January 15, 1967 to January 28th 1967
Super Bowl Sunday. In fact, January 15th was the very first Super Bowl Sunday. The Super Bowl has become a national holiday as friends and family gather every year to see what will certainly be the most watched broadcast of the year. It has also become the second-largest day for food consumption in America, second only to Thanksgiving.
The Green Bay Packers met the Kansas City Chiefs at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and defeated them by a score of 35 to 10. A 30-second commercial cost $42,000 and you could get a ticket for twelve bucks.
On that same Sunday, Lisa Velez was born. You may remember her as Lisa Lisa. Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam were a pretty good 80’s band. I certainly remember really liking this video back then. I’m sure there were a couple of reasons why.
That Super Bowl was the only one to be broadcast simultaneously by two networks; CBS and NBC. If you had been watching it on CBS, you could have seen The Rolling Stones perform on The Ed Sullivan Show just after the game. The single Ruby Tuesday/Let’s Spend the Night Together had just been released in the States the previous day, so those were the two songs they performed. However, Ed thought that “Let’s Spend the Night Together” was too suggestive, so he asked Mick to sing “Let’s Spend Some Time Together”. Mick went along with it, but every censored lyric met with a wicked eye-roll.
On Wednesday the 18th, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, was sentenced to life in prison.
Thursday night, NBC aired Arena, the episode of Star Trek where Kirk fights the Gorn. Classic!
Friday the 20th saw the release of the new Rolling Stones album Between the Buttons featuring Miss Amanda Jones, Connection, and Complicated.
On Saturday the 21st, Ann Sheridan, the popular and lovely movie star and pin-up girl of the 30’s and 40’s, died of cancer at the age of 51. She did terrific work with greats like Bogart, Cagney, Raft, and Flynn.
On the 27th of January, a Friday, at 6:30 PM in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Lieutenant Colonel Gus Grissom, Lieutenant Colonel Edward White, and Lieutenant Commander Roger Chaffee died when a fire broke out and destroyed their command module. The Apollo 1 disaster was NASA’s first major tragedy.
Gus Grissom was a very well respected astronaut. He had piloted Mercury-Redstone 4, making him the second American in space after Alan Shepard, and Gemini 3, which made him the first astronaut to make a second journey into space. Had Grissom lived, it is likely that he would have been the first man to step on the moon instead of Neil Armstrong.
Edward White had previously flown on the Gemini 4 mission where he became the first American to walk in space.
Roger Chaffee never made it to space. Apollo 1 would have been his first mission. However, it is rumored that he was the one who flew the U-2 spyplane over Cuba and took the famous photos of Soviet missiles that Pres. Kennedy showed on television during the Cuban Missile Crisis. America lost heroes on that day.
Comments and opinions are welcome and encouraged.
Thank you for your interest.
