ROCKIN' AROUND THE CLOCK
Arthur Rosenberg

From the vantage point of a millennium spanning light years and super strings, what is half a century? Time since high school is a kaleidoscope of spinning images from which souvenirs occasionally emerge into consciousness. Perhaps a few snippets from 1957 will help to clear the blur:

What Happened?
President Eisenhower begins a second term; Mao Tse-tung launches his “Great Leap Forward,” moving over half a billion peasants into 24,000 communes; Haitian voters elect François "Papa Doc" Duvalier; German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun moves to the US; the Soviet Union launches Sputnik; Ghana attains independence; Colombia, Honduras, and Malaya grant women the right to vote; Mikhail Botvinnik loses the world chess championship to Vasily Smyslov; Olympic pole-vaulting champion Bob Richards is featured on the Wheaties box; John J. Kelly wins the Boston Marathon; Sandra Owen and Dana Bennett win the Scripps National Spelling Bee; Bob Hope appears at the 1957 Paris Fair; Leona Gage (Miss Maryland) wins the Miss USA contest and then admits to being married with 2 children; Charles Van Doren, a Columbia English professor, wins $138,000 on the quiz show "Twenty-One," and later confesses to having been fed the answers in advance; the Southdale shopping mall opens in Minneapolis; Toys "R" Us opens its first store in Washington, D.C.; the Wankel rotary engine is produced; the first U.S. Atomic Power Station opens in Pennsylvania; Major John Glenn sets a new transcontinental speed record; the Treaty of Rome lays the groundwork for the European Common Market; New York City retires its last trolley car; Michigan opens the Mackinac Bridge; Ford rolls out the Edsel; GM releases the Chevrolet Impala with Dinah Shore singing, "See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet;" the Frisbee is introduced by the Wham-O Manufacturing Co.; the Las Vegas Dunes Hotel stages topless dancers; Balenciaga and Givenchy introduce the sack silhouette; Jimmy Hoffa gains control of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; IBM releases FORTRAN; margarine consumption overtakes butter; Stanford University biochemists produce synthetic DNA; microbiologist Albert Bruce Sabin develops a polio vaccine based on live, weakened viruses; Clarence Lillehei and Earl Bakken introduce the external pacemaker; U.S. Surgeon General LeRoy E. Burney links cigarette smoking to lung cancer, and scientists establish a link between asbestos and lung cancer; thalidomide (which produced severe congenital disorders in infants) is marketed to treat sleeplessness, nervous tension, asthma, and relief of nausea in early pregnancy; the U.S. records a record 4.3 million births; and "In God We Trust" appears on our currency.

The Civil Rights Bill, championed by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (opposed by Sen. Strom Thurmond, who sets a new filibuster record,  Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. James O. Eastland and Sen. Richard B. B. Russell), is signed into law by President Eisenhower ─  who admits that he doesn’t understand all of it. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus calls on the National Guard to "prevent violence" (i.e., block integration) in Little Rock.

Books:
Syntactic Structures (Noam Chomsky), The Hidden Persuaders (Vance Packard), The Assistant (Bernard Malamud), On the Road (Jack Kerouac), Pnin (Vladimir Nabokov), Gypsy (stripteaser Gypsy Rose Lee), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand); Doktor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak), Justine (Lawrence Durrell), Toutes les Femmes Sont Fatales (Claude Mauriac), Piedra del Sol (Octavio Paz), Monologues (Milan Kundera); Words for the Wind (Theodore Roethke), From Russia with Love (Ian Fleming) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Dr. Seuss) were published; and Denby Hanna & Joseph Barbera created Tom & Jerry.

Entertainment:
Broadway featured Time Remembered - Morosco Theater (Richard Burton, Helen Hayes, Susan Strasberg & Glenn Anders), The Ziegfeld Follies - Winter Garden Theater (Beatrice Lillie, Billy de Wolfe & Jane Morgan), New Girl in Town - 46th Street Theater (Gwen Verdon & Thelma Ritter), West Side Story - Winter Garden Theater, Jamaica - Imperial Theater (Lena Horne, Ricardo Montalban & Ossie Davis), and The Music Man - Majestic Theater (Robert Preston).

TV brought us The Benny Hill Show, The Tonight Show (with Jack Paar), Wagon Train, Have Gun, Will Travel, Perry Mason, Maverick, The Pat Boone Show, The Price Is Right and Leave It to Beaver.

At the movies we saw Bridge on the River Kwai (William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins & Sessue Hayawkawa), Paths of Glory (Kirk Douglas), Twelve Angry Men (Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam), Wild Strawberries (Victor Sjöström, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson), Witness for the Prosecution (Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester), Desk Set (Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn), The Last Bridge (Maria Schell), Man of a Thousand Faces (James Cagney, Dorothy Malone & Jane Greer); Peyton Place (Lana Turner, Hope Lange, Mildred Dunnock & Arthur Kennedy, Sayonara (Marlon Brando, Ricardo Montalban, Miiko Taka & Miyoshi Umeki), Sweet Smell of Success (Burt Lancaster & Tony Curtis), The Three Faces of Eve (Joanne Woodward, David Wayne & Lee J. Cobb), Love in the Afternoon (Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn & Maurice Chevalier), Les Girls (Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall & Taine Elg, Funny Face (Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson & Suzy Parker), and The Pajama Game (Doris Day, John Raitt & Carol Haney).

Alan Freed launches his nationally televised rock 'n' roll show (but cancels it when black performer Frankie Lyman dances with a white girl, enraging Southern affiliates); Motown Corp. is founded by Berry Gordy Jr.; and Stanford University students Dave Guard, Nick Reynolds, and Bob Shane become the Kingston Trio.

Pick your favorite song from: "Rock 'n' Roll Music," "School Days," "All the Way," "April Love," "Bye Bye, Love," "Tammy," "Jailhouse Rock," "Old Cape Cod," "Walkin' after Midnight," "I Can't Stop Loving You," "In the Still of the Night," "Soul Eyes," "You Send Me" and dozens of others.

In sports, boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson loses his Middleweight title to Gene Fullmer, regains it, and loses it again to Carmen Basilio. The Boston Celtics win their first NBA title (Bob Cousy is voted most valuable player). Lew Hoad and Althea Gibson win at Wimbledon (Gibson wins again at Forest Hills). Brooklyn's Ebbets Field is replaced by buildings, the Dodgers decide to move to Los Angeles, and Milwaukee beats the Yankees 4-3 in the World Series.

Who Died?
Former Hungarian dictator Admiral Nikolaus Horthy de Nagybánya, Count Maurice de Rothschild, French premier Edouard Herriot, Norway’s King Haakon VII, Czech president Antonín Zápotocky, Philippines president Ramón Magsaysay, Guatemala president Carlos Castillo Armas, Brazilian president Washington Luís, Japanese Imperial Army colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, Imam Aga Khan III, mathematician John von Neumann, novelists Malcolm Lowry and Sholem Asch, artists Kobayashi and Diego Rivera, singer Ezio Pinza, composer Jean Sibelius, conductor Arturo Toscanini, bandleader Jimmy Dorsey, polar explorers Edward Ratcliffe and Richard Evelyn Byrd, crime fighter Eliot Ness, Halliburton Co. founder Erle P. Halliburton, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Chicago gangster George C. "Bugs" Moran, and Bertha ("Big Bertha") Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach.

The population of the world was 2.888 billion (now 6.658 billion). And that’s the year that was MCMLVII, more or less.

Ah yes, I remember it well.