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What Life Was Like During Vin Scully’s Rookie Season

The country itself was fundamentally different

 Tosten Burks
09.26.16

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\n

• 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\n

• A Dodgers game ticket cost $1.66\n

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

• A movie ticket cost 37 cents\n

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

• A 10” record cost $2.85\n

• A gallon of gas cost 18 cents\n

• Plymouth discontinued the woodie station wagon\n

• President Truman entered the Korean War\n

• 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\n

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