Seventy-five years ago in 1949, most families didn’t have a television set yet. Radio provided our news and entertainment. Families gathered around the big old radio and mostly listened to variety and entertainment programs starring Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Bing Crosby, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx and Red Skelton.
These stars had high ratings, as well as other shows such as The Lone Ranger, which had been on the air three times a week since 1933 from The Lone Ranger studios near downtown Detroit. While Brace Beemer played the masked man on radio, Clayton Moore starred in the leading role as The Lone Ranger began its nine-year run on Thursday nights on ABC television.
Arthur Godfrey and His Friends began its 10-year run in 1949 and Bozo the Clown began its decades long run. The talented Gertrude Berg, whose writing appeared in all of the scripts, started her Molly Goldberg TV program while the Ed Sullivan Show was in the second year of his popular Sunday night variety program.
Movie stars who starred in popular box office movies 75 years ago in 1949 were June Allyson, James Cagney, Joseph Cotten, Montgomery Clift, William Broderick Crawford, Katherine Hepburn, Burt Lancaster, Ray Milland, Robert Mitchum, Edward G. Robinson, Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Wells and Loretta Young.
My favorite movie of 1949 was “It Happened One Spring,” starring Ray Milland as a scientist who discovers a formula to make a baseball evade a wooden baseball bat. Of course, Milland becomes a pitcher that batters can’t hit. While I didn’t see the aforementioned movie until several years later on television, I started listening to some radio broadcasts of the Detroit Tigers with my father on our living room couch.
On Sunday nights, my father was glued to the radio when Drew Pearson and the news came on and he hung on to every word coming out of the radio regarding Israel as the new Jewish state founded on the biblical Jewish homeland of the Jews, repelled most of the invading Arab armies of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Egypt still remained a threat to the tiny nation of an estimated 650,000.
On February 19, 1949, the Jordan daily newspaper wrote: “The Arab states encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.” While Arabs left Israel voluntarily, thinking they would return after the Jews were killed or driven out, almost 568,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries after their properties and bank holdings were confiscated. In Iraq, many Jews were hung as Zionism was declared a crime.
When a ceasefire was agreed to in July, Jerusalem was a divided city. Israel held the western half and Jordan controlled the eastern half, including the Old City. The Gaza Strip was taken by Egypt and most of the Arabs that fled the area, waiting for the Jews to be killed or driven out, were taken to UN refugee camps. The only Arab country that granted some of them citizenship was Jordan.
Baseball provided an escape for my father and his friends as he devoured the sports section and passed it on to his young son. The pennant races in the American and National Leagues were exciting and not decided until the last day of the season. The Yankees won the pennant over the Boston Red Sox by one game as did the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League over the St. Louis Cardinals.
The Yanks defeated Brooklyn in the ’49 World Series, winning four out of five games marking the first of five consecutive Series victories under new manager Casey Stengel. Fourteen of the 25-man Yankees roster would receive rings for the next five years as they were lucky enough and good enough to stay with the team and cash in on World Series shares.
