Jan 2
The first U. S. anti-aircraft defense area is set up at Mitchel Field, New York.

Jan 9
James Thurber and Elliott Nugent's The Male Animal opens at Broadway's Cort Theater.

Jan 11
Howard Hawks' film His Girl Friday opens in New York City.

Feb 2
Soprano Martina Arroyo is born in New York City.

Feb 5
Youth Congress demonstrators in New York City stage an anti-war protest.

Feb 8
Walt Disney's Pinocchio opens in New York City.

Feb 23
John Cromwell's film Abe Lincoln in Illinois opens at Radio City Music Hall.

Mar 3
The first major folk concert is held, in New York City, with Woody Guthrie, the Lomaxes, Leadbelly, and others.

Mar 7
The Queen Elizabeth arrives in New York on its maiden voyage.

Mar 8
King Vidor's film Northwest Passage has its New York premiere.

Mar 11
Pianist Artur Rubenstein gives the first recital of the Carnegie Hall season.

Mar 28
Alfred Hitchcock's film Rebecca opens in New York.

Mar 29
Joe Louis knocks out Johnny Paychek at Madison Square Garden.

Mar 31
New York's LaGuardia airport opens to traffic.

Apr 1
Maurice Evans returns to New York City to play in Shakespeare's Richard II.

Apr 12
New York's Tonawanda Creek overflows its banks, flooding part of West Main Street in Batavia.

Apr 19
31 passengers and crew are killed when a New York Central train derails on the Gulf Curve section of track east of Little Falls.

Apr 25
Actor Al Pacino is born in New York City.

Apr 26
Henry O. Flipper, first black graduate of West Point, dies of a heart attack in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of 84.

May 9
Vivien Leigh makes her U. S. stage debut, starring with Laurence Olivier in Romeo and Juliet. on Broadway.

May 10
Germany invades Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.

May 11
The New York World's Fair opens for its second year.

June
Novelist Carson McCullers and her husband Reeves move from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to an apartment at 321 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village.

July
Through her editor Robert Linscott, Carson McCullers meets poet W. H. Auden, Swiss writer Annemarie Clarac-Schwartzenbach, and German novelist Thomas Mann's children,

Aug 17
Roosevelt meets with Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King at Ogdensburg to discuss the defense of North America,

Aug 18
Roosevelt and King sign the Ogdensburg Agreement, creating the Permanent Joint Board of Defense.

Aug 31
A statue of James Fenimore Cooper by Springfield sculptor Victor Salvatore, is unveiled in Cooperstown's Cooper Park, at the end of the 150-year anniversary of the one-year old's arrival from Burlington, New Jersey.

September
McCullers leaves her husband Reeves, moves from their Greenwich Village apartment to 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights. ** A record 46-pound 2-ounce northern pike is caught in Great Sacandaga Lake.

Sep 1
Social reformer Lilian Wald, 73, dies in Rochester.

Sep 6
Russian-American chemist Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene dies in New York City.

Sep 11
Al Jolson returns to Broadway in Hold on to Your Hats.

Sep 18
Former Rochester health officer George Washington Goler dies there at the age of 76.

Sep 20
Batavia Downs harness racing track opens.

Sep 21
Journalist Paul Cowan is born in New York City.

Sep 29
Busby Berkeley's film musical Strike Up the Band opens in New York.

October
New York nightclub owner Barney Josephson opens Cafe Society Uptown. ** Hungarian composer Bela Bartok arrives in New York City.

Oct 16
Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator has its New York premiere.

Oct 19
Lloyd Bacon's Knute Rockne-All American has its New York premiere.

Oct 24
William Wyler'sfilm The Westerner opens in New York.

Oct 27
The New York World's Fair ends its second season.

Nov 3
Fred Niblo's film The Mark of Zorro opens in New York.

Nov 13
Walt Disney's film Fantasia opens in New York .

Nov 18
An unexploded bomb is found in a New York City Consolidated Edison building. It is the first to be planted by the "Mad Bomber".

Nov 23
William Wyler'sfilm The Letter has its New York premiere.

Dec 6
Rock and roll singer Steve Alaimo is born in Rochester.

Dec 25
George Abbott, Richard Rodgers and John O'Hara's stage musical Pal Joey opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

Dec 26
Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov's stage comedy My Sister Eileen opens at the Biltmore Theater.

