Tag: TV

the space race remembered

adventure, Cats & Animals, Commentary, History, In the News, Nature, This and That

Once I watched a rocket launch from under a blanket…our TV set was ancient and the light was very dim, so unless the room was almost dark the image on the set was barely visible.   I’m not sure of the year, or which of the early missions it was.   My whole life back in those days, between 1957 and about 1965 , are catalogued according to babies that joined our little family.

Our oldest was just a few months old, and we were living in a trailer park outside of the base of Fort Hood, Texas.  Our tiny television set was on a high shelf, and we had to stand right next to it in order to see anything in much detail.     In the interest of accuracy, by the time the Soviets launched Sputnick in October 1957, my daughter was five months old, and we were stationed at the Oklahoma Military Academy, where facilities had been set up to accommodate army insturctors.  We lived there for a year and a half.

Our connection to the United States Army accounted for much of my interest in space travel and life on other planets, and all kinds of innovative gadgets and scenarios that actually would become History within my lifetime.    I have  always been an avid fan of Science Fiction, and was working my way through the library shelves reading everything I could dealing with outer space.  The only other book that occupied as much or more of my time during that era was Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, having literally worn out my original copy of the Baby Manual.

So with that setting, the events leading up to the great space race between the United States and the Soviet Union were high on my “interests lists.”    The Cold War was alive and well, and a source of vast panic and hysteria for young military wives, who feared the bell ringing in the night would be a call for hubby to go somewhere and do something to fight The Russians.

So it was with great interest and intrepidation that I pretty much stayed glued to the TV after the hoopla of the Russians having beaten us to the draw in launching a rocket, and then a month later…a dog named Laika,  thus becoming the first Earth Creature ever to attempt space travel.

In January of 1958 we were absolutely ecstatic when th United States Army Ballastic Missile Agency sent up the first U.S. satellite into orbit.

Here’s a Timeline borrowed from the NASA site.    For the entire timeline, please go to  https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/space-timeline.html

1957

  • October 4 – The Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.
  • November 3 – The Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 was launched with a dog named Laika on board. Laika did not survive the voyage.

1958

  • January 31 – Explorer 1 was the first satellite launched by the United States when it was sent into orbit on January 31, 1958. It was designed and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. The satellite was sent aloft from Cape Canaveral in Florida by the Jupiter C rocket that was designed, built, and launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) under the direction of Dr. Wernher Von Braun.

1960

  • August 19 – The Soviet craft Sputnik 5 was launched, carrying the dogs Strelka and Belka. They became the first living beings to survive a trip into space.

1961

  • April 12 – Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
  • May 5 – Astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space.
  • May 25 – President Kennedy challenged the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

[The space saga continues… .]

Do We Even Want to be Entertained? ReBlogged, Legends of Windemere

Art & Artists, Books and Reading, Other Bloggers' Work (re-posted here), This and That, TV & Hollywood, Writing and Blogging

Excellent article on what we expect from entertainment. This is my first visit to Charles Yallowitz’s blog LEGENDS OF WINDEMERE, and like it a lot. I agree that when I like a film or book…I LIKE it…and I don’t care what the critics say. Some of my favorites are works that others say are terrible. Thanks for enabling the RE=BLOG button! 🙂

Legends of Windemere

So, I’ve been wondering this for a while now.  I wasn’t sure how to write this up either and have gone through it in my head many times.  Then I stumbled onto this part from a Suicide Squad review:

“In my sensible critical opinion, Suicide Squad wasn’t a complete disaster, but inexcusably mediocre. To be fair, the audience I saw the film with appeared to love every frame: big laughter, cheers for the action and clapping as the credits rolled. Is there a disconnect between critics and audiences?”

Now, I’m not going to touch on the question because I have another one.  Are people disconnecting themselves from movies, shows, and books before they even start?  I’ve seen so many people swear that something will be bad for months and then they begrudgingly indulge.  SURPRISE!  They didn’t like it for exactly the reasons either they said or the critics declared.  Sometimes word for…

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Dreams of a Drama Queen The letter D in the A-Z Challenge

Challenges, Dreams, This and That, TV & Hollywood, Writing and Blogging

(Formerly published in this blog with the title: Dreams, the GRE, and Shirley Temple.)

In my dream I was taking the GRE, the examination for applying to graduate school.  There was an endless list of multiple choice questions, in a booklet that had many pages.   I kept looking to the back pages, trying to determine how many questions there were, and how long before I could expect to be finished.  There was a time limit, but it apparently was far more time than needed.

The GRE dream was part of a more comprehensive  dream in which I was, on another level, preparing a WordPress post with the creative opening phrase: “The thing I like about blogging…”   played over and over in my dream, but never got to the point–or if it did I don’t remember it.

I dream every night, and those that I recall in detail after I wake up, tend to remain with me indefinitely.     In fact I still remember dreams I had as a child.   One such dream was actually a nightmare, when I was coming down sick with flu symptoms.   The dream consisted solely of a giant, twirling bullseye…and the theme was Dick Tracy.   Remember him?  He was a comic strip character back in the 1940s, a police detective with a dark fedora hat and a face with sharp-chiseled features.

Another disturbing dream was when I was quite young, and I was in grandfather’s garage and God was chasing me around a wicker doll buggy.  I was terrified, and when I close my eyes I can picture the scene.   I had the impression that it was God, but he looked more like an old Father Time persona, complete with white robe and long, flowing white beard.

In that same era my little Self also experienced a beautiful dream, which presented like a suddenly-technicolor scene in a Disney movie–with a colorful panorama of flowers and little animals cavorting in a pastoral setting.     This impression of the movie screen changing from sepia to brilliant Technicolor, was used effectively in the movies produced at the transition period when the use of color was new.

These dreams of seventy-some years ago, and the fact that I remember them so vividly, may have had something to do with my general fear of the movies.   I was petrified, scared to death.   Maybe because the theater was dark, and the screen was enormous–the size of a wall, creating images of real actors who were literally gigantic.

My well-meaning grandparents were hell-bent on introducing me to the delightful and adorable child actress, Shirley Temple, who was the cutest child in the world at the time, (according to her legion of fans,) and would have been nowhere near as terrifying had she not been presented in giant proportions on screen.

Just the thought of that dark cavern with the giant people and booming sound makes my heart freeze.

It was years later, when I was about twelve, that I could finally attend movies in a theater.   And yes, that was back in the day when television was finally getting to the masses, but my parents didn’t get TV until about 1950, and by then those movies were not near as intimidating on a 12-inch screen.    Matt Dillon (Gunsmoke) was my parents favorite, and they really wanted me to share the excitement and charm of Gunsmoke and other “shoot-’em-ups.”

Just think about how scary some of these modern horror movies would have been on the giant screen….I’d still be hiding!