The week ending November 18, 1950 was a real grab bag of sorts. On the one hand, preparations were underway for Thanksgiving, coming up in a little under a week. On the other hand, fighting was going full speed ahead in Korea.
In between you had news regarding Football Coach Herman Hickman of Yale being handed a 10 year contract. Playwright Robert Sherwood made an appeal to the Theater community to keep The Theater alive, since Broadway was in danger of dying again, this time with Television looming on the horizon. A look back at Thanksgiving's past with FDR giving thanks in 1938 and how there became two Thanksgivings for a while. Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, debate was heating up over Foreign Policy with a particularly prickly showdown between Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio) and Secretary of State Dean Acheson getting underway. The Cold War was front and center again, owed in no small part to the situation in Korea with characterizations of Stalin and Mao as a kind of tag-team in Asia. The legendary Kefauver Crime Committee Hearings opened in Los Angeles with testimony from Mickey Cohen - long on words and short on substance.
And, if you can believe it, the biggest song to hit the airwaves this particular week in 1950 was called "The Thing" and it was largely speculated to be a song about Communism and the Cold War. But then, they tried to make that analogy about a lot of seemingly benign things. Bad music was not immune.
And that was the week that was for November 18, 1950 as reported by NBC Radio News Special Features program Voices And Events.