Dec 28
An agreement is announced for the Gimbel Brothers and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores to sell the art collection of formerly wealthy newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst.

Dec 31
Russian-born photographer Roman Vishniac arrives in New York City, from France.

City
Construction begins on East Harlem's Benjamin Franklin High School. ** The city takes over the operation of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) and Brooklyn Manhattan Transit (BMT) Company's subway lines. ** Hulan E. Jack is elected New York State assemblyman for Harlem. ** Circulation of the Sunday edition of the Daily News approaches 4,000,000. ** George Abbott's production of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's stae musical Pal Joey premieres. ** Pagliacci is telecast from the Metropolitan Opera House. ** Critic-author Irving Howe graduates from New York's City College. ** Jazz violinist Leon Abbey leads his own big band for a brief time this year. ** The New York Rangers win hockey's Stanley Cup. ** Jerome Robbins dances in George Balanchine's Keep Off the Grass. ** English actress Jessica Tandy makes New York City her permanent home. ** José Ferrer makes his New York professional stage debut playing the lead in Charley's Aunt. ** Ernest Hemingway attempts to pay his bar bill at the Stork Club with a $100,000 royalty check for the screen rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Club owner Sherman Billingsley has him wait until closing receipts are tallied, then cashes the check. Hemingway returns the favor by getting Billingsley's nephew Glenn's Key West Stork Club closed. ** Canadian-born James W. Ralston (an alias of embezzler Ralph Marshall Wilby) is sent back to Canada from California, on probation. He changes his name to Alexander Douglas Hume (the real one was enlisting in the army) and gets a job in New York with the William T. Knott Company, a subsidiary of Mercantile Stores, as a traveling auditor. He marries a salesgirl named Hazel before a justice of the peace in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he is doing an audit for a Knott client.

Brooklyn
Arbuckle Brothers wholesale grocery firm discontinues the sugar portion of its business. ** The population of Williamsburg drops to 79,000, down from 260,000 over the last two decades.

State
Batavian Donald Naegely buys a lunch stand at 106 Main Street, names it Don's Dinette. ** Archaeologist-historian J. Sheldon Fisher buys the market building at Valentown, near Victor. ** Baseball authority Harold Seymour receives his master's degree from Cornell University. ** 76,465 people of Polish descent live in western New York. ** The Smith family mansion in Peterboro, once home to abolitionist Gerritt Smith, is destroyed by fire. ** Prattsburg doctor Arthur Limouze presents his restored Narcissa Prentiss House to the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church. ** The state's Tender #10 is given a new engine. ** J. Ward's replica of his statue "The Indian Hunter and His Dog, Hector" in Cooperstown is relocated to Lake Front Park.

Rochester
The city annexes abandoned Erie Canal lands near Monroe Avenue and property near the airport, increasing its own size to 35.25 square miles. ** The Italian-language newspaper La Stampa Unita changes its name to The Rochester Press and introduces features in English. ** 130 buses are ordered over the next two years to replace remaining trolley cars. ** Wegmans food markets begin carrying frosted (frozen) foods. ** The Cataract Brewing Company goes out of business. ** The Kendall Houseparty variety show, hosted by Foster Brooks, premieres on radio station WHAM, runs one season. ** The Reynolds Arcade building is air-conditioned. opens in New York.

January
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Essex County signs up 31 new workers from the welfare rolls. ** The Lake Placid draft board calls up several Essex County men.

Jan 1
Various celebrities including actors Jinx Falkenberg, Al Jolson, Martha Raye, Lili Damita, and New York lieutenant governor Charles Poletti, see the New Year in at New York's Stork Club.

Jan 9
Folksinger-activist Joan Baez is born in New York City.

Jan 10
Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace opens in New York City.

Jan 24
Raoul Walsh's film High Sierra opens in New York City.

Jan 29
The body of missing New York longshoreman Peter Panto, who disappeared 18 months ago after agitating for reform of the dock unions, is found in a meadow in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

February
Defense industries will be training 30,000 men in eleven upstate New York cities, according to the Adirondack Record.

Feb 9
Singer-songwriter Carole King is born in Brooklyn.

Mar 11
The Rochester Transit Corporation discontinues streetcar service on the Portland and Dewey Lines. The subway-surface link to Kodak Park is also discontinued.

