Monday Memories of 1959

My brother is working on the 50th reunion of his high school class. Not only is he a "local" but he was also the class president. I think he's having a good time strolling down memory lane with his classmates. In today's WSJ, which I know he reads because he is a stock broker, Edward Kosner reviews Fred Kaplan's "1959: The year everything changed."

You can throw a dart at a timeline and write a book about almost any year (except 1957, imo) opines Kosner, but when examined closely, you can see important events that got us to where we are today. The most important one, from my view--1959 is the year I met my husband at the University of Illinois. We'd both broken up with our high school sweethearts (to whom we'd been engaged) and found each other. He told me on our first date that he planned to marry me--he was a big city (Indianapolis) slicker with a good line, and I laughed at him, much too smart to be taken in by that one. Other important events of 1959 outlined in this book were:

1. Castro took power in Cuba.
2. Berry Gordy started Motown.
3. Allan Ginsberg recited "Howl" at Columbia.
4. Pioneer space craft.
5. Lady Chatterley's lover heated up book reading.
6. Toyota and Datsun (Nissan) made their U.S. debut.
7. The microchip was introduced--the germ plasm of our digital age.
"Evolved from the transistor, the silicon integrated circuit was the work of a tinkering engineer named Jack Kilby. He showed off his little gizmo at a radio engineers' trade show in New York in March 1959. The debut of Kilby's microchip -- the germ plasm of our laptop, hand-held, wall-mounted, broadband, blog-sodden digital age -- merited two paragraphs in the next day's New York Times."
8. The first U.S. soldier was killed in Vietnam.
9. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opened.
10. Martin Luther King studied nonviolence in India.
11. The Birth control pill Enovid was approved for sale.
12. Jack Kerouac's "On the road" was launched.
13. The rise of Malcolm X.
14. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission documents racial discrimination in a 668 page report.

Kosner notes, "And, for all the wonders integral to 21st-century life, it's hard to argue that we're happier today than in good old, prehistoric 1959."