The Franklin
D. Roosevelt dime went into circulation.
Popular films
included
Anna and the King
of Siam
starring Irene
Dunn and Rex Harrison
The Best Years of
Our Lives
directed by
William
Wyler
The Big Sleep starring Humphrey
Bogart and Lauren
Bacall
The
Blue Dahlia
starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake
It’s a
Wonderful
Life
directed by Frank Capra starring Jimmy Stewart
Notorious
directed by Alfred Hitchcock
The Postman Always
Rings Twice
starring
John Garfield and Lana Turner
The Razor’s Edge starring Tyrone
Power
The Stranger directed by Orson
Wells.
Popular fiction included: Kay Boyle’s Thirty Stories,
Daphne Du Maurier’s The King’s General, Pat Frank’s Mr. Adam,
Francis Parkinson Keys’s River Road, Carson McCullers’s member
of the
Wedding,” J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Robert
Penn
Warren’s All the King’s Men, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding,
William Carlos Williams’s The Build Up and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs
of Hecate County.
Popular songs included: “Atomic Power” by the Buchanan Brothers,
“The Christmas Song” by Nat “King” Cole, “Coax Me a Little Bit” by the
Andrews Sisters, “The Frim Fram Sauce” by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis
Armstrong, “A Hundred and Sixty Acres” by Bing Crosby and the Andrews
Sisters, “No One
to Cry To” by the Sons of the Pioneers, “One Z Two-Z I Love You-Z” by
Phil
Harris and his orchestra, “Route 66!” by the King Cole Trio, “Something
Old,
Something New” by Frank Sinatra and “Sonata” by Perry Como.
Dr. Benjamin
Spock’s The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care was
published.
Eames exhibited his designs in the first one-man furniture show by the
Museum of Modern Art.
Breuer completed the Robinson House in Williamstown, Massachusetts
which was the model for split-level houses.
March 30: Critic Robert Coates used
the term Abstract Expressionism to describe New York modernist painters.
April 14: The first
film to be shown
on a plane was So Goes My Love shown on a Pan Am
flight from
New York to Ireland.
May 9: The first hour-long musical-variety
program, “Hourglass,” was broadcasted by NBC.
June 19: 140,000 people viewed the
first heavyweight title fight between Joe Louis and Billy Conn, in
which Louis
won, on television.
October 2: The first television soap
opera, “Faraway Hills,” was televised by the DuMont network.
December 5: President Harry S
Truman’s Executive Order 9809 established the President’s Committee on
Civil Rights.