“The Man Trap,” the first episode of a new television series on NBC, debuted 50 years ago tonight. Star Trek is a half-century old today.

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Michelangelo unveiled his masterpiece, the 17-foot-tall statue of David, on this date in 1504. (Close-up photo above.)
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Charles Hardin Holley was born 80 years ago today in Lubbock, Texas.

His family nicknamed him Buddy. The Holley family was a music-loving one, and Buddy was participating in talent shows and contests before he was in high school. Within a year of graduating from high school, he was signed to his first recording contract, with Decca. His name was misspelled by Decca’s agent on the paperwork: Buddy Holly.

That first contract yielded very little for either Buddy Holly or Decca: he did not like having a producer oversee operations, even though that producer was one, Owen Bradley, whose eventual reputation was made molding singer-songwriters, and no hits resulted. Decca fired him within months, but it enforced the terms of his contract: he could not re-record his songs with any other label for the next five years.

Thus, his subsequent recordings, one of them a re-recording of a song Decca rejected titled “That’ll Be the Day,” were released under the name of his new band, the Crickets. But they were all written or co-written by Buddy Holly. By 1957, he was a star.
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“If Clarence Saunders lives long enough, Memphis will become the most beautiful city in the world just with the things Saunders built and lost.”—Ernie Pyle

Perhaps someone else would have dreamed up and built the ideas that Clarence Saunders built, but Saunders built them. If you will be shopping for tonight’s dinner at a grocery store today, you have Clarence Saunders to thank for several things you possibly take for granted: shopping for yourself at a grocery store, for one.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the opening of Saunders’ greatest achievement, the first ever self-service grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly (the name was his coinage and he never explained it), which is a grocery store chain that is still in business throughout the American South. The first store (a photo from inside it is above) was located at 79 Jefferson Street in Memphis, Tennessee, and a historical marker sits there to this day.
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