January 19, 1953: Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV is born in Los Angeles. The boy who will go on to become known as Desi Arnaz Jr. is the son of comic actors Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. He is one of the few people who has been famous for, literally, his entire life.
Because, at the same time, his parents, the stars and producers of the CBS sitcom I Love Lucy, were having their own baby.
When the show's pilot aired in 1951, Lucy was already showing her pregnancy with her 1st child, Lucie Désirée Arnaz. (Ball's full name was Lucille Désirée Ball.) No reference was made to it in the script. The show was picked up, but CBS executives decided that they had to wait until after Lucie was was born before they could start filming the show.
Mary Kay and Johnny was the first television series to feature a pregnancy, the Stearnses' real-life son Christopher, whose birth and character were written in the show in December 1948. It was also the first to feature a couple sharing a bed.
In contrast, I Love Lucy showed the Ricardos with separate beds. Even as late as its final season in 1966, The Dick Van Dyke Show showed Rob and Laura Petrie in separate beds. By that point, a lot of sitcoms got around the issue by showing widowed mothers and widowed fathers, who dated, but never got married again.
I Love Lucy was CBS' most popular show, so the network couldn't simply wait for Desi Jr. to be born: They had to keep filming. So they allowed the birth of "Little Ricky" to be worked into the storyline. But the censors refused to allow them to use the word "pregnant," so "expecting" was used instead. The episode "Lucy Is Enceinte" first aired on December 8, 1952 -- "enceinte" being French for "pregnant." (This ignores the fact the "pregnant" also comes from French.
The episode in which Lucy Ricardo gives birth, "Lucy Goes to the Hospital," first aired on January 19, 1953, which was the day before the Inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President. To increase the publicity of this episode, the original air date was chosen to coincide with Ball's real-life delivery of Desi Jr. by Caesarean section, which occurred 12 hours before the episode, filmed on November 14, 1952, aired.
By modern standards, the episode is problematic. Not only is Ricky not with Lucy for the birth, he's at work, doing a show. That's bad enough. It gets worse: He was doing a jungle number, and Desi Arnaz, a Cuban light-skinned enough to appear on American television in the 1950s and be accepted as "white" (though definitely as an often-mocked "foreigner"), was wearing blackface. He not only had the offensive makeup on when he took the phone call that told him the baby was born, but he still had it on when he went to the hospital and saw his son for the first time, and he fainted.
"Lucy Goes to the Hospital" was watched by more people than any other television program up to that time, with 73.9 percent of all American television sets tuned in, topping the 67.7 percent who saw "Ike" sworn in as the 34th President of the United States the next day. The campaign buttons the year before read, "I LIKE IKE," and Ike might have been the most admired man in America, but America loved Lucy.
It was estimated that 44 million people watched the episode. That record has been surpassed many times, as America's population, and thus its viewing audience, has grown. But the 73.9 share is a record that has never been topped, and never will be. Even such events as the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the 1st Moon landing in 1969, and the coverage of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 don't count, since they were covered by multiple networks, and no single network had a 73 share.
The 1st issue of TV Guide was published with a date of April 3, 1953. Desi Jr. was on the cover. As you can see, not only was Little Ricky more popular than Ike, but he had more hair. (Then again, so did Adlai Stevenson -- barely -- but that didn't help him in the 1952 election.)
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January 19, 1953 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. And no games were scheduled in the NBA or the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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