AP, 10/27/97)(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046593/)(SFEC, 5/24/98, DB p.38)
1954 Oct 27, Pres. Eisenhower offered aid to S. Vietnam Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem.
1954 Oct 28, Ernest Hemingway received news that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Poor health prevented him from going to Stockholm to receive it.
(TMC, 1994, p.1954)(AH, 10/04, p.15)
1954 Oct 29, In Egypt Colonel Nasser disbanded the Moslem Brothership.
1954 Oct 30, Linus Pauling won the Nobel prize in chemistry.
(SFC, 10/8/01, p.A17)(MC, 10/30/01)
1954 Oct 30, US Armed Forces ended segregation of races.
1954 Oct 31, Harry Lunderberg's AFL Sailors refused to report to work to unload freighters at a number of West Coast ports.
(SFC, 10/29/04, p.F11)
1954 Oct 31, The Algerian Revolution against the French began. [see Nov 1]
1954 Nov 1, "The Sky's The Limit" TV game show began airing on NBC and continued to Dec 27, 1955.
(http://tinyurl.com/jn5nuq7)
1954 Nov 1, The US Senate admonished Joseph McCarthy for his slander campaign.
1954 Nov 1, Algerian nationalists began their successful eight-year rebellion against French rule. [see Oct 31] Hocine Ait-Ahmed (1926-2015) was one of the nine so-called "sons of Toussaint" who launched the uprising. He was arrested in 1964 and condemned to death but later freed, and left for exile in Lausanne in 1966.
(AP, 11/1/06)(AFP, 1/1/16)
1954 Nov 1, General Fulgencio Batista was elected president of Cuba.
1954 Nov 2, Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) of South Carolina became the 1st US senator elected by write-in vote.
(http://constitutioncenter.org/timeline/html/cw10_12231.html)
1954 Nov 2, Andrei Y. Vishinsky (b. 1883) died. Jacob A. Malik succeeded him as the chief Soviet delegate to the UN and as First Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR.
1954 Nov 3, The film "Godzilla, King of the Monsters" was released. It was produced by Japan's Toho Co., headed by Tomoyuki Tanaka (d.1997). Godzilla went on to star in 22 films.
(SFC, 4/3/97, p.C2)(MC, 11/3/01)
1954 Nov 3, Henri E.B. Matisse (b.1869), French painter and sculptor (Dance II), died. In 1998 Hilary Spurling published "The Unknown Matisse," a work that covered the years 1869-1908. An end volume was planned. In 1999 John Russell published "Matisse: Father and Son" and John O'Brian published "Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse." In 2005 Hilary Spurling authored "Matisse the Master: A Life of Henry Matisse, Volume Two.
(WSJ, 7/5/96, p.A5)(WSJ, 10/27/98, p.A20)(SFEC, 8/8/99, BR p.6)(Econ, 3/12/05, p.79)
1954 Nov 4, The Broadway show "Fanny" opened at the Majestic Theater for 888 performances. It was produced by David Merrick (d.2000 at 88).
(SFC, 4/27/00, p.A25)(MC, 11/4/01)
1954 Nov 7, A US spy plane was shot down North of Japan.
1954 Nov 10, The US Marine Corps Memorial, depicting the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, was dedicated by President Eisenhower in Arlington, Va.
1954 Nov 10, Lt. Col. John Strapp traveled 632 MPH in a rocket sled.
1954 Nov 11, Elizabeth Coleman White (b.1871), agricultural specialist, died of in New Jersey of cancer. She collaborated with Frederick Vernon Coville to develop and commercialize a cultivated blueberry. In 1927 she helped organize the New Jersey Blueberry Cooperative Association.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Coleman_White)
1954 Nov 12, Ellis Island closed after processing more than 20 million immigrants since opening in New York Harbor in 1892.
1954 Nov 14, Egyptian Pres. Naguib was fired and a state of emergency declared. Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), chairman of the RCC, took command.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rulers_of_Modern_Egypt)
1954 Nov 15, 1st regularly scheduled commercial flights over North Pole began.
1954 Nov 15, Lionel Barrymore (76), [Blythe], actor (Dr Kildare, Key Largo), died.
1954 Nov 15, Aleksander Kwasniewski was born in Bialogard. He served as the President of Poland from 1995 to 2005.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Kwa%C5%9Bniewski)
1954 Nov 22, Humane Society formed.
1954 Nov 24, France sent 20,000 soldiers to Algeria.
1954 Nov 25, Police in Concord, Ca., captured John Waitkunas (38) following a 7-year national manhunt. He admitted cashing $150,000 worth of forged checks across the nation.
(SFC, 11/26/04, p.F4)
1954 Nov 26, Velupillai Prabhakaran (d.2009), founder of the Tamil New Tigers (TNT later renamed to LTTE), was born in Velvettithurai Sri Lanka.
(www.dailynews.lk/2009/05/19/fea02.asp)
1954 Nov 26, Jonas Zemaitis (b.1909), a founder of the Lithuanian independence movement and presidium head, was shot to death in Moscow.
(LHC, 3/15/03)
1954 Nov 27, Alger Hiss, convicted of being a Soviet spy, was freed after 44 months in prison.
1954 Nov 28, Enrico Fermi (53), Italian-US physicist (Nobel 1938), died. Fermi led the team of international scientists to produce the first nuclear chain reaction, giving birth to the atomic bomb.
1954 Nov 30, A meteorite struck Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges of Alabama as she was sleeping on a couch. The space rock was a sulfide meteorite weighing 8.5 pounds and measuring seven inches in length. Mrs. Hodges was not permanently injured but suffered a nasty bruise along her hip and leg. This was the 1st modern report of a Meteorite striking a human.
1954 Nov 30, Wilhelm Furtwangler (68), German conductor and composer, died. He was Hitler's favorite conductor but was never a card carrying Nazi.
(SFC, 1/3/97, p.C6)(MC, 11/30/01)
1954 Dec 2, The US Senate voted 67-22 to censure Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." This followed the McCarthy investigation of the Army. Roy Cohn was McCarthy's aide and Joseph Welch was the attorney for the army. Army general counsel John G. Adams (d.2003) later authored "Without Precedent: The story of the Death of McCarthyism." In 1999 Arthur Herman published "Joseph McCarthy," a reexamination of McCarthy's accusations.
