{"id":20799,"date":"2018-03-03T11:02:01","date_gmt":"2018-03-03T16:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=20799"},"modified":"2018-03-07T08:02:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T13:02:02","slug":"in-march-half-a-century-ago-ncpr-was-born","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2018\/03\/03\/in-march-half-a-century-ago-ncpr-was-born\/","title":{"rendered":"In March, half a century ago, NCPR was born"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"50bug\"<\/a>NCPR first signed on the air Thursday, March 7, 1968 and we will be celebrating our Golden Anniversary all year.<\/p>\n

WSLU, <\/strong>(now known as North Country Public Radio), was located in Payson Hall at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, and was on the air just a few hours a day with a staff of two professionals and a few students.\u00a0Three years later it would become an affiliate of the fledgling National Public Radio network.<\/p>\n

NCPR is marking the anniversary\u00a0with a day-long Open House at our main offices at 80 East Main St. in Canton, from 7:30 am to 7 pm on Wednesday, March 7. Please stop in.<\/p>\n

In other news<\/strong><\/h2>\n

March 1968 was what you might call \u201ca happening time,\u201d and not always in a good way. Here are some of the other things that happened just\u00a0in that one month. We\u2019ll start off easy…<\/p>\n

In music and entertainment:<\/h3>\n

\"ROMEO-AND-JULIET2050\"<\/a>Country legends Johnny Cash and June Carter kicked off the month by getting married in\u00a0Franklin, Kentucky. The first performance of an\u00a0Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice\u00a0musical, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was staged in London. NBC announced the return of Star Trek, after a long and loud campaign by fans, a bookend to\u00a0the demise\u00a0of Lost In Space. The British royal family attended the opening of the film version of Romeo and Juliet at London’s Odeon Cinema. Mel Brooks’s classic,\u00a0The Producers, premiered in the U.S. The Lucy Show, with Lucille Ball, aired its final episode, as did Batman, and The Monkees. Music promoter\u00a0Bill Graham\u00a0opened the Fillmore East, a concert showcase for the top rock and blues performers of the era in NYC. Meanwhile, across town, the innovative Record Plant\u00a0recording studio was founded.\u00a0The first album cut by the new studio would be\u00a0Jimi Hendrix’s\u00a0Electric Ladyland.<\/p>\n

In science and technology<\/h3>\n

\"Medicine-bottle\"<\/a>The BBC broadcast the news for the first time in color. The child-proof cap was introduced\u00a0for nationwide use on medicine bottles.\u00a0The U.S.\u00a0field tested the first Spartan\u00a0anti-ballistic missile, designed to destroy incoming missiles with its own 5-megaton warhead.\u00a0The term “green revolution” was coined in a speech to describe the increase in world agricultural production with the use of new technologies. And a\u00a0release of VX nerve gas\u00a0by the U.S. Army killed thousands of sheep downwind\u00a0from the Army’s\u00a0Dugway Proving Ground\u00a0in\u00a0Utah.<\/p>\n

In politics<\/h3>\n
\"President<\/a>

President Lyndon Johnson. Photo: White House Press Office<\/p><\/div>\n

The Presidium of the\u00a0Communist Party of Czechoslovakia\u00a0voted to end political\u00a0censorship of the press as part of the “Prague Spring” reforms.\u00a0Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka\u00a0“Danny the Red,” and others occupied a building at the University of Nanterre in Paris sparking widespread student protests that would lead France to the brink of revolution.<\/p>\n

A protest march by striking sanitation workers in\u00a0Memphis, led by\u00a0Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0and\u00a0Ralph Abernathy\u00a0at the forefront of 6,000 African-Americans, began peacefully, but\u00a0degenerated into violence and looting, and the shooting by police of a 16-year-old.<\/p>\n

Antiwar candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy nearly edged out incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the\u00a0New Hampshire Democratic primary. This vulnerability prompted NY Sen. Robert Kennedy to enter the race a few days later. NY Gov. Nelson Rockefeller elected not to challenge GOP favorite Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination. At the end of the month, beleaguered by military stalemate and the unpopularity of Vietnam War policy, Lyndon Johnson would announce that he was dropping out of the race to win a second term as president.<\/p>\n

In war and conflict<\/h3>\n
\"Lt.<\/a>

Lt. William Calley. Photo: U.S. Army<\/p><\/div>\n

U.S. Army 2nd Lieutenant\u00a0William Calley gave the order to fire\u00a0as Company C of the First Battalion of the U.S. Army’s\u00a020th Infantry Regiment\u00a0killed 504 women, children and elderly men in what became known as the My Lai massacre. The army covered up the incident for a year until a witness to the aftermath told his congressman, Mo Udall, \u00a0about the carnage.<\/p>\n

U.S. Army General\u00a0William C. Westmoreland, who had guided the military operations in the\u00a0Vietnam War\u00a0since 1964, was recalled by President Johnson\u00a0and\u00a0reassigned to the\u00a0Joint Chiefs of Staff. On the last day of the month, Johnson\u00a0authorized additional troop deployments to the Southeast Asian conflict, bringing the total number of U.S. soldiers to a peak of 549,500.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NCPR first signed on the air Thursday, March 7, 1968 and we will be celebrating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128,17192],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20799"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20810,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20799\/revisions\/20810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}