Rogers60

Being a high school history teacher, when I taught the 1950s of American history, one of my favorite stories to my students was an incident that happened at one of the Spokane high school basketball games in 1958. Remember those, every Friday of the basketball season, the Spokane Coliseum would have designated sections for students from West Valley, Central Valley, Lewis and Clark, North Central, Gonzaga, Rogers. (I listed those schools in the order they were placed clockwise, in the horseshoe arrangement from the stage.) Rogers was playing at the time when the Public Address announcer made an announcement, that the United States had successfully launched it's first satellite into space. The whole Coliseum crowd cheered, louder than for plays made during the game.

 

"We Were There" in those days when the US really entered the Space Age by sending a scientific object into space, even though that object was the size of a grapefruit. The Cold War became intensified by later shifting into the Missile Age. In the election of 1960, Kennedy and Nixon argued about the need and shortage of missiles, the "missile gap" became an issue, the theme of two films of 1964: "Dr. Strangelove" and "Fail Safe." Thank goodness we're still here.