(NYT, 12/3/54, p.1)(WSJ, 8/5/96, p.A10)(AP, 12/2/97)(WSJ, 12/6/99, p.A32)(SFC, 6/28/03, p.A1)
1954 Dec 3, Samuel Barber's "Prayers of Kierkegaard," premiered.
1954 Dec 3, William Walton's opera "Troilus & Cressida," premiered in London.
1954 Dec 8, Maxwell Anderson's "Bad Seed," premiered in NYC.
1954 Dec 10, In Japan PM Shigeru Yoshida (1868-1967), post-reconstruction statesman and 2-time prime minister, was unseated by Ichiro Hatoyama.
(Econ, 7/18/09, p.42)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigeru_Yoshida)
1954 Dec 15, Fess Parker (1924-2010) starred as "Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter" in its premier as part of the new Disneyland TV show. It was possibly the first miniseries.
(SFEC, 5/24/98, DB p.38)(SFC, 3/19/10, p.C6)(www.imdb.com/title/tt0561021/)
1954 Dec 15, With the proclamation of the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles attained equal status with the Netherlands proper and Suriname in the overarching Kingdom of the Netherlands.
(SSFC, 10/9/11, p.C3)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura%C3%A7ao_and_Dependencies)
1954 Dec 16, Lee Morse (b.1897), US jazz and blues singer and songwriter, died. Her most popular years were in the 1920s and early 1930s, although her career began around 1917 and continued until her death. Her hit songs included "Ukulele Lady" (1925).
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruYQYwneWyw)
1954 Dec 20, James Hilton (54), English author (Lost Horizon), died.
1954 Dec 21, Dr. Sam Sheppard, an osteopathic surgeon, was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife, Marilyn, and was sentenced to life in prison. Sheppard spent 10 years in prison before the Supreme Court overturned the verdict; he was acquitted at retrial in 1966 and died four years later. [see Jul 4]
1954 Dec 23, Dr. Joseph Murray led a team of surgeons at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston in the 1st successful organ transplant. Ronald Herrick donated a kidney to his twin brother, Richard. In 1990 Dr. Murray was warded a Nobel Prize for his work.
(SFEC, 1/30/00, p.A14)(SFC, 12/3/01, p.A17)(SSFC, 12/19/04, Par p.7)
1954 Dec 26, "The Shadow," aired for last time on radio.
1954 Dec 27, Gian Carlo Menotti's opera "Saint of Bleecker Street" premiered in NYC.
1954 Dec 27, UC scientist Daniel I. Arnon reported that, after 6 years of research, he had succeeded in isolating chloroplasts in a test tube.
1954 Dec 29, The Dow Jones cleared the 400 barrier for the first time. It took 25 years for the Dow to return to pre-crash levels.
(WSJ, 5/20/96, p.C-1)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R42)
1954 A World War II memorial to US Marines was dedicated next to Arlington National Cemetery. It was based on the Iwo Jima flag raising by 6 Marines, which was captured by AP photographer Joseph Rosenthal. The photo inspired the sculpture by Felix de Weldon (d.2003).
(AP, 2/23/98)(SFC, 9/21/00, p.C6)(SFC, 6/14/03, p.A21)
1954 Georgia O'Keeffe painted "My Last Door."
c1954 Carleton Putnam (d.1998), dropped his position as chairman of Delta Airlines and wrote the biography: "Theodore Roosevelt", that covered the first 28 years of Roosevelt's life.
1954 The 1997 film Going "All the Way" with Lesley Ann Warren was based on the 1970 novel by Dan Wakefield set in 1954.
(SFEC, 5/25/97, Par p.C14)(SFEM, 9/14/97, p.18)
1954 Celebrities Ron Howard, Denzel Washington, Christie Brinkley, Dennis Quaid and Catherine Bach were born this year.
(SFEC, 4/20/97, Z1 p.5)
1954 Alberto Giacometti made his sculpture "Diego in a Cloak."
(SFEM, 11/24/96, p.8)
1954 Elizabeth Catlett made her linotype "Bread for All." It was an example of Mexican muralists influence on Black American artists.
1954 Jasper Johns began his painting "Flag," completed in 1955.
1954 Barnett Newman painted his "The Word II." In 1995 it was sold by Christie's for $3 mil.
(WSJ, 11/21/95, p.A-12)
1954 Robert Rauschenberg painted "Collection."
1954 Jason Schoener (1919-1997) showed his WW II landscape paintings of Eniwatok Atoll in the Marshall Islands at Gumps in SF.
1954 Nicolas de Stael painted his "Beach at Calais."
(WSJ, 2/8/96, p.A-12)
1954 John Wilson made his painting "The worker." It was an example of Mexican muralists influence on Black American artists.
1954 Harriette Arnow authored "The Dollmaker." The novel documented the move by Gertie Nevel from self-sufficient poverty in Kentucky to urban poverty in Detroit. It was made into a movie in 1984.
(Econ, 12/19/09, p.58)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dollmaker)
1954 Simone de Beauvoir authored "The Mandarins," a thinly veiled account of her relationship with Nelson Algren and Jean-Paul Sartre. In 2000 the play "Nelson & Simone" was created by John Susman and staged in Chicago.
(WSJ, 12/5/00, p.A24)
1954 "Half Magic" by Edward Eager was published. It was illustrated by N.M. Bodecker.
(SFEC, 2/27/00, BR p.12)
1954 L. Brent Bozell and William F. Buckley Jr. wrote "McCarthy and His Enemies," a guarded defense of Senator Joe McCarthy.
1954 Peter Drucker (b.1909-2005) authored his seminal work "The Practice of Management." In 1943 he had began a 2 year study of GM from the inside.
(WSJ, 11/19/99, p.A20)(Econ, 11/19/05, p.72)
1954 Darrell Huff authored "How to Lie With Statistics."
1954 Aldous Huxley authored "The Doors of Perception," a book about hallucinogenic drugs. Jim Morrison later named his band "The Doors" after this book.
