“A Charlie Brown Christmas” had its first airing fifty years ago on December 9. I watched it! And so did a lot of you. Back on that day
*Lyndon B. Johnson was president. Nelson A. Rockefeller was our governor.
*Vatican II had officially ended the day before. The Voting Rights Act had only recently been passed. The New York World’s Fair had just ended. Malcom X had been murdered earlier that year.
*Eleven Americans had gone into space. Three of them were there at the moment.
*Computers were expensive huge machines owned by corporations, government, and large institutions. Most of them did less than the one you have at home.
*Besides “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” you probably watched “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “Gilligan’s Island,” and “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
*You got your news from Walter Cronkite (on CBS) or Huntley and Brinkley (on NBC).
*Corning Community College was eight years old. Its Spencer Hill campus was two years old.
*The first stretches of the Finger Lakes Trail were just being carved out.
*Bill Clinton (Georgetown), Hilary Clinton (Wellesley), John Kerry and George W. Bush (both Yale) were college students.
*Barack Obama was four years old. Michelle Obama was almost two.
*The Taylor Wine Company and Penn Yan Boats were major employers. Corning was very much an industrial town, thanks to the extensive factories of the Corning Glass Works.
In the fifty years since then
*Men stopped wearing ties.
*Girls got to wear slacks to school.
*Kids fell in love with “Sesame Street.”
*The draft ended.
*America conducted wars in Indochina, Panama, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan.
*The industrial Glass Works became high-tech Corning, Incorporated.
*A great flood ravaged our region, and killed nineteen of our neighbors.
*Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered. George Wallace and Ronald Reagan were shot.
*J. Edgar Hoover died. Nelson Mandela was freed.
*Incensed at Civil Rights advances, millions of white southerners became Republicans, and soon took over the party.
*The Soviet Union collapsed, along with the Cold War and European Communism.
*Superman died (repeatedly… but it didn’t take).
*The Rockwell Museum and the National Soaring Museum were created. Curtiss Museum moved to spacious new facilities. Corning Museum got major rebuilds. Benjamin Patterson Inn Museum was created, and grew into Heritage Village of the Finger Lakes.
*Steuben County transitioned from a Board of Supervisors government to a County Legislature government.
*Corporate consolidation, and the Boutique Winery act, wrought huge changes in that industry.
*Farming reduced dramatically, though hat drop was offset to some extent by the influx of Amish and conservative Mennonite farmers.
*Average glacial thickness dropped by 10 centimeters. The Arctic icecap shrank by well over 30%.
*Computers became so portable, so cheap, and so easy to use that they became commonplace.
*Card catalogues disappeared.
*Broadcast television as we knew it came to an end, but we were left with a tidal wave of choices anyway.
*Movie attendance plummeted as we got to watch them at home. Newspapers dwindled as internet, TV, and radio brought the news in quicker.
*The voting age was dropped to eighteen. Abortion became broadly legal during the first trimester. Homosexuality was decriminalized, and gay marriage became legal.
*There were two impeachment crises. One president was exonerated, while the other resigned in disgrace.
*Thanks in large part to that Immigration Reform Act in 1965, the nation became much more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse.
*We met Garfield, Doonesbury, Han Solo, Downton Abbey, Angry Birds, Mario Brothers, Fred Sanford, and Indiana Jones.
*Walt Disney died, but Disney World opened. Annette Funicello died.
*We went to the moon, then stopped going to the moon.
*Pet Rocks came and went… so did Rubik’s Cubes, spiked hair, bell bottoms, Mao jackets, Nehru jackets, “Laugh-In,” “All in the Family,” the Monkees, the Cowsills, the Carpenters, Betamax, and eight-track tapes.
*Charles M. Schulz died, and hours later the final “Peanuts” strip appeared.