November 11, 1962: "Seven Days In May" Is Published

November 11, 1962: Seven Days In May is published, written  by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II. A film based on it premiered on February 12, 1964. Kirk Douglas played the would-be hero, Burt Lancaster the villain, Frederic March the President caught in the middle, and Ava Gardner and Martin Balsam the people who hold the key to stopping a coup. Twilight Zone boss Rod Serling wrote the script.

Douglas, through his production company, and a friend of his, director John Frankenheimer, made the film. Frankenheimer didn't want to work with Lancaster again after clashing with him on The Birdman of Alcatraz, but Douglas insisted -- after beating the blacklist with Spartacus, he had that kind of clout (making him the George Clooney of his day). Oddly, Frankenheimer not only patched up his differences but became close friends with Lancaster, while he and Douglas fell out, and never worked together again.

President Kennedy had read the book, and was eager to see the film made, after the real-life actions of General Edwin Walker, whom Kennedy had forced to resign his commission. Kennedy had the White House staff cooperate with Douglas and Frankenheimer, heading up to Hyannis for a weekend so they could film outside without the Secret Service getting skittish over it. But, in a twist that Knebel and Bailey would have found poignant, JFK didn't live to see the premiere, for -- as the Warren Commission determined -- reasons that had nothing to do with a military coup.

March and Serling died in 1975, Gardner in 1990, Knebel in 1993, Lancaster in 1994, Balsam in 1996, Frankenheimer in 2002, Bailey in 2012, Douglas in 2020 (at the age of 103).

*

November 11, 1962 was a Sunday. Actress Demi Moore was born.

Baseball was out of season. These games were played in the NFL:

* The New York Giants beat the Dallas Cowboyss, 41-10 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

* The Green Bay Packers beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 49-0 at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.

* The Washington Redskins beat the Cleveland Browns, 17-9 at District of Columbia Stadium (later renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium) in Washington.

* The Chicago Bears beat the Minnesota Vikings, 31-30 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 26-17 at the 1st Busch Stadium, formerly the last Sportsman's Park, in St. Louis.

* The Baltimore Colts beat the Los Angeles Rams, 14-2 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

* And the Detroit Lions beat the San Francisco 49ers, 38-24 at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco.

These games were played in the American Football League:

* The New York Titans, who became the Jets the next season, lost to the Dallas Texans, 52-31 at the Polo Grounds.

* The Boston Patriots beat the Denver Broncos, 33-29 at Bears Stadium (later renamed Mile High Stadium) in Denver.

* The Buffalo Bills beat the San Diego Chargers, 40-20 at Balboa Stadium in San Diego.

* And the Houston Oilers beat the Oakland Raiders, 28-20 at Frank Youll Field in Oakland.

There were 3 games in the NBA. This included a doubleheader at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis. In the opener, the Boston Celtics beat the New York Knicks, 117-98. In the nightcap, the St. Louis Hawks beat the Detroit Pistons, 117-100 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.

And the Chicago Zephyrs beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 109-105 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Elgin Baylor scored 42 and Jerry West 30, in defeat. Terry Dischinger scored 30 to lead the Zephyrs, who became the Baltimore Bullets the next season, and are now known as the Washington Wizards.

And there were 2 games in the NHL. The Montreal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins, 4-2 at the Boston Garden. And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-3 at the Chicago Stadium. The New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings were not scheduled.

October 2, 1959: "The Twilight Zone" Premieres

October 2, 1959: The Twilight Zone premieres on CBS. Earl Holliman -- plays Mike Ferris, a man who walks into a deserted down, sees no people, and yells out the episode's title: "Where Is Everybody?"

In the first of the series' many "twist endings," it is revealed that he's an astronaut, going through an experiment to see if man can survive the long journeys of space all alone. It turns out that he can, but the effects are not good.

Series creator, host and main writer Rod Serling was a big sports fan. In the June 17, 1960 episode "The Mighty Casey," filmed at the Los Angeles version of Wrigley Field, a robot pitcher is signed, in what turns out to be a vain attempt to save a fictional team called the Hoboken Zephyrs from being moved.

In the May 26, 1961 episode, "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" some bus passengers, forced into a diner by a washed-out bridge, realizes that, taking the diner's owner and the policemen into account, there's more people in there than were on the bus.

Somebody had seen a "flying saucer," and decided that one of the bus passengers must be a Martian invader. One of them, played by Jack Elam, is asked the kind of question that American soldiers used to ask suspected incognito Nazis in World War II: "Who won the World Series last year?" Elam's character laughs, and correctly says that the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Yankees in 7 games. 

In the May 2, 1963 episode "On Thursday We Leave for Home," set in 1991, a rescue of a spaceship lost in 1963 is made, and one of the rescued astronauts asks a wiseguy question: "What city are the Dodgers in now?" Correctly as it turned out, he is told, "Los Angeles."

The October 4, 1963 episode "Steel" is an adaptation of a 1956 short story by noted science fiction writer Richard Matheson, imagining that robots have replaced human boxers, but that a robot's trainer, played by Lee Marvin, has to fill in when his robot breaks down and can't fight, and gets clobbered by the opposing robot. The story would be made into a full feature film, Real Steel, in 2011, set in 2020 and starring Hugh Jackman.

The episode takes place in 1974, and Serling's opening narration says that human boxing was outlawed in 1968. This episode aired a year and a half after Emile Griffith killed Benny "The Kid" Paret in a middleweight title bout on live TV, so it has to be seen in that light.