(SSFC, 4/11/04, Par p.2)
1954 Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), American writer, critic, and naturalist, authored "Measure of Man." In 1955 it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wood_Krutch)
1954 Iris Murdoch published her first novel "Under the Net."
1954 Romanian poet Marin Sorescu published his "Alone Among Poets."
1954 Le Corbusier, French architect, published his "The Modular."
(V.D.-H.K.p.363)
1954 Gordon Allport, psychologist, supported the position that we can under-stand discrimination through social scientific inquiry. This belief was developed in his book: "The Nature of Prejudice." In 1996 Prof. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl wrote a work "The Anatomy of Prejudices" that analyzes why Allport's view has been inadequate.
(SFC, 5/12/96, p.BR-9)
1954 Cecil Beaton authored "The Glass of Fashion," a history of style.
(WSJ, 9/15/07, p.W10)
1954 Harrison Brown wrote "The Challenge of Man's Future" in which he noted the world's population to be 2.6 billion.
(NOHY, 3/1990, p.222)
1954 Ernest Griffith wrote his textbook "The American System of Government."
1954 Werner Haftmann (d.1999 at 87), German art historian, published "Painting of the 20th Century."
1954 Kingsley Amis authored "Lucky Jim," his comic novel of academic life.
1954 Alger Hiss was released from prison and wrote "In the Court of Public Opinion." His accuser Whittaker Chambers (d.1961) his account "Witness" in 1952. In 1978 Allen Weinstein wrote an account of the Hiss-Chambers case. In 1997 Sam Tannenhaus wrote a biography of Chambers. In 1999 Hilton Kramer wrote "The Twilight of the Intellectuals," a portrayal of the influence of the political left on the cultural life of Cold War America.
(SFC, 11/16/96, p.A3)(WSJ, 4/20/99, A20)
1954 Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), Swiss-born psychoanalyst, published his work "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious."
(SFC, 6/5/11, p.G7)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung_publications)
1954 Louis L'Amour wrote his western novel "Lance Kilkenny."
(USAT, 6/10/98, p.1D)
1954 Alan Le May (1899-1964) authored his novel "The Searchers" (1954). The story was based on Brit Johnson, a black Texas ranch foreman, who was killed by Kiowa raiders in 1871.
(AH, 6/07, p.64)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Searchers_%28film%29)
1954 Robert Lindner published "The 50-Minute Hour," a landmark book on the inner workings of psychotherapy.
(SFEC, 5/2/99, BR p.8)
1954 Leslie Lipson, UC Berkeley prof. of political science, authored "Great Issues of Politics."
1954 Cora Partridge (d.1999 at 82) wrote her first book "Skeleton Cave" about a boy who finds Indian relics near his home. She wrote 15 children's novels and in 1977 "Vermont, the State with the Storybook Past."
1954 Arnold Toynbee published the last 4 volumes of his "Study of History."
1954 Norbert Wiener, MIT mathematician, wrote Invention: "The Care and Feeding of Ideas." It was published in 1995 by MIT Press (800-356-0343). "Wiener gave the world the theory and practice of Cybernetics..."
(Wired, 8/95, p.146)
1954 Eleanor Butler Cameron wrote the children's book: "The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet."
1954 Kenneth Dodson (d.1999 at 91) published his WW II novel "Away All Boats."
1954 Jean Giono wrote his novel: "The Horseman on the Roof." In 1996 it was made into a film directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and set in plague-stricken Provence in 1832.
(WSJ, 5/17/96, p.A-12)
1954 William Golding published his "Lord of the Flies." It is about a group of schoolboys who get marooned on an island and quickly degenerate to a state of savagery.
(WSJ, 10/5/95, p.A-12)
1954 M.E. Clifton James authored "I Was Monty's Double," an account of how he served as an impersonator of British Gen. Bernard Montgomery during WWII. A movie of the same title was released in 1958.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Was_Monty%27s_Double)
1954 Arthur Loesser authored "Men, Women and Pianos."
(WSJ, 7/15/06, p.P8)
1954 W.W. "Pudge" Heffelfinger wrote his autobiography "This Was Football." He was the 1st All-American selected by Walter Camp, and the 1st to receive a professional contract.
(WSJ, 12/16/03, p.D10)
1954 Randall Jarrell authored "Pictures From an Institution," a hilarious portrait of campus life.
(NW, 8/20/01, p.56)
1954 James Michener (d.1997 at 90) wrote his novel "Sayanora."
1954 Sam Moskowitz (d.1997 at 76) published his first book: "Immortal Storm," a collection of magazine articles that the development of the science-fiction fan movement.
1954 The "Story of O" by Pauline Reage was first published. She had written it at age 47 out of fear that her married lover would leave her. He never left her and saw to it that the novel got published.
1954 Bud Schulberg wrote the classic "On the Waterfront," a novel of labor and corruption in New York City.
1954 John Steinbeck wrote his novel "Sweet Thursday."
1954 JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) introduced a new mythological world in "The Lord of the Rings."
(TL, 1988, p.114)(WSJ, 2/11/97, p.A18)
1954 Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) published her own literary memoir, a book that mixed reminiscences and recipes under the title "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_B._Toklas)
1954 Rayner Unwin (d.2000 at 74), publisher of the Tolkien books, authored a biography of poet John Clare.
(SSFC, 12/10/00, p.C17)
1954 Gore Vidal published his satirical fantasy "Messiah."
1954 Modern Library published "Selected Stories" by Eudora Welty.
(SFEC, 12/6/98, BR p.12)
1954 "Under Milk Wood," a play for voices by Dylan Thomas, was broadcast in its final version by the BBC.
(TL, 1988, p.114)
1954 The Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical "Oklahoma" was made into a film. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann.
(WSJ, 2/5/96, p.A-16)(SFC, 3/15/97, p.A19)
1954 The Richard Nash play "Rainmaker" became a Broadway hit.
(USAT, 11/12/99, p.1E)
1954 The Broadway play "Witness for the Prosecution" was directed by Robert Lewis.
1954 The children's radio show "Let's Pretend" with Sybil Trent (d.2000 at 73) ended after running for 2 decades.
1954 Samuel Z. Arkoff (d.2001 at 83) and James H. Nicholson established American International Pictures (AIP). They soon began producing films for the teen market such as "I Was a Teenage Werewolf."