Mar 13
The Boston Bruins defeat the New York Americans, 8-3, becoming the first hockey team to win the divisional championship four times in a row.

Mar 21
New York's transportation workers return to the job, having won a wage increase.

Mar 31
The Rochester Transit Corporation abandons the last two streetcar lines in the city - The Lake Avenue and Main East lines.

April
Reeves McCullers visits his recuperating wife Carson in Columbus, Georgia. She returns to New York with him.

Apr 1
The first advertising contract with a commercial FM radio station begins with New York City station W71NY.

Apr 9
The Hope-Crosby-Lamour Road picture Road to Zanzibar opens in New York City.

Apr 14
Temperatures in New York City rise to 85 degrees F, highest here for this date.

Apr 15
New York City temperatures go to 87 degrees F, setting a second daily record in a row.

Apr 20
President Franklin Roosevelt and Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King sign the Hyde Park Agreement, to cooperate in the purchase and production of defense equipment.

Apr 25
Rock drummer Chris Augustine, of the group Every Mother's Son, is born in New York City.

May
Carson and Reeves McCullers meet composer David Diamond through mutual friend poet Muriel Rukeyser. The McCullers and Diamond become close friends.

May 1
Citizen Kane opens at New York City's Palace Theater.

May 5
The New York Times wins a Pulitzer Prize for its war reporting.

May 7
Utica discontinues its trolley service.

May 9
Theater television is demonstrated on a 15 by 20-foot screen in New York City.

May 20
Roosevelt establishes the Office of Civilian Defense by executive order. New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia is named director.

May 31
Tobacco Road ends a 3,180 performance run on Broadway.

June
Carson McCullers takes up residence for the summer at the Yaddo Arts Colony in Saratoga, after making the acquaintance of its director Elizabeth Ames. While there she meets novelist Katherine Anne Porter and literary critic Newton Arvin. She works on her novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and two stories, Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland" and "Correspondence". The stories will be published in The New Yorker by the end of the year.

Jun 2
New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig, 37, dies in New York City.

Jun 11
Naturalist-illustrator and Boy Scouts of America co-founder Daniel Carter Beard, 70, dies in Suffern.

Jun 17
Mackenzie King speaks in New York City, pledges Canada's total support to the British war effort.

Jun 23
Rochester librarian and author Lloyd E. Klos graduates from Irondequoit High School.

Jun 29
Polish pianist-statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski, 81, dies in New York City.

Jun 30
Roosevelt establishes the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park.

Jul 1
The first commercial television license is granted to station WNBT, which begins broadcasting. Programming includes a Dodgers-Pirates baseball game from Ebbets Field, the first television commercial (costing Bulova $9), a Lowell Thomas news program, a USO show and a quiz show. Truth or Consequences is simulcast over the radio.

Jul 2
Joe Dimaggio plays his record-breaking forty-fifth straight game with out being struck out.

Jul 3
Sing Sing warden Lewis E. Lawes retires.

August
Carson McCullers' story " The Jockey" is published in The New Yorker.

September
The Defense Plant Corporation, for the U. S, government, authorizes a $58,300,000 loan for Republic Steel to speed the expansion of a mill near Fisherkill, in the Adirondacks. ** Carson McCullers returns to New York City from Yaddo, files for divorce from Reeves.

Sep 7
President Roosevelt's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, dies at Springwood, Hyde Park, at the age of 86.

Sep 23
A time capsule is buried at the New York World's Fair, to be opened in 5,000 years.

Sep 26
Henry King's film A Yank in the RAF opens in New York City.

Sep 29
The Museum of Modern Art acquires Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night".

October
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp at McDonough closes. ** Carson McCullers leaves New York for Columbus, Georgia, her home-town.

Oct 6
The New York Yankees defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the World Series, four games to one.

Nov 4
Fiorello LaGuardia, running on the City Fusion-United City-American Labor Republican ticket, is elected mayor of New York City for a third term, defeating Democrat William O'Dwyer.

Nov 11
New York City's Gowanus Parkway opens.

Nov 26
Rochester's Committee to Aid Colored Draftees holds a benefit to raise money for black soldiers.

Nov 30
The Hudson River ferry across the Tappan Zee, linking Nyack and Tarrytown, makes it's last run.

