Congratulations to Watson Homestead in the Town of Campbell! The retreat and conference center, which hosts guests from across the country for its “Road Scholar” programs and other offerings, is celebrating its 60th anniversary. Watson Homestead has been a busy place for the past sixty years. And the whole world was pretty busy when Watson Homestead got started in 1957!
Corning Community College was established, but wouldn’t open its doors until the following year. Corning-Painted Post School District closed the last of its one-room schools. Davenport Girls Home in Bath was in its last full year of operation.
Over in Apalachin, a hundred Mafia leaders panicked when they saw police driving by the house where they were meeting, and immediately ran for the fields and woods. Since most of them had never been IN fields or woods, they soon came in to be rounded up. Fifty-eight of them were arrested, even though they claimed they had only driven up to Tioga County because they heard that their host was sick, and they were worried about him. J. Edgar Hoover finally confessed to the nation that the Mafia did, in fact, exist.
John Lennon met Paul McCartney, even as American Bandstand went national and Elvis Presley made his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Watkins Glen International began its first full year of operation. There were no Major League Baseball teams south of the Potomac, or west of Kansas City.
President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon began their second terms. (Tom Watson had been instrumental in getting Eisenhower nominated back in 1952.) Averell Harriman was governor of New York. Republican Irving Ives was one of our U.S. Senators. Democratic former governor Herbert Lehman finished his term on January 9, succeeded by Republican Jacob Javits. Steuben County still had a Board of Supervisors, rather than a county legislature.
The first Sputnik was launched, and International Geophysical Year got under way. USS Glenn H. Curtiss spent 1957 operating in the antarctic for the IGY. The International Atomic Energy Commission started its work under Director-General Sterling Cole of Painted Post.
Congress passed the first civil rights act since Reconstruction. Black students braved violence to enter a previously all-white high school in Little Rock. Ernie Davis started his senior year at Elmira Free Academy. Ghana was the first black African country to become independent from European rule.
The first Frisbee sailed across a yard. The first Toyotas were imported. IBM produced the first Fortran compiler. The first electric watch went on the market, and so did the first Edsel. Passengers flew into Elmira-Corning Airport on Mohawk Airlines (propeller planes, of course).
Premieres for the year included West Side Story, Leave it to Beaver, The Music Man, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Perry Mason, and The Cat in the Hat. The NBC peacock first showed its colors. John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage.
Deaths for the year included Bugs Moran, Humphrey Bogart, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Admiral Byrd, Oliver Hardy, Dorothy Sayers, and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The U.S. suffered its first combat death in Vietnam.
Mario van Peebles was born in 1957, along with Princess Caroline of Morocco, LeVar Burton, Vanna White, Spike Lee, Osama bin Laden, Daniel Day-Lewis, Bernie Mac, Caroline Kennedy, Donny Osmond, Andrew Cuomo, and Matt Lauer.
Prince Charles was nine years old. Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and George W. Bush were all in elementary school. There was no Rockwell Museum, no Curtiss Museum, no Soaring Museum, no Finger Lakes Trail. No one had ever heard of K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Spectrum, Apple, or the Super Bowl. On the other hand, folks in 1957 DID have Western Auto, Woolworth’s, Ben Franklin, Acme, White Castle, A&P, J. J. Newberry, AND S&H Green Stamps!