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51 – SUPER BOWL minus XIII

The biggest one-day sporting event in 1954 was any of:

— the Kentucky Derby; won by Determined on May 1;

— the Indianapolis 500, won by Bill Vukovich on May 31;

— Rocky Marciano’s two defenses of his heavyweight boxing title against Ezzard Charles on June 17 and September 17;

— or game one of the World Series, on September 29, won by the New York Giants with the help of a spectacular catch by center fielder Willie Mays.

The National Football League champion was the Detroit Lions. But they won their title on December 27, 1953, edging the Cleveland Browns 17-16. The season was only 12 games long; they didn’t play NFL games in January until the mid-1960s; in February until 2001.

There was a full house at Briggs Stadium in Detroit, where the game was played. But the game was broadcast on the DuMont Network, a network that would cease to exist by the end of 1956. The other three networks weren’t interested. 

So, yeah, the idea that more than 100 million Americans will watch today’s 58th Super Bowl – sorry, Super Bowl LVIII – between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers would blow the minds of adult Americans in 1954.

For one thing, the Chiefs – who played in the first Super Bowl in 1967 – didn’t exist. In fact, the American Football League, from which the Chiefs (nee Dallas Texans) emerged, began play in 1960. For another, Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas holds more people than the entire population of the city in 1954.

What else would amaze them? Probably everything.

That the buildup for the game would last two weeks. That major companies would use the ads during the game to make a big splash – so big that some people watch the game for the commercials alone. That CBS will use 165 cameras – on drones, on cranes, in people’s hands on the field – to show the action. 

That billions of dollars will be bet legally on the game and almost every aspect of it. That perhaps you and most of the people you know will spend the day ordering chicken wings, making nachos and guzzling beer. That, in some places, the water pressure will drop just before the halftime show.

That one of the big names in entertainment will curtail their act to about 15 minutes in order to perform for his, her or their largest audience ever at halftime. That the streets of your town will be deserted for 4 hours. That the game is so dramatized that it’s numbered in Roman numerals.

That the total gross receipts of that 1953 game between Detroit and Cleveland, about $359,000, would buy you about one second of a commercial during today’s game.

How the National Football League surpassed other sports to hold such sway over the American public is a matter for another time. How Taylor Swift became part of the 2024 narrative is not my problem.

For now, happy Super Sunday for those who celebrate! (And, tomorrow, happy first day of the baseball season for the rest of us.)

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52 – DRAGON ROLL

If you said the words “Asian food” to my parents – or any adult – in 1954, their response would have been “You mean Chinese food?”

Certainly there were other Asian ethnic groups represented in the U.S. population – Japanese immigrants notoriously were detained in internment camps during World War II. But the predominant one for most Americans were the Chinese.

The Chinese had come in big numbers during the late 19th century as they basically built the transcontinental railroad. But after that, immigration from China was held in tight check by the racist exclusion acts.

That racism wasn’t just meant for the Chinese. Immigration laws passed in the 19th and 20th century were stacked so that there were lots more openings for western Europeans and fewer for anyone from anywhere else. From elementary school through high school, the only Asians I knew were Chinese kids whose families ran local restaurants.

In Flushing, Queens, where we lived, there were two Chinese restaurants – Lum’s in the heart of the community and a place whose name I don’t remember but had a big green sign that said “CHOW MEIN” over the sidewalk.

My parents, who were married in Flushing and lived there for the first 12 years of their marriage, would – by the late 1980s – no longer recognize the place as immigrants from Asia took over.

The main catalyst for the change was the Immigration Act of 1965, which loosened the quotas from outside Europe. And it was not just Chinese immigrants – Koreans fleeing hard times and hostility, Thais fleeing political unrest and the Vietnamese, who endured hardship to escape when the Vietcong and North Vietnamese took over their country.

There were other influences as well. Japan’s rise as an economic power led to interest in its culture and food.

Sushi was an idea that made Americans (including this one) cringe when it started showing up in the 1970s. Now, there is almost no place that you can’t get it – even at gas station convenience stores (Caveat ficedular!).

