• Aviation: In July, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared after taking off from New Guinea during Earhart’s attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
• Music: Strange Fruit, one of the first banned protest songs, was written as a poem by Abel Meeropol.
• Influential Songs include: One O’Clock Jump by Count Basie
• The Big Movies included Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Saratoga, and A Star is Born
• Price of a gallon of gas in 1937: 16 cents
• The World Population was ~ 2,268,000,000
• When broadcasting pioneer Guglielmo Marconi (April 25, 1874- July 20, 1937) died, radio stations worldwide went silent for two minutes in tribute.
• Sylvan Goldman introduced the Shopping Cart in 1937.
• And… The animated short Porky’s Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery, featuring the debut of Daffy Duck, was released.

“Oh The Humanity” – Radio Reporter Herbert Morrison, on the scene of the Hindenburg disaster.

Bob Marley’s Redemption Song refrain, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free the mind,” quotes a speech in Nova Scotia by African American civil rights activist Marcus Garvey in 1937.

Speaking in the House of Commons in 1937, Winston Churchill said, “I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism

The word “dord” was created accidentally in 1937 when a dictionary editor meant to put “d or d” in the dictionary but was mistaken for a single word. Its word status was revoked in 1947 when an editor noticed it lacked an etymology.

In 1937, map makers from General Drafting added a made-up town called Agloe, NY, to their map to find who copied their design. In the 1950’s, a visitor to the area settled there, thus making the town a real place.

Before the inception of Marvel Comics, founding publisher Martin Goodman was about to board the Hindenburg airship but instead boarded an airplane as his and his wife’s seats were not together. So, had he boarded the Marvel Comics airship with Spider-Man, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, and The X-Men might not have existed.

The first manned North Pole station was established by the Russians in 1937. It operated for nine months, during which it drifted almost 1800 miles.

The 1937 Best Supporting Actress Oscar went to Alice Brady for her role in In Old Chicago, but she couldn’t attend the ceremony, so a man walked up and accepted the award on her behalf. After the show, he and the Oscar were never seen again.

There is such thing as a Santa School, training Santas since 1937.

After four years, on May 28, 1937, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened. Pedestrians were allowed a day earlier, on May 27th.

Samuel Caldwell was the first person in America to be arrested for selling marijuana. Arrested in 1937 for selling two joints, he was sentenced to a $1000 fine and four years of hard labor. This happened in Denver, Colorado, where it was legalized in 2012.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has been guarded every minute since midnight on July 2, 1937.

National Geographic published “Changing Berlin,” which painted a positive city portrait. Later, it was known that the author was on Goebbels’ payroll, Hitler’s propaganda minister. The magazine also published “Imperial Rome Reborn,” an article on Mussolini’s Italy this year.

Disney’s Snow White became the biggest film ever (at least until Gone With The Wind Came out in 1939.) The previous holder for that title was the controversial Birth of a Nation (1915).

The Seven Dwarves weren’t always Grumpy, Sneezy, Bashful, Doc, Sleepy, Dopey and Happy. In a 1912 Broadway play, they were Blick, Flick, Glick, Plick, Quee, Snick, and Whick.

During a flood in 1937, the Brown Hotel in Louisville was partially submerged, and a worker caught a two-pound fish in the lobby.

Hewlett-Packard was founded. The first big job for the young company was Disney, for Fantasia. Although initially a manufacturer of measurement instruments, they entered the computer industry in the 1960s.

In 1937, the US had 42% of total global warmaking potential (the ability of factories and industries to produce weapons and supplies), as much as Germany, the USSR, the UK, and Japan combined. Its economy grew 15% annually during WW2; the US ended the war with more than 50% of global GNP.

Hector Boiardi started canning his great pasta sauce in 1937. You probably know him better as Chef Boyardee.

The first city in North America to use “911” for emergency calls was Winnipeg, in Canada, in 1937, but it didn’t come into widespread use throughout the continent until the 1980s.

The D ration Bar was the first emergency chocolate ration bar commissioned by the US Army. The Army approached Hershey’s Chocolate in 1937 with four requirements: The bar must (1) weigh 4oz. (2) be high in food energy, (3) withstand high temperatures & (4) taste “a little better than a boiled potato.”
From the family home recipe of Giovanni and Assunta Cantisano, Ragu spaghetti sauce hit the store shelves.

Ken Daigneau, brother of a Hormel company executive in 1937, won a $100 prize in a competition to name a new item that would come to be known as SPAM.

In 1906, J.J. Thomson won a Nobel prize for proving the electron was a particle. Then, in 1937, his son, G.P. Thomson, won a Nobel prize for proving the electron was a wave.

The idea that eating spinach makes you stronger (like Popeye) is due to a calculation error made in 1870. It was noticed and corrected in 1937, but the reputation lives on…

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who won the 1937 Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery of Vitamin C, initially tried to name the molecule ‘god nose,’ as he was unaware of its structure.

Ray-Ban sunglasses were made for US Air Force pilots in 1936 and were such a hit that they began to be sold to the public in 1937. The brand has been featured in many films.

William Randolph Hearst used his influence to help push the marijuana tax act of 1937 to squash the hemp industry to protect his paper-making business. Halting the use of hemp, one of the world’s strongest natural fibers, just for his personal profit.

President FDR proposed to add up to 6 additional members of the Supreme Court because he disagreed with the court’s decisions. They were not added.

They say that Picasso’s greatest work was Guernica, which he painted in 1937. It was over 11 feet high and 25 feet wide. Here is a very small picture of this famous work:

During the Battle of Nanking, two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, held a contest to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword. Both were later executed on war crimes charges. The actual contest numbers may have been an exaggeration.

A gas leak in the basement at the local school in New London, Texas, caused a massive explosion that killed almost 300 children and teachers, the deadliest school disaster in US history.

So many people disappeared during Stalin’s reign that, in 1937, the phone book in Moskva was canceled.

One hundred five people died after an American pharmaceutical company, the S.E. Massengill Company, sold a raspberry-flavored drug elixir, Elixir of Sulfanilamide, prepared using diethylene glycol. The company’s head chemist was not aware that diethylene glycol was known to be poisonous. The incident hastened the final enactment in 1938 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the statute that today remains the basis for FDA regulation of these products.
Movie Star Death: Marie Prevost (malnutrition)

Heroic Person Death: Amelia Earhart (plane lost flying over the Pacific Ocean). 15-year-old Betty Klenck possibly picked up an emergency radio transmission from Amelia Earhart, who appeared to have crashed-landed somewhere. To this day, her body was never officially recovered/identified.

HEADLINE: The Hindenburg (LZ 129) is the Greatest Airship, EVER!*
*Hindenburg Update: It burned and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6th. Thirty-six people died in the accident. Ed Wood, considered one of the worst directors of all time, filmed, with his first camera, the Hindenberg flying over his hometown of Poughkeepsie before its historic crash in Lakehurst, NJ.
Safety Tip – use helium to float things, not hydrogen.

Arthur John Priest served on the ‘Asturias,’ the ‘Titanic,’ the ‘Olympic,’ the ‘Alcantra,’ the ‘Britannic’ and, finally, the “Donegal.’ All these ships sank, except the ‘Olympic,’ which crashed into another ship. Arthur died in 1937 of pneumonia, on land.

King’s Men Game, Bargain Day Game, Cootie Game

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Charts based on Billboard music charts