The October 25, 1963 episode "The Last Night of a Jockey" features 5-foot-2 Mickey Rooney as a disgraced jockey who wishes to be "big," and becomes 8 feet tall. He then gets a phone call, telling him that he's been reinstated. But now, he's too big to ride a horse, the one thing he had a talent for.

Seasons 1, 2, 3 and 5 had half-hour episodes. Season 4, 1962-63, had hourlong episodes. One, airing on January 24, 1963, was "He's Alive." Dennis Hopper plays a young white supremacist, unhappy at the progress of civil rights. He begins to get advice from a figure in the shadows, and becomes influential in the anti-civil rights movement. Then, one night, the figure moves out of the shadows, and it's Adolf Hitler. Serling closes the episode by saying, "He's alive so long as these evils exist." Serling got a lot of hate mail for this episode. But it remained the one he was most proud of.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry never wrote an episode. But William Shatner appeared in 2 of them: "Nick of Time," November 18, 1960, as half of a couple that falls under the spell of an alleged fortune-telling machine in a small-town diner; and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," October 11, 1963, as a man on a plane, newly released from psychiatric care, who sees a monster on the plane's wing, trying to destroy it, and doesn't know if it's real or his mind acting up again.

Leonard Nimoy had one line, as an American soldier, in the December 29, 1961 episode "A Quality of Mercy." Dean Stockwell plays an officer who hates the Japanese he's fighting, but is forced to imagine himself as a Japanese soldier being fired on by Americans. And George Takei co-starred in the May 1, 1964 episode "The Encounter," as a Japanese-American trapped in a house with a bigoted American veteran of World War II.

Burgess Meredith and Jack Klugman each appeared 4 times, sharing the record. In my opinion, the series' best episode was Meredith's June 2, 1961 appearance, "The Obsolete Man." Spoiler alert for a 61-year-old episode: In a totalitarian "future that might be," Meredith's character dies, but wins anyway. Serling closes: "Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under 'M,' for 'Mankind,' in The Twilight Zone."

Serling died in 1975, the result of his constant smoking. He was only 51 years old. The Twilight Zone was revived on CBS from 1985 to 1989, on UPN in the 2002-03 TV season, and on CBS again from 2019 to 2021.

Earl Holliman, who starred in the pilot, is still alive as of October 2, 2022, age 94.

*

October 2, 1959 was a Friday. It was midweek for football, and preseason for the NBA and the NHL. So there is only one score on the day.

It is Game 2 of the World Series. The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Chicago White Sox 4-3 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Charlie Neal hits 2 home runs, and Chuck Essegian adds another in support of 1955 Game 7 hero Johnny Podres. The Dodgers go on to win the Series in 6 games. 

April 3, 1968: "Planet of the Apes" Premieres

April 3, 1968: The film Planet of the Apes premieres, based on the 1963 novel La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle, who had also written Bridge over the River Kwai. Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame and Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Wilson wrote the screenplay, and Franklin J. Schaffner, later to win the Oscar for Best Director for Patton, directed.

This was also the day that 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered. I have a separate entry for that.

Charlton Heston plays Colonel George Taylor, the only survivor of an Earth ship that crash-lands on a planet where intelligent apes are the dominant civilization, and humans are their slaves. He is captured, and utters the 1st of 2 legendary lines from the film: "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" The Hays Code had recently fallen, allowing the line to be used in a mainstream film.

As with so many of Serling's stories, there's a twist ending. Linda Harrison plays Nova, a young human female, whom Taylor frees along with himself. They manage to make their way to an island, where they see the remains of the Statue of Liberty. As it turned out, Taylor was on Earth all along: He and his crew were in suspended animation, and had traveled for 2,000 years but hadn't aged.

Upon seeing the damaged Lady Liberty, Taylor yells, to men long dead, "You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to Hell!" Again, no more Hays Code.

I'm a bit surprised that the film did so well, because Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the next day, depressing film turnout for the next few days. It led to 4 sequels and a short-lived TV series.

Tim Burton remade the original in 2001 -- or, rather, as he said, he "re-imagined" it -- with Mark Wahlberg as astronaut Leo Davidson, and Estella Warren as Daena, the Nova equivalent. In one of his last films, Heston was cast against type, as an elderly ape. As he dies, he refers to the origin of the apes' dominance, and says, "Damn them. Damn them. Damn them all to hell!" And Linda Harrison also cameoed, as a woman in a cart.

The ending has baffled people, as Taylor lands in Washington, D.C., and sees the Lincoln Memorial, with Abraham Lincoln having a chimpanzee's face: An "Ape Lincoln." The people who were baffled by this clearly never read the original novel: When the human astronauts returned to Earth, they found Paris intact, including the Eiffel Tower, but populated by apes.

A rebooted series began in 2011, and has now led to 3 films, with a 4th planned.

*

April 3, 1968 was a Wednesday. British actress Charlotte Coleman, known for playing Scarlett in Four Weddings and a Funeral, was born.

Baseball season began a week later. Football was out of season. The NBA Playoffs were between rounds. And the NHL was between the end of its regular season and the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

There was an ABA Playoff game: The New Orleans Buccaneers beat the Denver Rockets, 102-97 at the Loyola Field House, at Loyola University in New Orleans. The Bucs went on to lose the ABA Finals to the Pittsburgh Pipers, moved to Memphis in 1970, and folded in 1975. The Rockets changed their name to the Denver Nuggets in 1974, and joined the NBA in 1976.