Other Asian concepts were adapted by Americans just about everywhere. Yoga. Pad Thai. Bahn Mi. K-Pop. Acupuncture. Chai. Taekwondo. 

And the Lunar New Year, which is not only a holiday in the countries of East Asia, but is becoming a day off in U.S. school districts.

Which is, by the way, today. So Happy New Year! Or, as we say in my family, Goong Hay Fat Choy!

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53 – BIG WEED

On the corner of Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd. and North Greenway Hayden Loop in Scottsdale, Arizona, within walking distance of this weekend’s Phoenix Open golf tournament, is a former bank building. All the old drivethru structure is there, save for the machines, tubes and signs.

But the parking lot is pretty busy from the time the establishment opens at 8 a.m. every day – except 6 a.m. on Saturday – until it closes at 10 p.m. every night.

The establishment is the Scottsdale location of Curaleaf, the nation’s largest retailer of cannibis, a.k.a. marijuana.

At this point in telling my parents about this nearly 70 years ago, I’d like to gauge how far their jaws would have dropped. Because it gets wilder, from their point of view.

Curaleaf has locations – the word used is dispensaries – in 14 states. You can choose the THC and CBD levels of your cannibis, which can be smoked, inhaled, rubbed on, drank or eaten. There’s plenty of knowledgeable sales help and a base of steady, otherwise sober customers ranging from age 21 to senior citizen.

My parents grew up at a time when the federal government had successfully completed the demonization of marijuana. As a result, they believed that it was totally and irretrievably evil.

While not a user myself, my college years were filled with the aroma of smoked reefer. It didn’t seem any more of a problem than when I tended to dormmates getting over a failed romance with rotgut booze.

I thought marijuana would be legal by the time I was 30. But like so many things about my generation, we talked a good game but didn’t deliver. It took this generation of 20- and 30-year-olds to make the push to legalize cannibis.

Twenty-four states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories have either legalized marijuana or are in the process of doing so. Many of these states – New York among them – actually promote locally grown weed.

President Biden has pardoned those convicted of federal charges of simple possession and his administration has downgraded its status among drugs perceived to be dangerous.

And Curaleaf, based in New York but traded in Toronto, recently reported 2023 revenue of nearly $1.4 billion.

Far out.

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54 – YEAH, YEAH, YEAH

Ten days after and 13.5 miles west of where I was born, a 28-year-old singer from Michigan walked into a Manhattan recording studio.

He was about to help launch a genre of music that would be a point of contention between a baby boy in Flushing and his parents.

The singer was Bill Haley, and on April 12, 1954, he and His Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock,” the first really popular rock-and-roll song. Until then, genres such as country, blues and jazz were picking around the edges of what would become the dominant form of popular music in the late 20th century.

As Haley was recording “Rock Around the Clock”:

— 19-year-old recent high school graduate Elvis Presley was trying to get Sun Records in Memphis to use him in recording sessions

— 10-year-old Mick Jagger was moving with his parents away from his childhood buddy, Keith Richards

— 12-year-old Carol Klein of Brooklyn was in junior high, years after she skipped first grade and years before she changed her name to Carole King to perform with her friend, Paul Simon.

— and, in the British port city of Liverpool, four tweens and early teens were beginning to get interested in a musical world that they would revolutionize a decade later.

None of this was remotely imaginable in 1954, where band singers like Patti Page and Perry Como still topped the charts. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were still active stars, although both were getting more involved with movies: Sinatra won an Oscar for best supporting actor for “From Here to Eternity” eight days before I was born.

My parents, who loved singers like Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, were not totally antagonistic toward rock. My Dad bought me the “Meet the Beatles” album shortly after the group’s famed appearance, 60 years ago this week, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I think Mom came around to realize that Lennon and McCartney were amazing song writers.

But, perhaps like I am with a lot of what I hear now from younger people, they didn’t really have the patience for rock and roll. So I was late to discover a lot of the great music of the ’60s and ’70s – I found a lot of it in college and my early adulthood, thankfully.

