The Muppet Show premiered, with that premier on the British ITV network. It was soon syndicated in the US.
A much more in depth look at the event is here:
September 5, 1976: "The Muppet Show" Premieres
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Popular 1970s television series Alice premiered on CBS. Based on the 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, it ran for nine seasons.
BBC Television, which had been off the air since September 1, 1939, resumed broadcasting. The resumption was for only an hour on June 7, but it signaled its first return. The programming featured speakers welcoming the audience back, a performance by ballerina Margo Fonteyn, a talk segment, and a rebroadcast of Disney's Mickey's Gala, the latter being the last thing broadcast in 1939.
There were over 18,000 television sets in the US when service was suspended.
The players of the Pittsburgh Pirates, which had threatened to walk out if they were not allowed to join the American Baseball Guild, didn't.
First flight of the Short Sturgeon.
Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles to Gladys Pearl Baker, nee Monroe, who was married at the time to her second husband, Martin Edward Mortensen, but who was not her father.
Newton Baker and Gladys had married when she was only 14 years old. Baker was reportedly abusive. The couple had two children. Interestingly, she was born to an American family living in Mexico but one that had strong connections to California, where she grew up.
In 1923 the Bakers divorced and obtained custody of all three of the couple's children. He, however, kidnapped the oldest two and moved to Kentucky. Baker was effected by the Roaring 20s and conducted herself to some extent as a flapper and participant in the early feminist movement, which then as later advocated sexual laxity. She was pregnant when she married Mortensen, who she soon found to be boring, leading to divorce.
Norma Jean's father was likely Charles Stanley Gifford, Gladys's superior at RKO Studios, where she was working.
Baker was likely mentally unstable ,which seems to have run in her family. Based on what evidence exists, it seems like that there was a genetic component to this and she's spend much of the later years of her life institutionalized.
The rest of this story is, of course, well known. While its speculation, it would seem likely that at least some of the genetic component of her mental instabilities visited themselves upon her daughter, who of course lived a very disrupted early life.
She outlived her daughter and died in 1984.
Andy Griffith was born in Mount Airy, North Carolina. He was at first a voice comedian and later a famous television actor, best remembered for the Andy Griffith Show. He was strongly connected to North Carolina his entire life.
The Andy Griffith Show almost defines a certain vision of rural America to this day, and it retains a very strong following. Unlike the Sheriff protagonist of the show, Griffith married three times and had an affair with one of the shows love interests while it was running. Irrespective of those failings, he remains widely admired.
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1946 End of Special Session of the Legislature concerning funding of the University of Wyoming.
The first television network, DuMont Television Network, came into being.
The Florida Foods Corporation introduced frozen concentrated orange juice. The product was called Minute Maid, which of course still exists.
The comic strip Mark Trail was introduced.
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Route 66 was recorded for the first time, the introductory edition of the Bobby Troup work by Nat King Cole.
Troup was a songwriter and actor, married to actress Julie London
He was also a graduate of Wharton, which produced the unfortunate Trump and Gray, but that's another matter. He served in the Marine Corps in World War Two, by which time he was already a songwriter. The war did not really interrupt his songwriting.
Route 66 was an absolute masterpiece, and has been recorded an innumerable number of times, and was even used for the basis of a television series that ran from 1960 to 1964.
In some very real ways, Route 66 symbolized the post war world and its sense of youth, indicability, and automotive freedom.
Route 66 itself was one of the original U.S. Highways of the United States Numbered Highway System. It was established on November 11, 1926, with road signs erected the following year. It became a huge factor in Depression Era migration to California, which makes the way its nostaglically remembered somewhat ironic, but as
College basketball player George Mikan, who was hugely popular turned pro.
He was a great player, and notably played with glasses. He struggled with diabetes in his final years, which focused attention on the plight of pre big money players.
Over this past weekend I was horrible sick with what was probably the "stomach flu". My wife is now. I'll write more on that latter.
Anyhow, I woke up in a bad state (I'll spare the details) and spent most of the weekend on the sofa, falling asleep.
A lost weekend.
Anyhow, my wife had Dawson's Creek on, which was on as one of the major actors, James Van Der Beek recently tragically died of colon cancer, something I relatively recently dodged the bullet on myself. FWIW, quite a few actors who were on the series have passed away, although he's the youngest (although barely so) to do so. It was a tragic death.
Dawson's Creek, 1998-2003, sucks.
The question would be why I put it up here at all, and I don't have that much of a good reason, but it reminds me of how television shows featuring teenagers of recent years fit a pattern. The other one is One Tree Hill.
Their nighttime soap operas, but they're bad, and at worst, perverted.
All the characters, even the supposedly poor ones, are fantastically wealthy living in really good conditions. They have nearly unlimited access to wealth that most middle class families in the real world struggle for and their lives are more or less unhindered by their parents, who are portrayed as a sort of older siblings, even in their appearance. Nobody in this world has been worn down by age and responsibilities. They're all beautiful. There's now an ugly duckling girls or awkward boy amongst them. Their entire lives involve endless love triangles, and at least in Dawson's Creek's case, statutory rape. They're maudlin in the extreme.
All in all, they're a really weird look at the teenage years of Americans, and its weirder than people want to look back at teenagers that way. It says something about our society, and not in a good way. That millions of adults would follow a series that deals, at least in part, with sexual encounters of minors, is weird. Dramas, and comedies, focusing on youth have always been a thing, but not ones that focus on youth as well funded adults lusting or longing for each other.