1954 Director Sam Fuller trekked to the rainforest with a 16mm Bolex, 75 boxes of cigars and 2 cases of vodka hoping to make a film. Producer Darryl Zanuck called it off. The 1995 documentary film "Tigrero" was made by Finnish filmmaker Mika Kaurismaki. It covered Fuller's trek into the Brazilian rainforest.
(SFC, 12/5/97, p.C12)
1954 Kemp R. Niver (1912-1996), cinematographer and film historian, received an Oscar for his restoration of 3,600 movies made between 1894 and 1912. He converted frame-by-frame paper photographs back into film using his own designed Renovare Process over a period of 15 years. During this time he wrote 11 books that included a cross-reference for the early movies and the book: "The First Twenty Years: A Segment of Film History."
1954 Audrey Hepburn received an Oscar for "Roman Holiday" (1953) and a Tony for her role in the Broadway play "Ondine."
1954 Hal Roach, Jr. produced a 30-minute "Bozo the Clown" television pilot for Capitol Records starring Gil Lamb as Bozo. This film can be viewed at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and Beverly Hills, California.
(www.mtr.org)
1954 "Four Star Playhouse" was a TV dramatic series that starred Charles Boyer, Ida Lupino, Dick Powell and David Niven. It was edited by Coles Trapnell (d.1999 at 88). The show closed in 1956.
1954 The TV Omnibus series showed the first under water films by Jacques Cousteau.
1954 "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour" were hit TV programs. Their comedy writers included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon. "Your Show of Shows" with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca ended.
(WSJ, 8/19/96, p.A11)(SSFC, 6/3/01, p.A29)
1954 "The Tonight Show" with Steve Allen began on TV.
1954 Louis Armstrong recorded "Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy" on Columbia.
1954 British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976 created his chamber opera "The Turn of the Screw" based on the 1898 novella by Henry James.
1954 Ray Charles (1930-2004) recorded "I've Got a Woman." It was based on the hymn "My Jesus is All the World to Me."
(USAT, 6/11/04, p.7A)(Econ, 6/19/04, p.84)
1954 The Collins Kids of Oklahoma, Lawrencine (1942-2018) and Lawrence (b.1944), began performing as a musical act on "Town Hall Party," hosted by Tex Ritter on KTTV, Los Angeles. Lawrence later co-wrote "Delta Dawn," a 1972 country hit for Tanya Tucker and a 1973 No. 1 pop single for Helen Reddy.
(www.rockabillyhall.com/YouTubeCollinsKids.html)(SFC, 8/10/18, p.D5)
1954 Misty, written by pianist Errol Garner, was released on his Verve album "Contrasts." Wyatt "Bull" Ruther (1923-1999) played the bass lines.
(SFC, 2/25/08, p.E13)
1954 Bart Howard (1916-2004), born in Iowa as Howard Joseph Gustafson, wrote the hit song "Fly Me To the Moon." His initial title was "In Other Words."
1954 The Mambo became the hottest dance since the Lindy Hop in 1936.
(TMC, 1994, p.1954)
1954 Web Pierce made a country hit with "Slowly." The tune boosted the pedal steel guitar to prominence.
1954 Cole Porter's lyric "Some get a kick from cocaine" was changed to "Some get perfume from Spain" in order to get radio airplay.
1954 Elvis Presley was climbing the music charts in the US.
(WSJ, 5/20/96, p.C-1)
1954 The Medallions recorded "The Letter." The song contained the phrase "the pompatus of love."
1954 The first Newport Jazz Festival was organized by George Wein and held on the lawn of the Lorrilard estate in Newport, R.I.
1954 The Robins signed with Leiber and Stoller and recorded such hits as "Riot in Cell Block 9," "Framed" and "Smokey Joe's Café."
1954 The Lyric Opera Chorus of Chicago was founded.
1954 Truman Anderson, Chuck Arnao and Raymond Plank (1922-2018) formed Apache Corp. to raise investor funds for oil and gas drilling. Plank pioneered the use of what came to be known as master limited partnerships, an investment vehicle that can be traded publicly with significant tax advantages to investors. The firm later expanded to oil exploration and production and in 2017 reported revenue of almost $6 billion.
1954 In Louisville, Ky., the Satterwhite Wing was added to the Speed Museum. Preston Pope Satterwhite had donated an entire 17th century English paneled room, some 500 pieces of art along with cash to house it all.
(WSJ, 12/18/97, p.A20)
1954 The Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami Beach, designed by Morris Lapidus (1902-2001), was completed.
(SFC, 1/20/01, p.A24)(WSJ, 12/26/07, p.D6)
1954 Haldor E. Rosvold (d.1997 at 81), neuroscientist, founded a unit to study animal behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health. He studied mental processes like short-term memory and discovered the first of several complex networks in the brain. He was one of the first to reveal a functional connection between the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia.
(SFC, 10/6/97, p.)
1954 The Korbel property in Guerneville, California, was acquired by the Heck family who began producing sparkling wines.
(SFC, 4/9/96, zz1 p.3)
1954 The town of Mauch Chunk (Indian for Sleeping Bear) was renamed Jim Thorpe after the athlete, in an effort to revitalize the town and bring in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The hall of Fame went to Canton, Ohio, but Thorpe's mausoleum was erected there.
(HT, 4/97, p.18)
1954 At the Texas State Fair Harry Winston premiered the flawless 62.05 carat Winston diamond. It had just been cut from a 154.5-carot rough stone.
1954 The Church of Scientology was begun by L. Ron Hubbard (d.1986), science fiction writer, in Los Angeles.
(SFC, 9/7/96, p.A9)(SFC, 10/22/96, p.A12)
1954 The Unarius, the Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science, organization was founded by Ernest and Ruth Norman. In 1997 the group claimed to have 5,000 members worldwide. The group expected to make contact with extraterrestrials in 2001.
1954 "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should," began to be advertised.
(WSJ, 11/4/97, p.B1)
1954 The WSJ described the new fish sticks as "boneless oblongs roughly four inches long."
(WSJ, 1/7/04, p.B1)
1954 The National Basketball Association (NBA) introduced the 24-second clock.
(SFEC, 4/6/97, Z1 p.5)
1954 Lefty O'Doul led the San Diego Padres to a baseball pennant victory.
(SFEC, 3/30/97, BR. p.6)
1954 Max Born won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to quantum theory.
(WSJ, 12/8/00, p.W11)
1954 Thomas Weller (1915-2008), John Enders (1897-1985) and Frederick Robbins (1916-2003) won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of the ability of poliomyelitis viruses to grow in cultures of various types of tissue.
