February 11, 1963: The French Chef premieres on WGBH-Channel 2 in Boston. It becomes the most famous cooking show in the history of American television.
Julia Child, with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, had published Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961. Living in Boston, the 49-year-old former copywriter and researcher for the OSS (the World War II forerunner of the CIA) convinced WGBH, one of the earliest public television stations, to allow her to demonstrate recipes from the book.
The show ran for 10 years, as WGBH syndicated it nationally to National Educational Television (NET), which became the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1970. PBS continued to air reruns until 1989, and they've been broadcast on nostalgia networks ever since.
Child died in 2004, at age 91. In 1989, Jean Stapleton, best known for playing Edith Bunker on All in the Family, played her in a one-woman short musical play, Bon Appétit!, with music by American opera composer Lee Hoiby. In 2009, Meryl Streep played her in the film Julie & Julia.
In a 2016 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, comedian and chef Mamrie Hart played her, while "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.
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February 11, 1963 was a Monday. This was also the day that author Sylvia Plath took her own life, and the day that The Beatles recorded most of their first album. I have separate entries for those events.
Baseball and football were out of season. And no games were scheduled for either the NBA or the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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