Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness on 1956 Episode of I’ve Got a Secret | Hacker News Reader

Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness on 1956 Episode of I’ve Got a Secret

laughingsquid.com

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This is amazing, I had never even connected the two points of data in such a way as to realize that someone alive when Lincoln was president would still be alive when TV is on the market.

Aside from the intense tobacco ads (the big banner and the participation gift), I find it interesting that they were playing for the amount of $80.

Accounting for inflation, that's around $650 in today's dollars. Meanwhile these days, game shows play for a top prize usually around $10k to $1mil per episode. I guess in 1956, TV itself was enough to keep people entertained and tuned in. I wonder if 50 years from now, they'll be playing for people's lives or something equally crazy to keep jaded video audiences tuned in.

Actually, there are still plenty of gameshows around where people play for (generally) sub-thousand dollar prizes. Cash Cab (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_Cab) comes to mind. $50 payouts on that show are actually surprisingly common, although that is considered doing poorly.

I suspect that the perception of the cash prize size is related to the perceived commitment the contestant has to put forward. So they are fairly large on shows the contestant has to go out of their way to be a part of, but low on shows where the contestant just happens to "stumble upon" the contest.

That's a very good point, and Cash Cab is sweet. Also, I was under the impression that the people guessing in that gameshow were celebrities. Are there any game-shows today that play for sub-thousand-dollar prizes with celebrities?

It's interesting to note links to historical events by very young observers.

The last of the civil war widows passed away only a few years ago (2008). As young women, they married octogenarian civil war veterans - and continued receiving the widow's pension for decades...

http://www.radiodiaries.org/transcripts/OtherDocs/civilwar.h...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/national/16widow.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maudie_Hopkins

I'm reminded of this:

"Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had served on the bench into the nineteen-thirties, had in his long lifetime shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and also our new incumbent, John F. Kennedy."

"Old Country" by Roger Angell. The New Yorker; September 11, 2006

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911ta_talk_an...

He lived long enough into the era where his speech or interview could have been filmed. I couldn't find anything on YouTube; perhaps he was too frail by the 1930's to be doing such things.

I like finding these old film clips featuring performances from ancient legends.

Thomas Edison (born 1847) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftii6D68Veo&feature=relat...

Sir Ian Hamilton (born 1853) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlRruY4WRjw

President John Tyler has a living grandson:

http://www.who2.com/blog/2009/03/wait-john-tylers-grandson-i...

I know this is what is referred to in Midnight in Paris as "Golden Age Thinking," but I can't fight the feeling when I see television programs and interviews in the 50s and 60s that the level of "popular" discourse was much higher then than it is now. That is, interviewees of all ages are much more well spoken, articulate, and informed. I can't imagine the panel of American Idol judges (much less the audience) being able to drill down so quickly to a historical event like that, or even care to take a serious crack at it. Am I off?

Ex, a 60s era CBS documentary on rock--fair from and to both sides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSq1ca__cRA

Did you notice the last word spoken by the host Garry Moore was "withal", meaning "nevertheless". Can you imagine a game show host using the word today?

Yes. Or rather, the temporally-updated equivalent. Withal sounds erudite because now it's dead, and a sign of sophistication to know the word at all. Much less so then, albeit perhaps not zero.

The problem with some modern game shows isn't vocabulary. It isn't even necessarily spectacle qua spectacle, because if they could have done it and afforded it in the 50s their shows would have been bigger, too. Humans haven't changed in the past 60 years. The problem with modern game shows is something more like they have more resources than they know what to do with, competing against ten other shows with the same "problem". I'm not convinced there's a good argument for modern people being more relatively degenerate than people of old... the set of which, I would remind you, really does include actual, factual people who considered combat to the death fit entertainment.

I can't imagine anyone using that word today. Perhaps "withal" was in wider general use in that time period?

It reminds me of the UK panel shows, a format that has died off here.

"But apart from that, Mr Seymour, how was the play?"

