1952: Events and Inventions

Jan23

February 6-7, 1952. King George VI of the United Kingdom dies at age 56, and Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen Elizabeth II. (Photo: Princess Elizabeth and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh on a rail car in Canada.)

February 26, 1952. Prime Minister Winston Churchill announces that the United Kingdom has an atomic bomb.

July 23, 1952. General Mohammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser, the real power behind the coup, bring about the overthrow of King Farouk of Egypt. King Farouk, known as “The Playboy King”, abdicates and sails away on his luxury yacht.

August 11, 1952. The Jordanian army forces King Talal to resign due to mental illness; he is succeeded by his son King Hussein of Jordan, age 16.

September 2, 1952. Dr. C. Walton Lillehei and Dr. F. John Lewis perform the first open-heart surgery at the University of Minnesota.

October 20, 1952. The Uk declares a state of emergency and martial law in Kenya due to the Mau Mau uprising.

November 1, 1952. A small island off Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean is the site of a U.S. nuclear test explosion of the new hydrogen bomb. It is believed that Soviet scientists will soon produce their own H-bomb.

November 4, 1952. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeats Democrat Adlai Stevenson to become the president of the United States.

December 10, 1952. Dr. Albert Schweitzer receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a doctor in French Equitorial Africa. He intends to use the prize money to set up a leper colony.

In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis. Although a polio vaccine is under development by Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, and another by Dr. Albert Sabin in Cincinnati, a polio vaccine will not be announced until 1955 nor widely administered until the late 1950’s/early 1960’s. I was born in 1957, and I remember being taken to the health clinic at City Hall to get my polio vaccination and also a smallpox vaccination when I was about four years old. I’m sure my mom and other parents of her generation were quite thankful for the protection of a vaccine against the double scourges of smallpox and polio. (Photo: An “iron lung” was used to help some polio victims breathe.)

1952: Books and Literature

Jan22

The National Book Award was given to From Here to Eternity by James Jones.

The Caine Mutiny by Hermann Wouk won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I read The Caine Mutiny back when I was a teenager, and I remember where I was when I read it: Glorieta, New Mexico at a camp for Christian young ladies. (We were called Acteens, a very 1970’s title for a missions organization for girls.) Anyway, the camp itself and the subject matter in the book were enough of a contrast that I remember the experience of reading it quite well. In my cabin at a camp full of teen girls, during afternoon rest and recreation (recreation for me was reading), I was reading about a bunch of men on a ship and how they eventually relieve Captain Queeg of his command on the basis of the men’s belief that he is mentally unbalanced. I’ve never seen the movie based on The Caine Mutiny. Have you?

Newbery Medal for children’s literature: Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes.

Carnegie Medal for children’s literature: The Borrowers by Mary Norton. I love The Borrowers. I need to read it to Z-baby if we ever finish reading The Lord of the Rings. (I love LOTR, too, but it is very long.)

Published in 1952:
Mrs McGinty’s Dead and They Do It With Mirrors by Agatha Christie. I think Mrs. McGinty was one of the first Agatha Christie mysteries I read, and I remember it well, including whodunnit. I must admit that I can often re-read many of her other novels with pleasure because my ailing memory doesn’t remind me who the murder is.

The Silver Chalice by Thomas B. Costain. Historical fiction set during the time of Christ.

Giant by Edna Ferber. Ferberâ€™s fun, but highly inaccurate, novel of Texas. I grew up around ranchers and oil men, and although some Texans truly are “bigger than life” (and too big for their britches), Giant goes just a little too far with all the high-flying and high-rolling Texas millionaires. I really wonder if Ms. Ferber had ever been to Texas and if not, where she got her information about the culture of the state. She was a New Yorker as and adult, and she was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. Giant was made into a 1956 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, and Rock Hudson. It’s a good story if you don’t take its portrayal of Texas too seriously.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I can take, and even appreciate, some Hemingway, but this story of an old man and a boy catching a fish seemed long even at only a little over a hundred pages.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis. Such a fun book, and it has about the best opening sentence in children’s literature: â€œThere was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.â€ In this book, Lewis does a riff on the Odyssey as Caspian, Edward, Lucy and cousin Eustace voyage on The Dawn Treader looking for the seven lost Lords of Narnia and for the End of the World. This chronicle also has the best transformation as Eustace becomes a dragon, repents of his whining, greedy, lazy ways, and is restored by Aslan to his human form, albeit a much nicer person than when he started out on the journey.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. I found the book, Excellent Women, to be reminiscent of Jane Austen (drolly observant), Mrs. Gaskellâ€™s Cranford (insightful in regard to the ordinary), and even Jane Eyre, without the drama, but with the wry self-analysis. Semicolon review here.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck. If I have to choose between Steinbeck and Hemingway, I’ll take Hemingway.

