Fun Facts from the winter of 1956:
In the winter of 1956 it took between 10 and 12 hours for a plane to fly from New York City to Los Angeles.
Art Linklater starred on two different television shows on two different networks. He would become famous for his interviews with children.
Lucy and Desi were at the peak of their collective fame and power. They had their own famous show and were on nearly every other CBS show in need of a ratings bump. They even released a movie of the clips from their weekly show. It is available today on Tubi.
Lawrence Welk began his long run.
Gunsmoke began its long, long run, not on Monday nights as I remembered but on Saturday nights.
So what do these trivia notes have to do with the grounding of Etrusco on Cedar Point in March 1956. Consider them context. The Etrusco event had a lot going on around it.
In January of 1956 Dwight Eisenhower was president and deciding to run for a second term. His vice president was Richard Nixon.
Nikita Khrushchev had emerged from the death of Joseph Stalin to lead the Soviet Union.
In Vietnam the French had lost in the battle of Dien Ben Phu and that country was wrestling with the great power decisions made in the Geneva accords. Most Americans could not find Vietnam on a map.
In January 1956 Martin Luther King Jr. saw his house bombed in response to his ongoing role in the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott by black Americans there.
On a much more positive note Mary Martin returned to Broadway as Peter Pan.
Also, Academy Award winning actress Grace Kelly became engaged to Prince Rainier of Monaco.
On January 28, 1956 Elvis Presley and his band, Scotty Moore, Bud Black and DJ Fontana, performed Heartbreak Hotel on the Dorsey Brothers Stage Show. The great Sarah Vaughn performed as well.
Elvis wore a black shirt, white tie, dress pants with a shiny stripe, and a tweed jacket. He sang a ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll / Flip, Flop & Fly’ medley and ‘I Got a Woman’. The audience reacted with both shock and interest. The show received an 18.4% ratings share while its competition ‘The Perry Como Show’ on NBC received a 34.6% share. The option was picked up and Elvis appeared a total of six times on ‘Stage Show’.
He played Heartbreak Hotel again two weeks later. His more famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was ten months away.
It was a very optimistic time. Check out this ad from the January 18th issue of the Boston Globe.
Yes, you read that right. 50 cars or 20 helicopters at the grocery store in Quincy. People really believed in a brand new kind of life. Family helicopters for everyone!
In Scituate, prior to Etrusco coming ashore, the news was filled with dark discussion of the Bonomi trial. In the summer of 1955 Dominic Bonomi was arrested for the murder of his wife Mildred. Her body was found on Labor Day in a gravel pit. Bonomi was found guilty later in January and sentence to death in the electric chair. Not since the war years had there been such a horrible episode.
This sensational trial with its hints of an extra marital affair (the defendant was routinely described as dapper) and a road map of conflicting stories had to have the full attention of a town with the population of 8341. The town was growing; five years before the population had stood at just over 5000.
The Selectmen were Tilden, Bailey, and Shields. In place at Scituate Light were Jaime and Jessie Turner who had been integral to buying the Lighthouse from the federal government 40 years before. They would have quite a summer in 1956. Long time adventurer, painter, writer, and speaker, Colonel C. Wellington Furlong was still in the news.
It was a very small town, despite the Bonomi murder and a resident with paintings in the Smithsonian. Article 14 of the Town meeting of 1955 dealt with this issue. Not exactly life or death coming before the voters.
So the scene has been set. The next installment will tell the story of February 1956.
The Lightkeeper's Blog 