1956 was a tremendous year for the movies.
We have already made mention of Mr. Roberts and Around the World in 80 Days in our second installment of this series. As the summer unfolded there would be more titles that grabbed audiences and have held on to be mainstays of Turner Classic Movies.
Musicals included the King and I and High Society. Dramas included two masterpieces, The Searchers by John Ford, and The Man Who Knew Too Much by Alfred Hitchcock. For the kids Walt Disney had Davy Crockett and the River Pirates on the big screen with Fess Parker in the leading role.
This was a time of the big screen and big, big stars. Crosby. Kelly. Sinatra. And the greatest of them all, Louis Armstrong.
In Scituate it was a time of indecision. The Globe had a story one week of Etrusco being scrapped. In the local paper a week before Chief Kane had been definitive; the ship would not be broken up and moved over Scituate streets during the summer.
Other local stories noted 53 blind men visiting at the Sunlight House on Branch Street.
Marshfield rejected the idea of a regional high school to be shared with Duxbury.
Reverend Alan Creelman presented Beryl Sylvester (her father was Buster who had been up all night on the radio crew during the grounding of Etrusco) with a scholarship at the June graduation.
Charles Rogers received the biggest award: the John Heffernan Memorial Scholarship and would use it at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The schools had a new leader following the retirement of Leroy Fuller. Thomas Abbott would take his place.
Legendary Local Everett Dorr took up his post in Cohasset.
And if you wanted a beach sticker for the summer of 1956 you made your way to the Police station still located at the junction of First Parish Road, Stockbridge Road, and Carrie Litchfield Lane. With Etrusco on the beach it was a tough intersection to get through for your sticker.