(http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1954/)(LSA, Spring, 2009, p.56)
1954 American CIA director Allen Dulles hired Richard M. Bissell Jr. to take charge of the U-2 spy plane program. He later directed the Bay of Pigs invasion. He tells his own story in "Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs published in 1996."
1954 US Congress passed the Revised Organic Act, a document that established the governing structure of the Virgin Islands. Residents cannot vote on national elections and their governor is appointed by the president.
(NG, Jan, 1968, C. Mitchell, p. 95)
1954 Charles Diggs (d.1998 at 75) was elected to the House of Representatives from the 13th district (around Detroit) and stayed in congress for 25 years. In 1978 he was convicted of 29 counts of operating a payroll kickback scheme and was censured by the House. He was the first chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and served from 1969-1971 and 1973-1978.
1954 The US rejected Afghanistan's request to buy military equipment to modernize the army.
(https://www.afghan-web.com/history/chronology/)
1954 A Federal Highway Act was passed.
(SFC, 10/22/97, p.E5)
1954 The US Treasury began keeping daily records on Treasury Bills.
1954 The Atomic Energy Act made the leaking of confidential information punishable by a $1000 fine.
1954 US missile silos were built in the Marin, Ca., headlands. They were decommissioned in 1974. In 1975 the area became home to the non-profit Marine Mammal Center.
1954 The FBI "Security Index," begun in 1940, peaked with the names of 26,174 people.
(SSFC, 6/9/02, p.F3)
1954 The 600-square-mile Garrison Dam in North Dakota, authorized by Congress in 1949, was completed. It covered the ancestral lands of Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Indians.
(SSFC, 8/29/04, p.M5)
1954 US Congress voted to withdraw support to Wisconsin Indians guaranteed in 1854. The Menomonee (people of the wild rice) Chiefs Oshkosh and Keshena met with federal Indian agents in Keshena Falls, Wisconsin, in 1854 and agreed to retain only 275,000 acres from their original 9 1/2 million acres. As part of the settlement the chiefs and their followers were promised eternal government protection.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.235)
1954 The US Supreme Court in Berman v Parker approved a slum clearance plan of the government of Washington DC over the objections of a local department store owner.
1954 The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) restriction led to the prohibition against pastors endorsing candidates at the risk of losing their churches' tax exempt status.
1954 In the US employer-provided health insurance was made tax-free.
1954 Dr. Everett Parker (1913-2015), an American ordained minister, created a public relations office for the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church, which became the United Church of Christ in a 1957 merger.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/us/everett-parker-obituary.html?_r=0)
1954 Stan Getz, tenor sax player, was arrested for trying to rob a drugstore in Seattle and served a 6-month sentence.
1954 Abraham Ribicoff was elected Governor of Connecticut and served two terms (1955-61).
(SFC, 2/23/98, p.A5)(www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKribicoff.htm)
1954 The Alaska town of North Pole began Operation Santa, a volunteer program to respond to children's letters sent to Santa Claus. The US Postal Service dropped the program in 2009.
1954 In San Diego, Ca., a 43-foot cross was erected on Mount Soledad. In 2011 the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it violated the First Amendment. Proponents said it was built to honor military veterans. In 2013 a federal judge ordered the cross to be removed.
1954 In southern California Sabato "Simon" Rodia, Italian immigrant and cement finisher, completed his Watts Towers project, begun in 1921, and deeded the property to a neighbor. Ownership eventually passed to the state. The property was closed in 1994 due to Northridge earthquake and reopened in 2001.
1954 Bartender Larry J. Cano (1924-2014) took over an old Polynesian restaurant in southern California's San Fernando Valley and created a sit-down Mexican restaurant named El Torrito. By 1978 he was operating 22 locations and sold the chain to W.R. Grace, but continued for a decade as president.
1954 A group of SF artists took over the King Ubu Gallery at 3119 Fillmore St. and renamed it the Six Gallery. The 6 founding members included: Jack Spicer, David Simpson, Wally Hedrick, John Ryan, Hayward King and Deborah Remington.
1954 San Francisco toy magnate Norman Rosenberg (d.2017 age 98) began hosting "The King Norman Show" for kids on KGO-TV and continued to 1961. He and his wife had turned a small toy store in San Francisco into a 21-store chain with branches in the SF Bay Area, Oregon and Washington state.
1954 In San Francisco a new 9-story downtown garage, designed by architect George A. Applegarth, was built at 325 Mason.
(SSFC, 6/28/09, p.C2)
1954 San Francisco State Prof. Ruth Witt-Diamant founded a Poetry Center at SF State.
1954 In San Francisco the Telegraph Hill Dwellers neighborhood association was founded. In 2013 it counted 550-dues-paying members.
1954 A SF supervisor said the YGC (Youth Guidance building) was so badly put together that it should be abandoned.
1954 SF Archbishop John J. Mitty consecrated John Joseph Scanlon (1907-1997) as a bishop. Scanlon then served as bishop of Honolulu from 1954-1981.
1954 Alfred Addy began editing the Council News, a newspaper issued by Bay Area Teamster Joint Councils 7 and 38.
1954 The Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center, founded in 1890, moved from 1736 Stockton St. to 660 Lombard St.
(SFC, 6/1/01, WBb p.3)(SFC, 6/7/01, p.A17)
1954 The Telegraph Hill Dwellers formed to fight the closure of the 39-Coit bus route.
1954 In San Francisco George's Place opened at 2629 Bayshore Blvd. The log cabin structure had been built on the SF-San Mateo county line and was known earlier as Sam's Lodge. In 1958 it became George's Log Cabin. The Silvestri family bought it in the 1970s and used the former nightclub for storage.
1954 Chinese-born civil engineer Tung-Yen Lin (1912-2003) founded the San Francisco-based T.Y. Lin engineering firm.
(SSFC, 6/23/13, p.A16)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tung-Yen_Lin)
1954 In San Francisco the O'Farrell, Jones and Hyde cable car lines and the Jones Street shuttle ended operations.
1954 Harold Powers was elected lieut. Governor of California.
(SFC, 10/17/96, C2)
1954 California's Highway 101 freeway opened at Mission San Miguel.
(SB, 3/28/02)
1954 Sherwood Johnson (d.1998 at 73) opened the first pizza parlor in Sacramento, Ca. It grew into the int'l. chain known as Shakey's.
