1938 History, Trivia and Fun Facts

Quick Facts from 1938:

• World Changing Event: First appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1 (cover-dated June).
• Influential Songs include: Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing) by Benny Goodman
• The Movies to Watch include The Adventures of Robin Hood, You Can’t Take It With You, Test Pilot, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Angels with Dirty Faces, Boys Town, Room Service and The Terror of Tiny Town
• The Most Famous Person in America was probably Clark Gable
• Notable books include: Our Town: A Play by Thornton Wilder
• Price of 24 oz of salt in 1938: 3 cents
• The March of Dimes was established as a foundation to combat infant polio.
• The Funny Duo were: Abbot & Costello
• The Conversation: Orson Welles’s radio broadcast War of the Worlds caused national hysteria.

Firsts, Inventions, and Wonders:
The Addams Family started as single-panel comics in The New Yorker, in 1938.

Samsung was formed in 1938 as a company that sold noodles.

The chocolate chip cookie was ‘invented’ by Ruth Graves Wakefield in 1938 as a treat for those who stayed at her tourist lodge, the Toll House Inn.

John Deering agreed to have himself monitored on an electrocardiogram as he was executed to see the effects on his heart.

Only 2 games in NFL history have ended with a score of 2-0, the first was the Packers over the Bears in 1932, the second was the Bears over the Packers in 1938.

1938’s Bringing Up Baby was the first film to use the word ‘gay’ to mean homosexual. In one scene Cary Grant was wearing a lady’s negligee. When asked about it he responds, “Because I just went gay”. At the time, most audiences thought it meant he was “being carefree”.

The Coelacanth, a prehistoric fish more related to reptiles and mammals than modern fish, was thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago until fishermen caught one in 1938.

The term “Gaslighting” comes from a 1938 stage play (and 1944 film) called Gas Light in which a husband tries to make his wife think she’s going insane through mental manipulation.

The fastest speed ever achieved on the German Autobahn was 268mph (432kph) in a Mercedes-Benz W125, in 1938.

Sandy Point Island in Rhode Island did not exist prior to the Hurricane of 1938.

Boardgame Scrabble was created in 1938 but did not become popular until 1952 when the president of Macy’s played it while on vacation. Surprised to find Macy’s did not carry it, he placed a large order and within two years four million games were sold.

Pop Culture News: 
Helen Hulick, a Kindergarten teacher who witnessed a burglary, was jailed for five days because she wore a pair of slacks for the second time, after being warned and rescheduled by the court. “I’ll come back in slacks and if he puts me in jail, I hope it will help to free women forever of anti-slackism.”

American auto-maker, Henry Ford, received Germany’s highest honor for a non-German, The Order of the German Eagle, along with a personal note from Adolf Hitler.

The concept of a Diamond engagement ring started in 1938 as an advertising campaign to shore up sagging sales for the De Beers Diamond Group.

US Assistant Secretary of the Interior ended the Cherry Tree Rebellion Protest in Washington DC in 1938 by serving the 150 women protesters free “never-ending cups of coffee”. A big bathroom break ended the protest.

The screenplay for John Carpenter’s The Thing was based on a 1938 science-fiction novella entitled Who Goes There? by Don A. Stuart (John W. Campbell, Jr.). The character names and main plot points are almost identical, and the creature is referred to as “the Thing” within the story.

National Donut Day (June 1) was created by the Salvation Army in 1938 to honor the “Doughnut Dollies”, women volunteers who served donuts to soldiers in France during WWI.

George Bernard Shaw is the only person to win a Nobel Prize AND an Oscar. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and an Oscar for Pygmalion in 1938.

Walt Disney won a special Oscar in 1938 for Snow White that had one regular-sized statuette and seven miniature Oscars.

In The Adventures of Robin Hood, the producers wanted a realistic look when people were killed by arrows. Instead of SFX or editing tricks, they just hired an expert archer to shoot extras wearing padding. Extras were paid $150 each time they were shot.

British Hero John Logie Bard invented color television in London’s West End.

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits confectionery products which contain a “non-nutritive object”, unless the non-nutritive object has functional value. Essentially, the Act bans “the sale of any candy that has embedded in it a toy or trinket”

Tokyo was scheduled to host the 1940 Olympics. In 1938, the Japanese rejected hosting the games because they saw the Olympics and its pacifist values as “an effete form of European culture”.

Assassin’s Creed is based on a 1938 Slovenian novel, Alamut by Vladimir Bartol.

After the real von Trapp family left Austria in 1938, the Nazis used their abandoned home as Heinrich Himmler’s headquarters.

The BBC broadcast its first multi-episode television show, a crime drama called Telecrime, in 1938. After five episodes, the show went on a seven-year hiatus due to WWII and resumed in 1946, when the remaining 12 episodes were broadcast.