In 1939 a rookie Yankee outfielder known as "King Kong" Keller sported # 9—yes, Maris' retired digit—and tore up the league. He was my boyhood idol, even though the "Yankee Clipper" hogged the headlines. Ah, '39, glorious, magical—never mind the open terrorism against Jews by the German people in '38, ignore France, England and the United States' cowering indifference to Hitler's power grab of Austria, Czechoslovakia and the march on Poland—for, yes, the Trylon and Perisphere were the symbol of the times, not the twisted cross, whose bearers were twisting the world.
Almost as exciting as the New York World's Fair were the brilliant movies created. GWTW, Wuthering Heights, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, even Reagan's grade B gem, Hell's Kitchen, with the Dead End kids—all fired the imagination. Yet to remind us of the recent, bitter past The Grapes of Wrath was in the bookstores, ready for celluloid the next year.
The automakers too tickled the fancy in extending the fenders and narrowing the grill work to a sleek short-lived needle-nose and moving the shift—Ford lagged in this respect—to the steering column. America was on a roll—too long mired in the Depression to be concerned with tanks on the roll.
The fierce early '40s plummeted us into the greatest war in history. Despite its told and untold tragedies the war was not without its redemption; for it united a people like never before. The rich and famous were at one with the rank and file; women wore uniforms or coveralls, and children bought war stamps. At the half mark of the decade triumphant joy on V-E and V-J Days—the holocaust had scarcely poked through the cover-up, nor had much thought dwelled on the implications of the atom bomb—brought euphoria that would last for years.
Professionalism returned to baseball with likes of Greenberg, Reiser, Kiner, Williams, and Bobby Feller. The greatest football game of all time—including the future—was gruelingly played at Yankee Stadium between the two juggernauts, Notre Dame and Army, torturing each other for sixty minutes in a scoreless tie. Integrity, too, came to baseball with Jackie Robinson's inauguration. New Yorkers were knee deep in snow from the record fall the day after Christmas of '47. TV antennas in '49 were now increasingly being laced to chimneys, destined to snag ensuing Santa deliveries. At the same time news broke on the first successful experiment in color television—yet three quarters of the population didn't have black and white yet and those who had were squinting at 7" snow on gray.
With the pros still a stepchild to college football all the nation either admired or hated Notre Dame for becoming national champs for the fourth time under Frank Leahy. Out of South Bend, too, came another "champion" in the late summer of '49, Studebaker continued to outpace Detroit in sleek design by adding a bullet nose to its '50 models to complement its wrap-around rear window introduced as early as '47.
Levittown, taking a lesson from the automotive industry, retooled, scrapping its popular cape-cod model for its " '49 ranch model" with accessories. But the euphoria abruptly ended by the Un-American Activities Committee, together with the "38th Parallel" becoming a household word.
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