1945 Hit Parade

Popular films included:
    Anchors Aweigh
starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly
   
The Bells of St. Mary’s starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman
   
The Lost Weekend starring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman
   
Mildred Pierce starring Joan Crawford
   
Spellbound starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman
   
The Story of G.I. Joe starring Burgess Meredith
   
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn directed by Elia Kazan
   
The Woman in the Window directed by Fritz Lang.

Fiction included:  Nancy Bruff’s The Manatee, T.B. Costain’s The Black Rose, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up, Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, Sinclair Lewis’s Cass Timberlane, John P. Marquand’s Repent in Haste, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Irving Stone’s The Immortal Wife, James Ramsey Ullman’s The White Tower, Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy.

Popular songs included:  “All That Glitters is Not Gold” by Dinah Shore, “Beulah’s Boogie” by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra, “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” by Louis Jordan and his Typanny Five, “The Gypsy” by The Ink Spots, “Her Bathing Suit Never Got Wet” by the Andrews Sisters, “Homesick, That’s All” by Frank Sinatra, “I’ll Be Back” by Gene Autry, “I’m Tired” by Private Cecil Grant, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” by Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra, “Till the End of Time” by Perry Como and “Waitin’ for the Train to Come In” by Peggy Lee.

Hans Laube, a Swiss inventor, created “Smellovision,” which was a smell pack triggered by television waves to accompany television shows featuring that scent.  Years later filmmaker John Waters would try to revive the fad with his film, “Polyester.”

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson recorded ``Move On Up a Little Higher.”

March 31:  Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway.

April 12:  President Roosevelt died at the “little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia and Vice-president Harry S Truman became the thrity-third president.

May 21:  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall married in Mansfield, Ohio.

August:  Gasoline rationing ended.

August 6:  The U.S. military dropped a bomb with a photo of Rita Hayworth on the Bikini Islands, and four days later a bathing suit was named after the islands.