Monday, August 03, 2020

This Week in Television History: August 2020 PART I



August 3, 1940
Actor Martin Sheen is born Ramon Estevez in Dayton, Ohio. 
The son of a Spanish immigrant, Sheen was the seventh of 10 children. He moved to New York after high school and began pursuing an acting career while working as a janitor, car washer, and messenger. After several successful Broadway roles, he appeared in his first film, The Incident, in 1967. His film and TV career has included numerous political roles, most recently as fictional U.S. president Josiah Bartlett on the popular TV show The West Wing. Previously, he played Robert Kennedy in the TV movie The Missiles of October (1974), John F. Kennedy in the miniseries Kennedy (1983), and the White House chief of staff in The American President (1995). Sheen is the father of film stars Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen.
August 9, 1945
The first network television broadcast occurred in Washington, DC. The program announced the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. 

Alan E. Ruiter, biographer of Allen B. DuMont, and Dr. Thomas T. Goldsmith, one of Dr. DuMont's early colleagues, have both reported that the first DuMont network telecast occurred on August 9, 1945, when DuMont's New York and Washington TV stations were linked via coaxial cable for an announcement concerning the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Ruiter writes, however, that DuMont was first to be officially "licensed" as a television network.

To quote the Bicentennial Minute, "And that's the way it was".


Stay Tuned


Tony Figueroa

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