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What Life Was Like During Vin Scully’s Rookie Season

The country itself was fundamentally different

Tosten Burks
By Tosten BurksSep 26, 2016
Tosten Burks
Tosten Burks is a writer based in Los Angeles
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Vin Scully, baseball’s greatest narrator, called his last game at Dodgers Stadium on Sunday, closing with a division-clinching walk-off homer by Charlie Culberson. As the ball landed in the bleachers, Scully sounded as charmed as everyone by the cinematic ending to his career in Los Angeles: “Would you believe a home run?” After the game, the announcing legend played “Wind Beneath My Wings” over the loudspeakers to a standing ovation.

Scully, who calls the final game of his 67-year career this upcoming Sunday in San Francisco, joined the Dodgers when the club still played in Brooklyn. The year was 1950. The world was a far different place. Scully’s time in the booth, starting with a 9-1 loss to the Del Ennis-led Philadelphia Phillies, outlasted apartheid, the Cold War, and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts column, which launched the same year. These are some other facts about that fateful time.

In 1950…

• The U.S. consisted of 48 states

• The country’s population was 151 million

• Major League Baseball consisted of 16 teams

• Five MLB teams employed a black player

• 95 percent of American households owned radio receivers

• 9 percent of American households owned a television set

• Minimum wage was 75 cents per hour

• One dozen eggs cost 49 cents

• A Dodgers game ticket cost $1.66

• The highest grossing movie was “King Solomon’s Mines”

• A movie ticket cost 37 cents

• The most popular song was The Weavers’ “Goodnight, Irene”

• A 10” record cost $2.85

• A gallon of gas cost 18 cents

• Plymouth discontinued the woodie station wagon

• President Truman entered the Korean War

• Hillary Clinton turned three years old

• Donald Trump turned four years old

• The United Nations turned five years old

• Life expectancy in the U.S. was 68.2 years

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