1954 In northern California a catastrophic flood this winter caused the levees to fail at Bull Island on the Napa River where grain and potatoes had been raised.
1954 John Madden, born in Minnesota, graduated from Jefferson High School in Daly City, Ca., after attending middle school at Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Madden)
1954 The Plum Island Animal Disease Center opened off of New York's Long Island. Congress voted to close it in 2009.
1954 On the US-Mexican border the 100,000 acre Falcon Lake, near Zapata, Texas, was created on the Rio Grande's old river bed. It was managed by the bi-national International Water Boundary Commission.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20101001/ts_csm/329598)
1954 The tobacco industry faced its 1st liability lawsuit by a lung cancer victim. The suit was dropped after 13 years.
1954 US labor union membership reached an all time high of 35% of the work force.
1954 Hyman P. Minsky (1919-1996), professor of economics, received his doctorate from Harvard. He went on to develop ideas on how lending patterns and mood swings can push the economy into speculative booms and declines. He showed how high cash flow in prosperous times can cause lending to get beyond control that can lead to a pullback and contracting economy.
1954 Boothe Leasing was founded by Dyas Power Boothe Jr. He launched the company with a $10 million loan from the Ford Foundation. The firm leased trucks, dredging equipment, and automobile manufacturing equipment. By 1961 the company was leasing airplanes to TWA.
1954 GM transferred production of the Corvette to St. Louis and 3,000 were produced in this year.
1954 B.F. Goodrich developed the tubeless tire. It was introduced by Packard. [see 1948]
(F, 10/7/96, p.70)
1954 The last Indian motorcycle was manufactured in the US. The last Indian motorcycle was manufactured in 1953. (2 of 3 for 1953)
(SFC, 6/10/96, p.D3)(SFEC, 1/3/99, BR p.4)(WSJ, 4/16/99, p.W14)
1954 William Jovanovich (1920-2001) was elected president of Harcourt, Brace and Co. The firm had 125 employees and sales of some $8 million. At his retirement in 1990 Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Inc. had 12,000 employees and sales of $1.7 billion.
1954 Leonard and Bernice Lavin (1925-2007) purchased a West Coast cosmetics company from Blaine Culver for nearly half a million dollars. They moved the operation to Chicago, renamed the company Alberto-Culver and dumped all the products except VO5. In 1965 the company went public on the NYSE.
1954 Brownie Wise (1913-1992), lead sales woman for Tupperware, became the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week magazine.
(http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d7509.htm)(WSJ, 7/30/08, p.A13)
1954 A subscription to the WSJ cost $20 a year.
1954 Lennar Corp., a residential home builder, was founded.
1954 In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, brothers Martin and Matthew Bucksbaum started what later became General Growth Properties Inc. by building a shopping center to house one of their family's grocery stores in Cedar Rapids. General Growth Properties went public in 1972. In 2008 the company stock fell below $1 as it struggled under $27 billion in debt. In 2009 the company filed for bankruptcy.
(WSJ, 12/9/08, p.A12)(SFC, 4/17/09, p.C2)
1954 Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson Motor combined to form the American Motors Co.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl.)
1954 The Nash Metropolitan went on sale for $1,445. The small car got up to 40 miles per gallon. American Motors discontinued production of the British-built car in 1961. Total sales reached nearly 95,000.
1954 The Studebaker Co. merged with Packard Motor Car Co.
1954 James Whitman McLamore (1926-1996) and Dave Edgarton opened Insta Burger King in Miami, the forerunner to the international Burger King chain.
1954 John Templeton (1912-2008) set up his Templeton Growth Fund. A $10,000 investment in this Class A portfolio would have grown to $2 million by 1992, when he sold his stake.
1954 The 1st major neon sign in Las Vegas was the Young Electric sign Co.'s project for the Boulder Club.
1954 AT&T Bell Labs scientists invented the solar cell.
1954 Con-Tact paper premiered at 59 cents a yard.
(SFC, 7/14/99, p.8)
1954 A team of scientists at General Electric that included Robert Wentorf Jr. (d.1997 at 70) perfected a process for converting graphite to diamond using high pressures and temperatures. Wentorf also developed Borazon, a cubic form of boron, second only to diamond in hardness but more resistant to high temperatures.
1954 IBM rolled out its models 704 and 705 computers.
(http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1952.htm)
1954 The Semiautomatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program was established by the US Air Force. It was an air defense network of the time using the largest computer ever built. SAGE machines contained 55,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 275 tons and occupied half an acre of floorspace.
(WSJ, 10/15/01, p.R23)(Econ, 6/10/06, Survey p.33)
1954 The Rand corp. built the Johnniac computer. Bill Gunning (1916-2006), computing pioneer, helped build the device, one of 17 designed around the computing architecture suggested by John von Neumann. Gunning went on to help develop Ethernet (1972) at Xerox's PARC.
(SFC, 11/8/06, p.B13)
1954 T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang of Columbia Univ. published a paper pointing out that although most interactions in nature seem to occur in such a way as to keep parity unbroken, there is no reason why this must always be so. It was completely within the realm of possibility that nature was not invariant under the parity operation. All that was necessary was that if it were not, then charge conjugation, time reversal, or both would have to be violated as well. For this they received the Nobel prize in 1957.
(JST-TMC, 1983, p.173)
1954 Marc Gregoire, a French engineer, bonded aluminum with polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) and created the 1st nonstick pan.
(AARP, 5-6/04)
1954 The American Cancer Society and the British Medical Research Council, in independent reports, found higher death rates among smokers than nonsmokers.
(HNQ, 11/10/98)
1954 Dr. George Moore and colleagues at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute at Buffalo, NY, published a pioneering study of male patients with cancer of the mouth showing that a majority of them had been tobacco chewers for significant periods of time.
1954 General Electric introduced highly structured coursework centering on leadership and development. This introduced the concept of the corporate university.
