Posted on 10/18/2012 7:39:31 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness appears on television's "I've Got a Secret" on February 9, 1956.
On a 1956 game show, a man appeared who had been present at Ford's Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865.
(Note: Link over to the YouTube site provided to watch this amazing historical video.)
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
My grandfather was born before Custer's last stand, and lived long enough to see men orbit the moon.
That’s fascinating. I can’t watch this now, but I will in a few days time.
Thanks for posting this, amazing really.
It’s like that saying, the past isn’t even past. (I don’t have that right, but you get the gist!)
Child Eyewitness of The Gettysburg Address
“the voice of William V. Rathvon, who as a nine-year-old boy watched and listened to Abraham Lincoln deliver his address at Gettysburg in November 1863.
“The story was told on February 12, 1938 and recorded on a 78 rpm. record. No other Gettysburg eyewitness is known to have recorded his memories in audio format.”
“Sunday Night in Black and White.”
I LOVED that! Those old shows were so great, everyone was so polite and dressed up! I’m very sorry they got rid of it too, enough “lingo” already, these shows were great!
I also liked a game show I used to listen to on NPR....what was the name? I can’t remember, “if you say so”??? “you don’t say”??? Something like that.
It was a very clever game, I only heard it a few times (of course it became elusive as soon as I liked it!) but it involved odd words and fake definitions and having to guess which were real or fake.
I mention it because the promo used to say it would take you back to the days when “radio was in black and white” and I thought that summed it up very well.
It WAS like the old days with Dorothy Kilgallen and all, they’d’ve fit right in. It was very high minded and the folks on it were very polite to each other. And no politics at all, it was really the best NPR show I’ve ever heard (2nd best - “car talk” of course, best callers in radio!).
My great-grandfather was born in 1868 and lived till the B-52 went into service, 1955.
I still remember him.
I remember seeing on I’VE GOT A SECRET, an old Indian who was a warrior with Geronimo.
***It WAS like the old days with Dorothy Kilgallen and all,***
Wasn’t she the reporter who was going to dig into the Kennedy assasination, but was found dead not long after? I remember reading of this back in the mid 1960s.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/death4.htm
I wikied her to see about what you said, and it seems you are right, there is some, let me say “controversy” about her death and the Kennedy assassination. Those who are interested can check out your link or wiki. (I’d urge any of those folks to also check out Ben Bradlee’s dead sister-in-law, I think it was his s-i-l, another suspicious Kennedy related death)
But it seems that mostly she was a show biz reporter and the only way I know her is as a participant in these early game shows.
I’m guessing you are a little older than me (I’m 54, Lord bless me) and I’m just barely old enough to remember “what’s my line” “to tell the truth” and some of the other shows from early TV. I don’t think I really remember “I’ve got a secret” from prime time, but I certainly did see it sometimes, I’m guessing in some late night pre-cable re-runs.
One thing I do know - I’m not *really* a baby boomer because I DO NOT remember Howdy Doody!
What was up with that show? People even a very few years older than me have it as part of their real cultural memory base I and my cohorts know nothing about it, other than what we’ve gleaned from our near elders! I’ve never figured out the exact dividing line, but Im pretty sure there is one.
I guess this show was a huge hit, but never went into reruns. To me this is a strange and almost unique situation.
Oh, actually there’s another one I can think of “Peter Gunn” everyone knows and loves the theme song to that show, but I don’t know ANYONE who’s seen the actual show!
The mysteries left to us from early TV!
Add in a couple of world wars, the atomic age, electrification, radio, television, automobiles, lasers, aircraft, jet engines, computers, etc. etc. etc. and I just hope I can deal with the technological and other changes I witness in the remainder of my life as gracefully (when being graceful is appropriate). (8^D)
Lol
The Lincoln Worship Brigade will be along shortly
Good luck
My grandmother was born in 1887 in the mountains of Norway and died in 1985. She always said she live through the most fast-paced time in human history of unbelievable change. I would tend to agree. Especially from her vantage point of growing up in rural Norway and reaching old-age in American Suburbia.
My mom is 94 and still kicking and a better memory than me, is also very interesting to talk with. We visited over the summer and took a tour of her old haunts. At her grade school playground she said in the rare sighting of an airplane they would shout “Lucky Lindy” and sing some song they made up and would pretend to fly.
And now we have robots digging dirt on Mars and guys parachuting from space!
Grover Cleveland might well have been the last Democrat worth voting for! Unfortunately, McKinley won the next election with TR as his VP - the beginning of the Progressive era in the United States.
Ping
Someone recently observed that people who as children traveled in covered wagons in the great migration West, lived to see it depicted in movies on TV...in the comfort of their suburban California homes.
So did Thomas Jefferson. Do you hate him too?
But the Lincoln haters showed up first. You must be so proud.
ha-ha!! Nicely played....
The last surviving Confederate Civil War widow died in 2004. The last surviving Union Civil War widow died the year before.
“Here is a man, elderly but still kicking, who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”
Mmmm. Would I be flamed too much if I express some skepticism?
Here is the deal. In 1956 the Lincoln assassination was 91 years in the past. Don’t know about the rest of you, but my earliest memories date from when I was about 5 (memories of the election returns in 1960). So this guy would have to be a minimum of 96, and a more realistic estimate of his age would be 100.
So how many nonogenarians or centennials do you think were alive in the United States in the 1950s? (A smaller percentage of the population than in that cohort today, and there were about half the people in the US then than there are today.) What are the odds that one of them was in the audience when there were only (at best) a dozen or so children in that audience at Ford Theater?
I don’t doubt he was alive when Lincoln was assassinated. Anyone in their nineties would have been in 1956. I just find it hard to believe this is more than some old codger finding a nifty means of getting people to pay attention to him. (For that matter, he was probably dining out on the “I saw Lincoln assassinated” story for the last 50 years before then.)
And please don’t tell me people don’t make stuff like this up. Look at all the folks who claimed to be dead Old West outlaws that had faked their deaths and led a new life, or all the people that claimed to have been the couple in the Times Square V-J Day photo.
I had a neighbor who won $32K on the $64,000 question show. He spent it putting a bomb shelter in his basement.
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