As a complaint about television scripts, I suppose, it's interesting that television likes to keep a couple that should obviously be a couple nearly being a couple for years, and then conclude with them not being a couple. This can be a legitimate dramatic element, as in the Western drama Wil Penny, but if its going to be done it ought to serve some purpose. In television dramas, it simply tends not to. The Wonder Years, well worth watching, provides another example.
On material details, this is set on the Eastern Seaboard which I don't know much about, but nearly 100% of the people depicted are white, which I don't think realistic. Maybe my view of the Eastern Seaboard is off, however. Made when it was, an obligatory sympathetically portrayed homosexual couple is included.
One thing I'll add to all of this is that this entire series' view seems summed up by its horrible theme song, which wasn't written for it, I Don't Want To Wait by Paula Cole. Sung in such a muttering style that it hard to understand, the song is a lament that the singer's grandparents had to endure World War Two and her grandfather came back physically and mentally scarred by the war, and then seemingly implied that they had not lived their lives for the moment. The lyrics are, in part:
o open up your morning lightAnd say a little prayer for IYou know that if we are to stay aliveThen see the peace in every eyeShe had two babies, one was six months, one was threeIn the war of '44Every telephone ring, every heartbeat stingingWhen she thought it was God calling herOh, would her son grow to know his father?I don't want to wait for our lives to be overI want to know right now what will it beI don't want to wait for our lives to be overWill it be yes or will it be sorry?He showed up all wet on the rainy front stepWearing shrapnel in his skinAnd the war he saw lives inside him stillIt's so hard to be gentle and warmThe years pass by, and now, he has granddaughtersI don't want to wait for our lives to be overI want to know right now what will it beI don't want to wait for our lives to be overWill it be yes or will it be...
The I deserve happiness right now and can obtain it without repercussion sort of view was a common one with younger people at the time, memoirs of Gen X. Indeed, the show is sort of Gen X Romeo and Juliet and the ballad fits that. That sort of vapid view has really passed into the the rear view mirror and younger generations don't have it, been afflicted, as they are, by the real world. The shallowness of the views expressed in Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, and Beverly Hills 90210 help explain the big turn towards inward conservatism in the generations that have followed.
Anyhow, just skip this and watch 5-25-77 instead.
There was news on the Elk Mountain disaster, including that miners had a role in discovering the crash.
The Rocky Mountain News reported on the disaster as well.
An advertisement from the same edition of the Sherican Press.:
The USSR annexed the Kurils.
Russia holds them today.
They need to give them back.
The Rocky Mountain News was inspiriting panic.
Sunspots disrupted radio communication between North America and Europe between 4:05 am and 7:00 am EST.
Twenty Questions, hosted by Fred van Deventer and based on the on the "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral" parlor game, premiered on the Mutual Broadcasting System.
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Television was introduced in South Africa.
Yes, that late.
The first shows were The World at War, which was truly excellent, followed by an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, which also was. South African TV was initially limited to five hours in the evening from 7 p.m. to midnight, with half of the programming in English and half in Afrikaans..
Would that such limitations applied everywhere today.
The scourge of no fault divorce was introduced to Australia.
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The Detroit Tigers won the World Series, beating the Chicago Cubs 9 to 3 in game four.
The Chongqing Negotiations (Chinese: 重慶談判) came to an end.
The negotiations were between the Nationalist and the Communists and marked a resumption, after a twenty year gap, of efforts between the two contesting sides to resolve their differences. Both sides signed the Double Tenth Agreement at the end.
This day would be the last meeting between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
The Double Tenth Agreement provided:
The British completed the reoccupation of the Andaman Islands.
The Allied Control Council abolished the Nazi Party.
The Communist Party of Korea was founded, unfortunately.
Joseph Darnand, a French hero of the Great War, far right politician between the wars to the point of belonging to the La Cagoule terrorist organization, decorated French soldier again upon the German invasion of 1940 only to form the collaborationist militia, Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL) and become a member of the SS, was executed. He was 48.
CBS successfully conducted an experiment in color television.
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Only ABC carried a speech by President Ford, the other networks determining not to interrupt programming.
Italo Luder, Acting President of Argentina during a leave of absence by President Isabel Perón, signed Decree 2772, giving the Argentine armed forces authority to "annihilate subversion" by any means necessary against guerilla insurgents.
Sound a bit like Trump?
The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional of Chile, attempted to assassinate former Interior Minister Bernardo Leighton and his wife Anita, who were in exile in Italy.
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The first television transmission was made in London. The experimental broadcast was made by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird.
Spanish troops entered the Rif capital of Ajdir.
The Pact of the Vidoni Palace was signed at the Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli in Rome between the Fascist-dominated General Confederation of Italian Industry) (Confederazione Generale dell'Industria Italiana or CGI) and the Fascist-controlled National Confederation of Trade Union Corporations labor union. It abolished all other unions, including Catholic and Socialist unions, and gave the government effectively corporatist control, on the fascist model, of labor.
200 feet of the roof on the western end of the Church Hill Tunnel, Virginia collapsed killing 40 workers.
La Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker’s comic Charleston opened in Paris. Baker became a huge success overnight.
Baker was an enormous talent. Her shows of the era likely wouldn't have been legal in much of the United States due to the nudity or near nudity that they featured.
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Albania issued a decree requiring minorities to adopt names reflecting a Muslim origin, which of course they did not have. It impacted Catholic and Orthodox minorities.
Welcome Back Kotter premiered. Set in a gritty high school class in Brooklyn, it was one of the best television series of the 1970s. It ran until 1979, and debuted John Travolta.
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