(Hem, 9/04, p.66)
1954 Maurice Allais, French economist, recorded the movement of a pendulum for 30 days during which the moon eclipsed the sun and caused the pendulum to move a bit faster. The "Allais effect" confounded physicists and indicated a possible flaw in General Relativity.
1954 A US middle-class home of 800 square feet cost $7,000.
1954 Col. John Paul Stapp, an Air Force medical researcher, accelerated to 632 mph on a rocket powered sled in 5 sec. The sled then decelerated to a dead stop in 1.4 sec. with 40 times the pull of gravity.
1954 A major flood along the Tennessee River took away a third of Pittsburg Landing, held by Union troops during the 1862 Confederate attack at Shiloh.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.27)
1954 Labib Habachi, Egyptian archeologist, unearthed at Karnak a 'victory stela' in which the Theban king Kamose (successor to Sekenre) commemorated incidents in his successful struggle with the Hyksos king, Aweserre Apopi.
(L.C.-W.P.p.59)
1954 Charles Belden (b.1904), writer, died. His 1933 play "The Mystery of the Wax Museum" was turned into the 1953 film "House of Wax," the first 3-D movie, starring Vincent Price and Charles Bronson.
(www.moria.co.nz/horror/waxmuseum.htm)(SFC, 11/1/02, p.A28)
1954 Strickland Gillilan (b.1869), American poet, died. His poems included "The Reading Mother." "...Richer than I your can never be / I had a mother who read to me."
1954 Charles Ives (b.1874), insurance agent and composer, died. His work included symphonies, songs, and "Three Places in New England." He was pioneer of dissonance as flavoring. Jan Swafford later authored the biography "Charles Ives: A Life With Music." Helen R. Sive authored the biography "Music's Connecticut Yankee."
(WSJ, 8/15/96, p.A10)(HN, 10/20/00)(WSJ, 1/20/04, p.D7)
1954 Robert H. Jackson, US Supreme Court Justice (1941-1954), died. His incomplete memoir of FDR, begun in the early 1950s, was published in 2003 as "That Man: An Insider's Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt."
1954 The Organization of American States (OAS) put forth its convention on diplomatic asylum.
(Economist, 9/15/12, p.16)
1954 In Australia Evdokia Petrov (d.2002), Soviet Union spy, was abducted by Soviet agents after she and her husband Vladimir Petrov (d.1991), the third secretary at the Soviet embassy in Australia, defected. Australian police snatched her back as her plane stopped for fuel in Darwin.
1954 The Tintin comic book, "Explorers on the Moon," was published. One drawing in Chinese ink from Belgian cartoonist Herge shows the fearless reporter, his white dog Snowy and his friend Captain Haddock in spacesuits, walking on the moon for the first time and looking at the Earth. In 2016 this drawing was sold for a record 1.55 million euros ($1.64 million) by auction house Artcurial.
1954 British actress Eleanor Drew (1922-2014), born as Nellie Darlison, began a 5-year run in the West End in the musical "Salad Days."
1954 Chris Chataway (1932-2014) was named the first-ever BBC Sports Personality of the Year. He broke the 5,000 meters world record and was one of the pacemakers for Roger Bannister's landmark four-minute mile.
c1954 Anti-witchcraft laws were repealed in Britain.
1954 British Colonel Leofric Boyle began compiling information about endangered species. His card index system grew to become the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
(Econ, 9/14/13, SR p.12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUCN_Red_List)
1954 Quebec, Canada, celebrated its first Winter Carnaval.
(SFEC, 1/10/99, p.T5)
1954 China's first constitution said that citizens enjoyed "freedom of residence and freedom to change their residence."
(Econ, 4/19/14, SR p.7)
1954 Deng Xiaoping condemned the "Gao Gang-Rao Shushi anti-Party clique."
1954 In China the bingtuan was founded in Xinjiang province. It consisted mainly of demobilized Han soldiers and were ordered to turn desert areas into farmland while keeping their guns to fend off potential Soviet incursions. Mao Zedong abolished the corps in 1975. Deng Xiaoping re-established it in 1981.
1954 In China a flood on the Yangtze killed 30,000 people.
(NH, 7/96, p.2)
1954 The IMF expelled Czechoslovakia, ostensibly for failing to provide adequate statistics, though the cold war probably had more to do with it.
1954 In Egypt Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), filmmaker, directed "The Blazing Sun" with Omar Sharif.
1954 Colonel Nasser took over in Egypt and the British pulled out of the Suez.
1954 In Egypt the statue of Ramses II was moved from Memphis to Cairo. It was divided into 3 pieces and loaded onto trucks for the move.
1954 In France the Little Sisters of Marie, Mother of the Redeemer, was founded in Toulouse by Marie Nault (1901-1999), a woman who, according to legend, stopped her formal education at age 11 to work on the family farm but possessed such spirituality that she developed the stigmata — the bleeding wounds that imitate those of Christ on the cross. In 2018 nearly all the nuns in the tiny religious order threatened to renounce their vows rather than accept the Holy See's decision to remove their superior.
1954 The French National Assembly rejected the European Defense Community.
1954 A French military court sentenced Alois Brunner to death in absentia for war crimes. He had sent 23,000 French Jews to death camps. Brunner fled from Germany to Syria.
1954 Jacques Courtin (1921-2007) opened his first beauty salon, the Institut Clarins, on Paris' Rue Tronchet. His beauty lines were among the first to tap into natural ingredients. Clarins went public in 1984.
1954 French engineer Marc Gregoire sprayed his wife's pans with teflon and created his own marketable invention: nonstick cookware. [see 1956]
(Sm, 2/06, p.38)
1954 Otto John, the first head of West Germany's Federal Bureau for the Protection of the Constitution - an intelligence agency, crossed over to East Berlin. He said he was kidnapped.
1954 Elizabeth Dewey Johns Drake (1915-1996) and her husband St. Clair Drake received a Ford Foundation grant to study the impact of western media in the Gold Coast (Ghana).
1954 In Honduras a three month strike was held by some 60,000 workers against the US-based United Fruit Co. and other land holders. They won improved labor conditions and influenced union movements throughout Latin America.
1954 In Hong Kong missionary wife Elsie Elliott (1913-2015), later Elsie Tu, set up the Mu Kuang Middle School under an army tent with 30 desks. By 2015 the school grew to a 7-storey block with 1,300 students.
