1959
Arthur William Matthew Carney
(November 4, 1918 – November 9, 2003)
Art Carney was an actor and comedian. A recipient of an
Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and six Primetime
Emmy Awards, he was best known for his role as Ed Norton
on the sitcom The Honeymooners (below) (1955–1956).
Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in that famous beach scene in
From Here to Eternity (Columbia Pictures, 1953).
John Carpenter’s "Halloween" premiered, sending chills
across small towns nationwide.
Produced for $300,000, the slasher movie grossed more
than $47 million in North America.
Jamie Lee Curtis, 19 at the time, was paid only $8,000 for
her film debut.
Halloween spawned a film franchise comprising 13 films
which helped construct an extensive backstory for Michael
Myers.
Jamie Lee Curtis will be 67 years young on November 22.
Nick Castle played Michael Meyers right.
John Howard Carpenter (77)
On October 7, 1960, the first episode of the one-hour television
drama "Route 66" aired on CBS.
The program had a simple premise: It followed two young men,
Buz Murdock (George Maharis) and Tod Stiles (Martin Milner),
as they drove across the country in an inherited Corvette
(Chevrolet was one of the show’s sponsors), doing odd jobs
and looking for adventure.
“The motive power driving our two characters is not a Corvette:
it is the desire for knowledge—and for sentience; it is a quest
through the perennially fascinating cosmos of personal identity.”
1955
Orvon Grover "Gene" Autry (September 29, 1907 – October
2, 1998)
Gene Autry, perhaps the greatest singing cowboy of all time,
was born on September 29, 1907, in Tioga, Texas.
While still a boy, Autry moved with his family to a ranch in
Oklahoma where he learned to play the guitar and sing.
The young Autry was quickly attracted to a new style of music
that was becoming popular at the time, which combined the
traditional cowboy music popular in Texas and Oklahoma and
the folk songs, ballads, and hymns of southern-style country
music.
Known as country-western, the new sound was popularized by musicians from the East Coast and the South who had never
been near a horse and couldn’t tell a stirrup from a lariat.
Donning cowboy hats and boots and affecting what they thought
were western drawls, hundreds of these newly minted “cowboys”
were soon crooning popular western ballads like “Tumbling
Tumble Weeds” all around the nation.