Dec 2
The world's largest roller skating rink, apart from one in New York City, opens in Peekskill.

Dec 6
The nave of Cram & Ferguson's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City is dedicated.

Dec 7
The Japanese attack U. S. forces at Pearl Harbor.

Dec 8
Journalist Walter Winchell applies for active duty. He will be assigned to press duty in New York.

Dec 18
King Vidor's adaptation of John P. Marquand's H. M. Pulham, Esq. opens at Radio City Music Hall.

City
The New York Aquarium, in lower Manhattan, moves to Coney Island, Brooklyn. ** Benjamin Franklin High School is completed. ** Construction begins on an airport in Idlewild, Queens. ** John O'Donnell leases Gaelic Park from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and runs the stadium, playing field, ballroom and bar, for the Gaelic Athletic Association. ** Cranbrook Academy of Art design head Charles Eames wins a competition of the Museum of Modern Art, with his design of a molded plywood chair. ** Pearl Bailey makes her city debut at the Village Vanguard. ** Marie Saxon Silverman, former musical-comedy dancer and widow of Variety founder Sime Silverman, dies at the age of 37. ** The Arbuckle Brothers' coffee and sugar processing plants at Brooklyn's Jay Street Terminal District are demolished. ** The Church of St. Stephen is renamed Sacred Heart - St. Stephen. ** Embezzler Alexander Douglas Hume (Ralph Marshall Wilby) works as an accountant in the local office of the William T. Knott management company.

State
A new building at the Brockport Normal and Training School is completed. It will eventually become Hartwell Hall. ** Batavia's Holland Land Office Museum is closed due to financial difficulties. The property is given to the Batavia Board of Education which in turn leases it to the Genesee Chapter of the American Red Cross. ** Richard Whitney, former president of the New York Stock Exchange, is released from Sing Sing prison after serving time on a embezzlement charge.  ** Samuel I. Newhouse buys the Syracuse Herald-Standard. ** Geneva's William Smith College acquires the Endicott Estate, extending the campus from Hamilton to St. Clair streets. The Endicott house is renamed McCormick House, honoring Dean Mary Ellen McCormick. ** Erastus Corning 2nd is elected mayor of Albany. ** Farm wages reach a ten-year high toward the end of the year, because of conscription and increased manufacturing employment. ** The National Lead Company builds a $5,000,000 titanium mine at the old Tahawus ironworks. Local efforts are made to limit it's life to the duration of the war.

Rochester
Woodside, 1840 East Avenue home of merchant Silas O. Smith, becomes headquarters of the Rochester Historical Society. ** Imperial Potentate of the Masonic Shrine Esten A. Fletcher dies, in his early seventies. ** Because of the war both car-ferries to Coburg, Ontario, Ontario I and Ontario II, are pressed into use, rather than holding one in reserve. The boat-train to Charlotte is discontinued. ** The Red Wings finish in baseball's first division for farm teams. Stan Musial is one of the new additions to the team.

Jan
Film star Rita Hayworth poses with servicemen in the Stork Club for a photographer fom the New York Daily Miror.

Feb 10
A fire destroys the French liner Normandie, in New York Harbor.

Mar 26
Novelist Erica Mann Jong is born in New York City.

Apr 1
The four-masted schooner Reine Marie Stewart, sailing under Panamanian registry, leaves New York with a mixed American-Scandinavian crew, bound for Africa.

Apr 21
Architect-designer Gustav Stickley, 85, dies in Syracuse.

Apr 24
Singer-actress Barbra Joan Streisand is born in Brooklyn.

Apr 26
Temperatures in New York City rise to 64 degrees F, highest here for this date.

Apr 30
Temperatures in New York City climb to 91 degrees F, highest here for this date.

May
The U. S. Army Pictorial Service takes over the Astoria Studios, in Queens. ** Rochester's Bausch Hall of Science, designed by Waasdorp and Kaebeler, opens to the public on East Avenue, after the museum moves there from Edgerton Park. ** Gas rationing begins in northern New York State.

May 21
The FBI arrests 12 German aliens in Moriah for failing to register.

May 30
Gas rationing begins in northern New York State as ration cards are distributed over the three-day Memorial Day weekend.

