October 4, 1957: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the world's 1st artificial satellite. This terrifies Americans into thinking, not so much that the Communists are ahead of us in any prestigious "space race," but that, soon, they will be able to attack us from space.
Well, it's been 65 years, and they've never attacked us from anywhere. (Spy-on-spy crime excepted, of course.) Time magazine had named Khruschchev its Man of the Year for 1957.
The Space Age has begun. Particularly related to this is satellite technology that allows us to see sporting events from anywhere in the world.
The launch of Sputnik 1 was seen by rock and roll pioneer Richard Penniman, a.k.a. Little Richard. This was only 3 days after a flight between the Australian cities of Melbourne and Sydney, where he saw the plane's red-hot engines and thought "angels were holding it up." He saw the launch after his Sydney concert, and described it as "a bright red fireball flying across the sky," and said he was "deeply shaken."
He took it as "a sign from God" to repent from his wild life and secular music. According to one legend, he threw all his jewelry into Sydney Harbour. He went home, gave a farewell concert at New York's Apollo Theater, and went into the ministry. He was determined to only perform gospel music from then on, and no less a practitioner of that art than Mahalia Jackson said he "sang gospel the way it shouldn't be sung."
It didn't take. By 1962, he was singing rock and roll again, touring Europe, and The Beatles opened for him. They copied his trademark "Woo!" on songs like "She Loves You" and "Please Please Me." With Paul McCartney singing lead, they covered his "Long Tall Sally," and that ended up being the last song in their last concert, at Candlestick Park in 1966. He was a charter inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and lived until 2020.
Also on this day, Leave It to Beaver premieres on ABC. Somebody once pointed out that the show was a lot less naive than it first appeared, and that the worries of Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, played by Jerry Mathers, mirrored those of the times; that the show premiered on the day Sputnik 1 was launched, and aired its last episode on June 20, 1963, right after President John F. Kennedy stared down George Wallace over integration at the University of Alabama and proposed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 2 months before Martin Luther King spoke at the March On Washington, and 5 months before Kennedy was assassinated.
Jerry Mathers, then 9 years old, as The Beaver
Mathers eventually enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He was never stationed outside the country, but a rumor went around that he was killed in action in Vietnam. Instead, he served his hitch without a scratch, graduated from the University of California, made money in real estate, became a disc jockey in Anaheim, and brought together the surviving members of the cast to produce The New Leave It to Beaver from 1983 to 1989 – as many seasons as the original show ran.
Since 2008, he has limited his acting to stage productions, frequently alongside his TV brother Tony Dow, with whom he ran a production company until Dow's death on July 27, 2022, at the age of 77. At that point, Mathers was 74.
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October 4, 1957 was a Friday. It was a travel day between Games 2 and 3 of the World Series, which the Milwaukee Braves would win over the Yankees in Game 7. Football was in midweek. The NHL season didn't begin until October 8. And the NBA season didn't begin until October 22. So there were no scores on this historic day.
One note, tangentially connected to sports: Bill Fagerbakke, who played assistant coach Michael "Dauber" Dybinski on the ABC sitcom Coach, was born on this day.
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