Prisoner’s Base and Triple Jeopardy by Rex Stout. Prisoner’s Base is sad in that a sympathetic character gets killed off in the beginning, but it’s good solid Nero Wolfe tale. Triple Jeopardy is one of Stout’s collections of long short stories or short novelettes, and as such it doesn’t interest me as much as the full-length books do. But I’ll read, and expect to enjoy, anything Mr. Stout wrote about Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin.

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. â€œWilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.â€

1951: Events and Inventions

Jan21

January 18, 1951. Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time. United Nations forces recapture Seoul in March.

March 6, 1951. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Jewish American communists, go on trial for passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. They are convicted and sentenced to death and later executed in 1953.

April 11, 1951. U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieves General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, a popular war hero of World War II and the commander of United Nations forces fighting in the Korean War, of command in Korea for threatening to invade China against U.S. policy.
Truman: “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a b—, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.”

May, 1951. People of color are removed from the election rolls in South Africa and therefore not allowed to vote.

May 9, 1951. The first thermonuclear weapon is tested on Enewetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands, by the United States.

June 14, 1951. UNIVAC, the world’s most advanced digital computing machine, is dedicated and installed in the U.S. Census Bureau in Philadelphia. UNIVAC uses vacuum tubes and occupies an entire room, 35.5 square meters of floor space. It can read 7200 digits per second.

July 5, 1951. William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain announce the invention of the junction transistor.

July 20, 1951. King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.

September 9, 1951. Chinese communist forces invade Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

October 26, 1951. Winston Churchill is re-elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in a general election which sees the defeat of Clement Attlee’s Labour government after six years in power.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Jan20

Directors: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Writers: Adolph Green and Betty Comden
Starring: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen

Z-Baby says: Some of it is funny, and some of it is boring. (Donald O’Connor’s solo, Make Em Laugh, was the part that made Z-baby laugh the most.)

Semicolon Mom says: I thought all the singing and dancing was fascinating. The story was thin and hokey, but story is not the main point of the movie. In fact, the movie within the movie practically screamed that the point of the musical, at least to the producers and directors of Singin’ in the Rain, is to shoehorn in all the song and dance numbers you can and work the plot around the dancing. Dialog is optional.

Ha! IMDB says, “The script was written after the songs, and so the writers had to generate a plot into which the songs would fit.”

We enjoyed listening to Z-baby chuckling at the movie almost as much as we enjoyed the movie itself.

IMDB link to Singin’ in the Rain.

1951: Books and Literature

Jan20

Collected Stories of William Faulkner wins the National Book Award.

The Town by Conrad Richter wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

PÃ¤r Lagerkvist wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Published in 1951:
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier. I’ve read this one, and it’s not as good as Rebecca, but it’s not bad.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. I just didn’t get this story. It’s about an illicit affair, and the woman who ends it because she makes a promise to God. I just didn’t get why it’s supposed to be so very meaningful and well-written. I’m afraid I may be demonstrating my philistinism, but there it is.

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. Not my favorite of the Narnia tales, but still a good book. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, Reepicheep the mouse.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Never read it.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. One of my favorite historical fiction mysteries of all time. From his hospital bed while recuperating from a broken leg, Scotland Yard Police Inspector Alan Grant solves the case of the murder of the two princes in the tower which occurred around the year 1483.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. Winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. I read this 1951 best-seller when I was in high school at a church camp, and I remember it as an absorbing tale. The book was later made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

Fiction set in 1951:
Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin. Recommended by Jennifer at 5 Minutes for Books.

