Over a week ago I attended a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the LA Dodgers. The game honored Vin Scully for his last broadcast as radio announcer for the Dodgers.
Scully had been the baseball radio announcer for the Dodgers from 1950 until now. Sixty-seven years.
I am conscious of this 67 year period for its revolutionary historic importance. Vin Scully himself may not have been aware of much that happened in America around him.
The 1950’s saw a dramatic economic growth around the world under American suzerainty. The U.S. was the undamaged victor of WWII. Therefore the U.S. established airplane routes around the world and made English the language of flight. It also made English the lingua Franca of the commercial world, the world of entertainment, and science-technology. American domestic standards spread around the world for tools, radio, TV, film, auto technology and nearly every other technical usage.
The home and the automobile were changed with washers, driers and automatic transmissions.
1960’s saw the end of large semi-monopoly retail U.S. commerce as manufactures lost control over retail pricing (‘fair trade laws’ were ended) and consumer vitality exploded. The same was true for global tariffs and import barriers which fell dramatically bringing new competition to retail business from Volkswagens to Marimekko to Cost Plus.
By 1961 the historic hereditary elite of the U.S. had lost its cohesion and influence at the top of major corporations.
1970’s was the explosion of the hippie world and associated new ideas of religion (Buddhism, EST, ecology etc), sports (mountain bikes, hang gliding, ski boarding), health (acupuncture, yoga, meditation) music, pleasure drugs, rampant sexual exploration and a radical explosion in foods (bread, tofu, organic and Thai).
1980’s was a dramatic increase in the pace of business with fast delivery from container ships, Fedex, tape messages on telephones, faxes and home video tapes.
1990’s was the beginning of widespread use of computers in business and the revolutionary rise of China and the Mexican border as suppliers of consumer products. Along with cable television and espresso.
2000’s the explosion of the Internet and personal computers.
2010 the smartphone became universal. The rise of a new American citizen’s political rebellion with the Tea Party Patriots.
Vin Scully’s radio career covered a radical change in American life including a replacement of baseball with football as the preeminent national sport.