June
Jazz trumpeter and vocalist Rowland Bernart "Bunny" Berigan dies from the effects of a severe hemorrhage at the age of 33, in New York City. ** Rochester newspaperman Lloyd Klos receives his draft registration notice. ** A German POW is picked up near the US-Canada border near Rouses Point, wearing a Royal Canadian Air Force uniform. ** Adirondacks towns futilely petition Roosevelt for a relaxation of gas rationing during the summer tourist season. The season will turn out to be a disaster. Three area state campgrounds remain closed due to a lack of visitors.

Jun 27
Eight German saboteurs are arrested by the FBI, after being landed on Long Island by submarine.

July
A parachutist is spotted in the air near Thurman, Local, state, military and FBI searchers fail to find any traces.

Jul 1
Brockport Normal and Training School officially becomes Brockport State Teachers College.

Jul 5
Choreographer Eliot Feld is born in Brooklyn.

Sep 28
New York City's Americans hockey teams is disbanded.

Oct 13
Singer-actor Art Garfunkel is born in Forest Hills.

Oct 22
Actress-singer-Mousketeer Annette Funicello is born in Utica.

November
Lloyd Klos receives a draft registration questionnaire. ** The Rochester Transit Corporation begins using automatic transmission buses.

Nov 6
A fireworks factory explosion in East Rochester kills twelve people; mostly female workers.

Nov 18
Thornton Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth opens, on Broadway.

Nov 19
Representative Gary Leonard Ackerman is born in Brooklyn.

Nov 26
Michael Curtiz's film Casablanca premieres at New York City's Hollywood Theatre.

December
The Jewish cemetery at Saranac Lake and a synagogue at Lake Placid are desecrated by vandals.

Dec 6
Lloyd Klos is directed to report for a blood test.

Dec 10
Lloyd Klos takes his blood test at Rochester's Abraham Lincoln School.

Dec 20
Temperatures in New York City plunge to -4 degrees F, lowest recorded here for this date.

Dec 21
Anthropologist Franz Boas dies, in New York City. ** Lloyd Klos is classified 1-A.

Dec 31
Temperatures in New York City drop to 3 degrees F, lowest here for this date.

City
Pace Institute receives its permanent charter from the city. It is taken over by Robert Scott Pace (president) and C. Richard Pace (secretary), sons of co-founder Homer St. Clair Pace. ** The Post adopts a tabloid format. ** The New York Times begins publishing a Sunday crossword puzzle.** The New York Herald Tribune makes reporter Homer Bigart a war correspondent. ** The USO Lounge of New York City's Pennsylvania Station opens. ** Bella Savitzky (Abzug) earns her A.B. from Hunter College. ** Brooklyn's Gowanus Expressway is built, separating the Gowanus and Red Hook neighborhoods.

State
Anna Dailey, owner of Dailey's Furniture Store in Batavia and sister of concert pianist Monica Dailey, dies. ** The Le Roy House and adjacent school buildings are given to the Le Roy Historical Society. ** The state sells the tug National, formerly used on Oneida Lake. ** Half of the upstate tomato crop rots on canning company loading docks due to a wartime manpower shortage. ** Miss Carrie Oliver, descendent of Dr. Andrew Oliver, leaves his 1852 house to the Village of Penn Yan for use as a museum and public meeting hall. ** The Hooker Chemical and Plastics Company purchases the uncompleted 1894 Love Canal for storing chemical wastes. ** The state converts a wooden vessel into the steel-hulled H. D. (Hydraulic Dredge) #1 and purchases Q. B. #1. ** Rochester pipe organ maker and musician David W. Andrews is born. ** When Canandaigua's Baptist Church is destroyed by fire, its parishioners are invited to hold worship services at the United (Presbyteran) Church. ** 15% of those bagging a deer in the state are women.

Hammondsport
C. Arthur Niver joins the Salvation Army Committee, and is elected to the school board.] ** The Keuka Grape Belt and Hammondsport Herald is combined with the Bath Advocate.

Rochester
The Rochester Press fails. ** The Committee for the Preservation of Christian Democracy is formed to attempt to get the Italian Community's' relatives in Europe to vote for democracy and not for Communism. ** The East Main Street subway car house is converted to a bus barn. The old operation moves to a new location at the General Motors subway loop. ** The Duffy-Powers Building on West Main Street is renamed the Civic Exhibits Building.

© 2004 David Minor / Eagles Byte


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