The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh.

1950: Events and Inventions

Jan19

January 26, 1950. The new constitution of India is ratified, forming a republic, and Rajendra Prasad is sworn in as India’s first president.

March 6, 1950. Scientist Klaus Fuchs is sentenced to 14 years in prison for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

April 27, 1950. In South Africa, the Group Areas Act is passed, formally segregating the races. This segregation is called apartheid.

June, 1950. The first human kidney transplant is performed by U.S. surgeon R.H. Lawler.

June 25, 1950. The People’s Republic of North Korea launches a surprise invasion of The Republic of South Korea. The 38th parallel of latitude marks the border between the two nations now, but communist North Korea under the rule of Russian-supported President Kim Il-sung wishes to unite Korea under one communist government.

June 27, 1950. U.S. President Harry S. Truman orders American military forces to aid in the defense of South Korea.

October 2, 1950. The comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz is first published in seven U.S. newspapers.

October 7, 1950. The 1950-1951 invasion of Tibet by People’s Republic of China begins.

October 19, 1950. The People’s Republic of China enters the Korean conflict by sending thousands of soldiers across the Yalu River.

The Romeo and Juliet Code by Phoebe Stone

Jan17

I like reading books that are re-imagined versions of Shakespeare’s plots, and that’s why I checked out The Romeo and Juliet Code. But it’s not that sort of book at all.

Instead, The Romeo and Juliet Code plays into another interest of mine: World War II and spies. Felicity Bathburn Budwig is a very, very British eleven year old girl who ends up in Maine at her estranged grandmother’s house by the sea. The year is 1941, and London, Felicity’s former home, is in the midst of The Blitz. When Felicity’s parents, Danny and Winnie, leave her to live with Danny’s American family–Uncle Gideon, Aunt Miami, and The Gram—Felicity is sure that Danny and Winnie will soon come back to get her and take her home, to England, where she belongs.

Felicity has a stuffed bear named Wink who reminded me of Paddington for some reason. And her American family is odd enough to people the pages of a fantasy novel rather than the straight historical fiction that this story purports to be. Then, there’s also someone named Captain Derek who may or may not live in a secret room upstairs. And there are secret letters, and a code, and an island and a lighthouse, and Aunt Miami who’s obsessed with Romeo and Juliet. All put together it’s the sort of story an imaginative girl could concoct in perilous times, and the point of view feels right. Strange, but right.

The problem would be finding the right readers, those who would enjoy a spy story that’s not very fast-paced or danger-filled, or a quirky family story that turns out to be quite realistic, or a historical fiction novel that has a lot of precious-ness mixed in with the history. If any of that admixture sounds like your cuppa, you might want to check out this Brit-comes-to-America-and-finds-a-home story of a girl nicknamed Flissy. Just know that Romeo and Juliet play a rather small part in the whole gallimaufry.

1950: Books and Literature

Jan16

The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The National Book Awards are established and the fiction award is presented by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to author Nelson Ahlgren for his book, Man With the Golden Arm.

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli, published in 1949, went on to win the Newbery Award in 1950. The story a boy, Robin, during the Middle Ages who wants to become a knight like his father. However, disease (polio?) strikes, and Robin’s legs become paralyzed. He is taken to a monastery where he regains the use of his legs to some extent and strengthens his spirit and character with the friendship and help of the monks. Robin later becomes a hero. It’s a lovely story to read aloud to children who are trying to figure out what real bravery and heroism are.

The Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature is awarded to The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont. Has anybody read it?

Published in 1950:
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi.
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

So they went and knocked on the study door, and the Professor said, “Come in,” and got up and found chairs for them and said he was quite at their disposal. Then he sat listening to them with the tips of his fingers pressed together and never interrupting, till they had finished the whole story. After that he said noting for quite a long time. Then he cleared his throat and said the last thing either of them expected:

“How do you know,” he asked, “that your sister’s story is not true?”

“Oh, but” began Susan, and then stopped. Anyone could see from the old man’s face that he was perfectly serious. Then Susan pulled herself together and said, “But Edmund said they had only been pretending.”

“That is a point,” said the professor, “which certainly deserves consideration. For instance, if you will excuse me for asking the question, does your experience lead you to regard you brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?”

