Gerry Hagberg's Pages, Grade 7
Here's Gerry's grade 7 class.
[Click here for audio ambience from 1958!]
These faces are very recognizable now. Derek Hamlet looks like Derek Hamlet, Bob Hall looks like Bob Hall and so on. Ken Hart is dapper here, as always.
Gerry does not know the names of everybody. The webmaster would appreciate having the names of those shown as "Unknown".
Left to right, back to front:
Paul Kennedy, Brian Unwin, Eric Gelling, Berk Maddaford, Derek Hamlet, Bob Hall, Ian Young, Richard Cuzner, Ian Wickett
Ken Hart, Gerry Hagberg, Janice Laidlaw, Diane Boughey, Lynn Menzies, Donna Bishop, Wendy Brinkworth, Barbara Trenholme, Gib McLean, Brian Smith
Judy Campbell, Carol-Ann Berry, Sharon Edmonds, Sandra Schutz, Bev Taylor, Bev Hynds, Cheryl Borris, Lucille Lamb,Wendy Cunning
George Dufour, Brooke George, Bob Moysey, John Lane,unknown, Rod Clayards, Pat Smith
(Identifications by Gerry Hagberg and Cheryl Borris.Cheryl has also contributed editing. Cheryl says that in this class, though not shown here, were Robert Gage, Caroline Overman and Christina Scott.)
1958. What was going on?
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.. Improbably, what must have been the longest movie contract ever for a comedy team finally ended. Columbia Studios terminated The Three Stooges' run of 24 years in films. Mind you, Columbia still had enough fresh material in the can to continue issuing to 1960! Sic transit gloria mundi. Oh, we are talking "Stooges" here, aren't we? Well then: "Sick bus Gloria Monday!" In photographs, the first three words of this paragraph appear upon the grave of one of the Stooges. Only an utter Philistine would have to enquire upon whose!
First the "bomber gap" and, with sputnik last year, now the "missile gap" was in the newspapers. These little kids are already of the space age. Explorer I was launched on January 31. It was the first satellite that the U.S. had managed to put into orbit after a series of failures, one of them truly spectacular right on the launch pad.
Von Braun had pressed to launch a satellite well before the magnificent Soviet achievement with sputnik but Eisenhower had not wanted "...those damned Germans..." at Huntsville to launch the first U.S. satellite. Von Braun and his crew quietly put aside one of their vehicles, fully prepared, under a tarp and waited for the call.
Instead of resorting to the damned Germans, Eisenhower pushed the U.S. Navy's program, "Vanguard". The December 06, 1957 launch attempt was a spectacular failure. It was the culmination of 84 days of slaving to get vehicle and payload ready. "Oh What a Flopnik" screamed one headline. Another made reference to "Kaputnik"! Sputnik kept sailing serenely overhead again and again sending down telemetry and, by this time, it had a companion. The telemetry had been specifically designed to be available to ham operators the world over to be certain that its existence and therefore the success of the satellites could not be suppressed.
In the end, the Project Vanguard launches numbered eleven and were successful three times.
Eisenhower was finally reduced to going to the Germans at Hunstville. Out from beneath its tarp came the vehicle, ready for many months. On the 31st of January in this year of 1958, the Germans from Huntsville promptly launched Dr. VanAllen's radiation detecting package, Explorer I.
It's January the 31st, 1958. Here are Pickering, Van Allen and von Braun triumphant.
Deutsche Ordnung.
The relevance of all this today is not much. Look around you. Half the world's population has been born after 1980. The last Apollo mission had occurred, at the very least, eight years before most of this earth's population had been born. Oh, are we old.
Remember Quemoy and Matsu? We were listening to endless news stories about the shelling of those islands in 1958.
The Boeing 707 went into commercial service last year and this year saw the inauguration of the first trans Atlantic service. The Douglas DC-8 made her first flight this year. The days of the magnificent double and triple banked radial gasoline engine and the grand trans Atlantic steamer were nearly over now.
We were becoming teenagers and interested in the music of the day and this was that music in 1958:
1.At the Hop ... Danny and the Juniors
2.Don't I Beg of You ... Elvis Presley
3.Tequila ... The Champs
4.Twilight Time ... The Platters
5.Witch Doctor ... David Seville
6.All I Have to Do is Dream ... Everly Brothers
7.The Purple People Eater ... Sheb Wooley
8.Hard Headed Woman ... Elvis Presley
9.Poor Little Fool ... Ricky Nelson
10.Volare ... Domenico Modugno
How many eyes and how many horns did that people eater sport?
In the theatres, we watched:
1. The Bridge on the River Kwai. It had come out last year but we continued to see it this year. We liked it a lot. It was artificial, a confection, but we liked it a lot. It was not just constructed mythology but provided an outright false picture of the hideous circumstances of the construction of the Burma railway. Vets who knew the horror tried in vain to stop its release. We ate it up anyway.
2. Peyton Place
3. Sayonara
4. No Time for Sergeants
5. The Vikings
6. Search for Paradise
7. South Pacific
8. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
9. Raintree Country
10. Old Yeller
Music awards this year, Grammy awards to:
Record of the Year: "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)" ... Domenico Modugno
Song of the Year: "Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu (Volare)" ... Domenico Modugno
Album of the Year: "The Music from Peter Gunn" ... Henry Mancini
Male Vocalist: Perry Como ... "Catch a Falling Star"
Female Vocalist: Ella Fitzgerald ... "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook"
The physics Nobel went to Cherenkov, Frank and Tamm of Moscow for discovery and elucidation of the Cherenkov effect.
Popular books this year included Doctor Zhivago, Lolita, Kids Say the Darndest Things, Aku-Aku and Inside Russia Today.
On the box, people were watching Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun Will Travel, The Rifleman, The Danny Thomas Show, Maverick, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Real McCoys, I've Got a Secret and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.
