“60 Minutes” debuted on September 24, 1968. In it’s opening, Harry Reasoner said that the show would be a “kind of magazine for television.” The first episode included segments that took a look at the headquarter suites of presidential candidates Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey at their conventions from that summer, a political commentary from Art Buchwald and an interview with then Attorney General Ramsey Clark on police brutality. The show enters its 44th season this fall.
It was 122 years ago today that the LDS Church officially renounced polygamy. Mormons had made a public practice of plural wives for forty years before distancing itself from the practice.
In a bit of cosmic synchronicity, on the morning of September 24, 1977, “Come Sail Away” was released as the first song off of the Styx album, “The Grand Illusion”. As if on cue that night, CBS debuted its new hour-long rom-com “The Love Boat”.
“The Love Boat” had a decade long run on CBS, but it never once had a scene nearly as good as this one from “Freaks and Geeks” where Lindsay watches her little brother Sam at his first high school dance. She’s bored and disillusioned with the high school experience, but seeing her little bro enter the gym where everything is new and magic makes her realize she might be taking it all a little too seriously. It’s still one of the best scenes Judd Apatow has ever done. Come sail away indeed.
Some would argue that I’ve buried the pop culture lede for this day in history: It was today in 2005 that Ashton Kutcher married Demi Moore. Ok, just kidding, but today in 1991, this dropped:
Arguably no band had changed the game to the degree that Nirvana did since the Beatles performed on Ed Sullivan. The face of the Seattle grunge scene (sorry Kurt, but you were the face of something), Nirvana hit at a time when Michael Jackson and Prince were past their peaks, pop-metal had gotten ridiculous seemingly overnight and Garth Brooks was the world’s most popular musician. Nirvana were the paddles and shock to the system that rock n’ roll needed.
Happy birthday to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born this day in 1896. “The Great Gatsby” has been done in some form or another dozens of time on film, but never by Baz Luhrmann and never starring Leo DiCaprio, like 2013’s movie will.
— Bill Hubbell