What in the world happened during August 1946?
COFCO’s first year was certainly a time of other notable firsts.
During July 1946, the first atomic bomb dropped.
August was a little less explosive, but certainly had its share of famous firsts, including the establishment of the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the first test of an airplane ejection seat and the first radar speed test of a baseball pitch!
Here are the details of those firsts along with some other interesting things from August 1946:
- The Fulbright Scholarship program was created.
- Santa Claus Land, credited as the first “theme park” for coordinating amusement park rides with a Christmas time theme, was opened by Louis Koch in Santa Claus, Indiana. Now operating as Holiday World, the park preceded Disneyland by nine years. (Fun fact: One of COFCO’s major manufacturing partners, National Office Furniture, has its headquarters on Christmas Blvd. in Santa Claus, IN!)
- Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta, Ohio, who on July 20, 1969, would be the first man to walk on the moon earned his student pilot’s certificate on his 16th birthday, learning on an Aeronca Champion airplane
- Martin Luther King, Jr., a 17-year-old junior at Morehouse College, began a lifelong crusade against racial prejudice, with the publication of a letter in the Atlanta Constitution, in response to an editorial. His father later remarked that the letter was the first “indication that Martin was headed for greatness”
- Army Air Force First Sergeant Lawrence Lambert became first person in United States to test an ejection seat
- Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States (term 1993–2001), was born William Jefferson Blythe III, at 8:51 a.m. in Hope, Arkansas
- Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians became the first Major League Baseball pitcher to have the speed of his throw measured by radar, with a U.S. Army “lumiline chronograph” clocking him at 98.6 mph at a game in Washington, D.C. against the Senators. Feller’s Indians lost that game 5-4
- Frontier guards at Khist-Tepe in the Kunduz Province of Afghanistan were digging a foundation for a cattle shed and struck a buried vase containing 626 ancient Greek silver coins that had been buried 2000 years earlier
- Norma Jean Baker agreed to a suggestion by Ben Lyon, talent manager at 20th Century Fox signing a contract for the first time with her new stage name. Borrowing the names of actress Marilyn Miller, and her mother, Gladys Monroe Baker, she became Marilyn Monroe
- A milestone in vascular surgery was achieved when Portuguese surgeon João Cid dos Santos performed the removal of plaque from an artery, a procedure now referred to as an endarterectomy