“That’s just the funny thing about it, sir,” said Peter. “Up till now, I’d have said Lucy every time.”

“And what do you think, my dear?” said the Professor, turning to Susan.

“Well,” said Susan, “in general, I’d say the same as Peter, but this couldn’t be true– all this about the wood and the Faun.”

“That is more than I know,” said the Professor, “and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.”

“We were afraid it mightn’t even be lying,” said Susan; “we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy.”

“Madness, you mean?” said the Professor quite coolly. “Oh, you can make your minds easy about that. One has only to look at her to see that she is not mad.”

“But then,” said Susan, and stopped. She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn’t know what to think.

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn”t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.
Three Doors to Death and In the Best Families by Rex Stout. Nero Wolfe’s charge to his assistant Archie: “You are to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.”
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. Reviewed at Things Mean a Lot.

“Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart.”

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl.

1949: Events and Inventions

Jan16

January, 1949. New micro-groove 45-rpm records are invented in the United States.

March 18, 1949. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is formed by agreement between twelve countries: the United States, Britain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The purpose of the alliance is “mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.” NATO is primarily a response to the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe and the growing perceived threat from the Soviet Union. The North Atlantic Treaty is actually signed on April 4th.

April, 1949. The newly proclaimed Republic of Ireland (not including Northern Ireland) leaves the United Kingdom Commonwealth.

May 12, 1949. The Soviet Union lifts its blockade of Berlin.

May 23, 1949. Dr. Konrad Adenauer becomes the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). West Germany consists of the American, French, and British zones of occupation, but not the Soviet zone of occupation which is formed by Stalin into a communist state called the German Democratic Republic in October.

July, 1949. The Pope declares that supporters of communism will be excommunicated from the faith as communists and social democrats vie for political control in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.

August 29, 1949. The USSR tests its first atomic bomb, built partly as a result of secrets stolen from the U.S. nuclear program. Klaus Fuchs, a German-British theoretical physicist and atomic spy, is convicted in 1950 of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research (the Manhattan Project) to the USSR.

October 1, 1949. Mao Zedong declares the civil war in China to be over and the new People’s Republic of China to be the legitimate government of the country. Nationalist Chinese, led by Chiang Kai-shek, are not welcome as part of Mao’s new republic and will be expelled from mainland China to the island of Taiwan.

October 16, 1949. The Greek civil war, which began in 1944 when the Nazi army pulled out of Greece, is over. The Greeks have defeated Communist guerrilla fighters to establish a democratic government, but the war has left the country bitterly divided still because of the atrocities committed by both sides during the civil war.

December, 1949. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands grant Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies, independence and sovereignty. Sukarno is elected president of the Republic of Indonesia.

1948: Events and Inventions

Jan11

January 30, 1948. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi is assassinated by a fanatical Hindu man while Gandhi is a prayer meeting in New Delhi. All India mourns.

February 25, 1948. Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia.

May 14, 1948. Jewish leaders Chaim Weitzmann and David Ben-Gurion declare the independence of the new Jewish state of Israel.

June 23, 1948. The Soviet Union blockades road and rail links to the city of Berlin located inside the Soviet zone of Germany. On June 30, U.S. planes, carrying supplies for besieged Berlin, land in the city delivering 2500 tons of much-needed food.

June, 1948. Columbia Records introduces the first long-playing commercial vinyl records.

July 1, 1948. Yugoslav Communist Marshal Tito provokes the Soviet Union into expelling Yugoslavia from the Cominform (the international organization of communist parties) in Tito’s determination to remain independent from Soviet control.

August, 1948. The Republic of South Korea is proclaimed in Seoul with Syngham Rhee as president.

September, 1948. Communist leader Kim Il Sung proclaims the People’s Republic of North Korea in Pyongyang.

October 22, 1948. Chester Carlson and Haloid Corporation announce the invention of “xerography”, electrophotography. Haloid Corp. will change its name later to Xerox Corp., and it will be 1960 before the first commercial automatic copier is released by Xerox.

December, 1948. In Switzerland, Georges de Mestral invents Velcro, a new clothes fastener.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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