I am a little late this week with my pop culture history blog, but let’s see what happened during the week of April 8th, 1967.
The 39th annual Academy Awards ceremony was held this week. Who were the big winners? Well, A Man for All Seasons, which starred Paul Scofield (who just died on March 18, 2008), took home Best Picture. Liz Taylor’s performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won her a second Oscar. Walter Matthau won Best Supporting Actor for The Fortune Cookie and Sandy Dennis won Best Supporting Actress for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. If you remember 1967, you will probably cringe when I tell you Born Free won Best Song and Best Original Music Score. I haven’t heard that song in at least 10 years, but the lyrics “Born free, as free as the wind blows…” is still stuck in my mind. Oh yeah, the award ceremony itself was a hit – it drew in 65 million viewers.
What was on television? If you tuned into CBS on Tuesday night, you could watch “Dick Van Dyke” and “Petticoat Junction.” If you flipped over to ABC, you could catch “The Invaders” and that risqué nighttime soap, “Peyton Place.” If you wanted to see “Lost in Space,” “Beverly Hillbillies,” or “Green Acres,” you would have to tune into CBS on Wednesday nights.
Music was changing. The hippie movement hadn’t quite officially ushered in the Summer of Love, but, the airwaves were alive with new sounds. The British Invasion was in full swing and the Motown Sound was heating up. Turn on the radio and you could hear the Turtles singing “Happy Together,” the Mamas & the Papas singing “Dedicated to the One I Love,” my personal favorite made-up television band, The Monkees singing “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” the Four Tops singing “Bernadette,” the Rolling Stones singing “Ruby Tuesday” and the Beatles singing “Penny Lane.”
Janice Dickinson likes to say she was the first supermodel, but I remember another little blonde English pixie from the 60s – Twiggy. She was making it big as a model in 1967 although she was only 5’6”.
What was going on in the national news? Dr. Martin Luther King wanted to merge the civil rights movement with the peace movements. However, the NAACP said it would be a mistake for the civil rights movement to align itself with the war protesters. Large numbers of protesters march against the Vietnam War in San Francisco and New York City this week.
In a deja vu moment, there was a 13-day strike against the three major networks. The final settlement was announced only three hours before the Academy Award ceremonies were to be aired. If it had not been settled, the ceremonies would have been held, but not televised.