1954 Israel established an enemy infiltrators law. It allowed the government to hold people without judicial revue if they were deemed to be security threats.
1954 The Uzi machine gun was first made by Israel Military Industries. Uzi Gal, the inventor of Israel's Uzi submachine gun, died in Philadelphia after a long illness in 2002. The Netherlands was the 1st country outside Israel to buy Uzis in 1958.
(AP, 9/9/02)(SFC, 9/10/02, p.A16)
1954 Italy regained Trieste, which had been held by the United Nations. In 2001 Jan Morris authored "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere."
(SSFC, 10/28/01, p.R2)(SSFC, 10/28/01, p.R2)
1954 Ardito Desio (d.2001 at 104) of Italy organized the 1st expedition to reach the top of K2 in Kashmir, the world's 2nd highest peak. In 1962 Desio became the 1st Italian to reach the South Pole.
1954 Japanese painter Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972) founded the Gatai movement. He encouraged followers to challenge conformity.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Yoshihara)(Econ, 5/2/15, p.75)
1954 The Japanese film "Sansho the Bailiff" was produced.
(SFC, 10/12/97, DB p.53)
1954 The Japanese film "Seven Samurai" (Shichinin no samurai) starred Toshiro Mifune. It was directed by Akira Kurosawa. It was the basis for the American film "The magnificent Seven."
(SFC, 12/26/97, p.C3)(SFC, 12/25/97, p.A25)(SFC, 9/7/98, p.A21)
1954 Japan's "Self-Defense Forces" (SDF) were formed.
1954 In Japan the Brothers of Christian Instruction founded the Catholic St. Mary's Int'l. School for boys in Tokyo. In 2016 three former students alleged they were molested or raped by religious brothers at the school during the 1960s.
1954 In Kenya the British government began making preparations for the country's Independence.
1954 In Kenya British forces allegedly used pliers to castrate Paulo Nzili, a Mau Mau rebel. He survived the severe beatings which killed many other Mau Mau and in 2009 launched a bid with 4 others to win compensation from Britain over claims they were tortured and unlawfully imprisoned during Britain's colonial rule.
1954 In Lebanon Beirut Int'l. Airport opened. In 1998 a new $460 million airport was under construction.
1954 Mexico's Dept. of Tourism made the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico founded by Amalia Hernandez the nation's official cultural ambassador.
(SFEC, 9/8/96, DB p.47)
1954 The Bilderberg Group was set up in to support military and economic co-operation between Europe and North America during the Cold War. Its first meeting was at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland.
1954 The Hague Convention of this year forbade the taking of war booty. The Hague cultural Property Convention recognized the protection of cultural, religious and historical monuments including national parks.
1954 The 5 islands of the Netherlands Antilles were federated. These included Bonaire, Curacao, St. Maarten, Saba and St. Eustatius.
1954 Areogun (b.1880), Yoruba sculptor, died. He was a native of the Ekiti region of Nigeria.
(www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/11/sfg/ht11sfg.htm)
1954 Russian conducted the Totsk nuclear test involving ground troops.
1954 In Singapore Lee Kuan Yew founded the People's Action Party (PAP). He won his first parliamentary seat a year later.
(Econ, 3/12/15, p.77)a
1954 Gen. Franco closed the Spanish consulate on Gibraltar in a fit of rage over a visit by Queen Elizabeth II.
1954 The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt (1928), formed in Sudan.
1954 British colonial authorities opened a deepwater port at Mtwara, Tanzania.
1954 Albert Pickerell (d.1999 at 86) served in Thailand as a Fulbright lecturer and helped establish a School of Journalism at Thammasatt Univ. Later at UC Berkeley he published "The Courts and the New Media."
1954 In Uganda Owen Falls Dam was built at the source of the Nile River. It used Lake Victoria's waters to generate power for Ugandan residents and export to neighboring nations.
1954 Venezuela's Radio Caracas Television Station (RCTV) began operations.
1954 The Caracas Convention established ground rules for political sanctuary in Latin America.
1954-1955 Charles David Keeling, a geochemist at Cal Tech, conducts his experiments to measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. He finds out that the concentration of carbon dioxide varies throughout the night and day and settles at a daily balance of 315 parts per million every mid-afternoon.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.23)
1954-1955 The Univ. of Michigan fired professors Chandler Davis, Clement Markert, and Mark Nickerson because they refused on Constitutional grounds to answer questions of the Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities on their relationships with the US Communist Party. An annual lecture on academic freedom was established in their honor in 1990.
(MT, Win. '96, p.7)
1954-1956 Drummer Max Roach and trumpet player Clifford Brown led an influential jazz quintet over this period.
(DFP, 7/28/96, p.F8)
1954-1959 The names of 77,297 Czech Jews were put on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague. The memorial was closed in 1968. It was renovated after the collapse of the Communist regime and re-opened in 1996.
(www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/a-ex-pinkas.htm)
1954-1960 Robert Young (d.1998 at 91) played the loving father Jim Anderson on TV in "Father Knows Best." Jane Wyatt (1910-2006) played his wife. The show had started as a radio sitcom in 1949.
(SFC, 7/23/98, p.C4)(SFC, 10/23/06, p.B3)
1954-1962 During the Algerian war of independence French generals approved torture and the disappearance of the 3,000 suspected guerrillas. About a million people were killed during this period. In 1977 Alistair Horne of Britain authored "A Savage War of Peace." In 2000 former Gen. Paul Aussaresse testified on French military behavior and the approval of Gen. Jacques Massu. In 2001 a mass grave of 290 people was found at the site of the former headquarters of the French army. In 2001 former Gen. Aussaresses authored "Special Services: Algeria: 1955-1957." In 2002 Aussaresses was convicted of "trying to justify war" and was fined $6,500.
(SFC, 12/31/00, p.B9)(SFC, 4/24/01, p.A12)(SFC, 5/11/01, p.D4)(SFC, 1/26/02, p.A8)(Econ, 4/19/14, p.41)
1954-1963 This period of the civil rights era was covered in Taylor Branch's book: "Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 1954-1963."
1954-1965 This period of the Vietnam War was covered by Mark Moyar in his book "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1865" (2006).
(WSJ, 9/28/06, p.D8)
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