And, truth be told, neither I nor my parents really liked Elvis.

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55 – FUN, FUN, FUN

The nation’s most populous state in the 1950 Census – based four years and a day before I was born – contained just 14.8 million people, 4 million more than the No. 2 state.

The No. 1 state was New York. No. 2 was California.

New Yorkers, like my parents, don’t like to think of themselves as second in anything. But New York’s status as No. 1, something it had held since 1820, was in jeopardy.

California’s population more than doubled between 1940 and 1960, the last time it was second. By 1970, it had taken over the top spot and has held it since.

With California’s taking over as the most populous state has come its dominance in setting the tone of day-to-day life.

It was exemplified by TV shows. All the quiz shows done in New York moved to California. So did “The Tonight Show,” which on the day I was born was hosted by Steve Allen and aired only in New York.

California’s contributions have their pluses: environmental consciousness, technological innovation, The Beach Boys.

It also has its minuses: freeway congestion, smog, driving too fast

And the shoulder shrug: a casual lifestyle, fast food drivethrus.

There is, to be sure, a lot of California envy in the U.S. – even in the arrogant wilds of New York. 

But, as I recently saw in Arizona, there’s also a lot of antipathy. I saw a sign on a lamppost that decried the way Californians are ruining the state; and one T-shirt tried to belittle the neighbor by showing Arizona with a semi-automatic rifle and California with a phone saying “911.”

Like it or not, California replaced New York as the center of gravity in America after I was born. Whether that will last is an interesting question as California deals with problems such as wildfires, massive rain events and the high cost of living there.

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56 – A RANDOM PRESIDENCY

At 9 p.m. EST on March 26, 1954 – a week before I was born – the CBS anthology series “Schlitz Playhouse” presented a 30-minute drama entitled “The Edge of Battle.” It’s the story of a troubled GI who’s holding an Army lieutenant captive.

I don’t know if my Mom, who loved ’50s anthology series, or my Dad were watching. But I would have liked seeing the look on their face if someone told them that the guy playing the captive Lt. Paul Random would – 30 years later – be seeking a second term as the 40th President of the United States.

My parents knew who Ronald Reagan was. He was one of those actors in a lot of B-movies and TV melodramas. His big role was as doomed football player George Gipp in “Knute Rockne: All American” just before World War II.

My Mom might have known that Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild. I’m not sure she would have known that he had given the FBI a list of actors he believed had Communist leanings during the blacklist period. Being up on such things, she might have known that Reagan was on his second marriage, having divorced actress Jane Wyman and married lesser known actress Nancy Davis.

The first question my parents might have asked, once they were convinced you weren’t pulling their leg, would be for what party did Reagan head the ticket. He strongly backed Franklin D. Roosevelt. But like a lot of Democrats, he supported Dwight Eisenhower in his 1952 campaign.

My mother, a loyal Democrat, would grow to hate Reagan and his presidency. She came to admire Jimmy Carter and felt Reagan maligned a great man – an unpopular view even in liberal circles on Long Island. My father had a hard time taking him seriously – Reagan played a louse in some of these dramas and that sometimes would color Dad’s view of a person.

And, in 1954, I’m not sure even Ronald Reagan imagined what he’d be doing in exactly 30 years. My parents wouldn’t have been alone.

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57 – HOW MANY DOES IT TAKE?

Keep in mind that Thomas Edison’s first incandescent lightbulb came only 75 years before I was born. So 1954 is a little more than halfway to when we are now.

But, in 1954, it would have been hard for my parents to imagine there would be anything other than the kind of bulb that lasted a few months, at best, when you screwed it into a lamp or ceiling fixture.

Or that light bulbs would become political footballs.

The biggest problem with old incandescent bulbs was their relative inefficiency – only about 5% of the energy used to power those bulbs lit a room; the rest was just heat. And not only did they waste electricity, but you needed to replace them often – lightbulbs came in packs of four and six because one was never enough.

Starting in the 1980s, the compact fluorescent bulb – those tubey things – came out to offer far more efficient lighting. But they contained mercury, making them a problem for landfills. In the 2000s, the LED bulb, even more efficient and less of a waste hazard, took hold.

LED lamps last up to 100 times longer than incandescent bulbs – with the added bonus that, with some of them, you can make them change colors.

And the energy they save is considerable. According to the Department of Energy, U.S. electricity usage declined in several of the years before the COVID pandemic as people replaced incandescents with LEDs. Usage is climbing again primarily because computers, not lights, have become larger consumers of energy.

Not everybody loves this. In 2019, the Trump administration rescinded rules that would have accelerated adoption of LED bulbs. They don’t think the light they get is the same brightness — or something.

Which reminds me of a joke.

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58 – BLUE NO MORE

My parents did their weekly grocery shopping on Saturday nights. My father often worked Saturdays at the Firestone store in Flushing, so Saturday night was often the only time they could go.

The day they couldn’t go was Sunday. Because no supermarket in New York was open on Sunday.

Blue laws, which mandated closing stores on Sundays to honor the Christian Sabbath, were in full force in much of the nation at the time I was born. Not just supermarkets, but department stores and other retailers were shut.

The one place my family could shop on Sundays was near my father’s parents’ house in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn. There, in that heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, stores were closed on Saturday.

But if you were not Christian in other places, tough. The political sway that Christian churches held in those days made the repeal of blue laws a slow process.

It wasn’t until the late 1970s that supermarkets in New York were allowed to open on Sundays. Other retailers joined them soon after.

Blue laws have been erased in most of the nation. But vestiges remain. In some states, alcohol sales are forbidden or restricted on Sundays.

And Bergen County, New Jersey – a shopping mecca Monday through Saturday that’s just a few miles from my home – still prohibits retailers to open their doors on Sunday. Even if, as was the case this past year, Christmas Eve is on a Sunday.

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59 – LIONS AND TIGERS AND BEARS

My birthday was 16 days before Easter in 1954.

Easter in New York meant many things. One of the biggest was the arrival of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus to Madison Square Garden, which was then on 8th Avenue and W. 50th Street in Manhattan.

I remember going for the first time when I was six. You walked through the menagerie with the people seen as curiosities. It seemed exploitive and cruel, especially to a kid with weight issues.

But the big attraction was the animals performing tricks in the three rings of the Garden. It smelled a little funky, but people seemed to enjoy it. And besides, it was a tradition; parents take their kids to the circus.

Or maybe not.

Ringling Bros. had management issues and various problems. People were revolted by the way other people were put on display. And concern about treatment of animals turned people off.

Competition came from circuses that focused on spectacular acrobatics – something that had also been a part of the Ringling shows – such as Cirque de Soleil and the Big Apple Circus.

The biggest circus in the world stopped touring in 2017. It is trying to make a comeback, sans animals.

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60 – THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY

One of the more shocking things you could have told my parents on the day I was born was that, 200 miles or so northeast of where they were holding their infant, there was a 25-year-old Boston University student for whom a national holiday will be celebrated.

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a Rev. or a Dr. in April 1954. He was a year away from obtaining his doctorate. He was married for less than a year to Coretta Scott. He wasn’t a father yet – of either his children or a civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus boycott was a year away.

(As an aside, I don’t think the idea of Black History Month, which we’re beginning, would have shocked my parents. There has been a commemoration of African-American history since the 1920s, known as Negro History Week. It was expanded in the early 1970s to all of February – the month in which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born.)

No celebration of Black History Month can be made without considering the legacy of Dr. King. A Nobel Peace Prize winner and an agent of remarkable change in our nation, my parents – especially my Mom – admired Dr. King and were as crestfallen as most of the nation when he was assassinated in 1968.

My parents might have been shocked that someone less than two years older than my father would be the reason millions of Americans have the third Monday in January off. But once you told them about why, they would have understood.

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