I think Matt Damon has a time machine.

Thank you for noticing! My girlfriend and I could not believe our eyes when we saw that first questioner.

Ha! First thing I noticed as well...

By the way, am I the only one that thinks that this belongs on reddit instead of hn?

It's interesting. HN posts don't have to be solely about programming or startups. Anything that gets you thinking is fair game.

The Matt Damon looking guy is fifties game show fixture Bill Cullen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cullen

and he looks less Matt Damonish in higher resolution.

He looks more like Drew Carey at that resolution.

On a related note, the last surviving Civil War veteran (though he never saw combat) also died in 1956.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Woolson

Interestingly, the last widow of a Civil War veteran died only three years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maudie_Hopkins

It's easy to forget the United States is "only" 235 years old. Columbus sailed over TWICE as long ago.

Some countries would laugh at that http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+oldest+countries

(added: actually, wait a sec, Wolfram is very wrong, Portugal Italy and Spain all existed when Columbus first sailed)

Mechanical steam power, automobiles, airflight, television, computers and landing on the moon was all accomplished in that relatively tiny timeframe of US existence.

Italy did not exist then as a country. It was unified by Garibaldi in 1861. Portugal is older, Spain, depends how you count it, but it was Castile and Aragon until 1469, and Granada was reconquered in 1492...

Apart from newly formed countries like USA, it can be a bit hard to define exactly when a country was formed. China can arguably be claimed to be many thousand years old, even if their current constitution only dates back to 1949.

Wow, that's truly fascinating. Seeing that 5 minute clip gives me a much better feeling for how long ago Lincoln's death really was. Deeply understanding timelines was always my weakness when it came to history, which is part of why high school history was thoroughly boring to me. Now I can saw, when my parents were 5, they saw a really old guy on TV who was 5 when he saw Lincoln shot. A lot more digestible than 1865 or 146 years ago.

Hey, just a quick plug:

I run a web app called Preceden [1], which specializes in creating multilayered timelines. You could easily use it to plot the significant events in your life and anyone else's to see how they overlap. Lots of teachers use it to solve the same problem you have had; visualizing time can be very difficult without the right tools.

[1] http://www.preceden.com

Edit: Just for fun, here's a timeline of the Civil War, Mr Seymour's life, the I've Got a Secret Episode, and today's date using Preceden:

http://preceden.com/timelines/15108-i-ve-got-a-secret---linc...

Very cool tool. But it appears that the "article appears on Hacker News" is cut off.

Thanks -- FYI you can scroll over by dragging the timeline around.

Edit: Added a 25 year zoom level to the timelines, which makes this timeline (and I'm sure others) fit better.

Yesterday I had a relevant epiphany:

I'm 43, about halfway thru my lifespan of perhaps 86. I'll have lived about 1% of recorded history.

Human history doesn't seem very long now.

We are a very young species

If you are older than 23, you have been around for more than 10% of the US's history since the constitution was ratified. Pretty crazy to think about.

The oldest living American has been around for more than 50% of it.

The fact that I could see an eyewitness to that event was overshadowed by the huge cigarette ads. It reminds me of the current state of online ads, only it's huge banners for electronic cigarettes instead.

Maybe the man's real secret was: "I am a giant Winston ad!"

i'm currently reading the master switch (http://amzn.to/qvgGrx) which talks about how early radio and tv were forbidden to have commercials because they were supposed to be public services, but that programs could be sponsored like you see in the video. in early radio, companies weren't allowed to directly mention their products, so for example, gillette's first radio ad was a lecture on the history of beards.

after seeing that video, i much prefer commercials to that style of sponsored programming. when a commercial comes on, you can get up and do something else, change the channel, or mute it. with sponsored programs, everything is so integrated that it makes it hard to ignore.

Non minified and non link code to the above amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003F3PKTK/

Wow, this is amazing. I can't help but want to ask him questions -- what was DC like during and after the war? How did Marylanders view the assassination (after all, Booth hid out in MD for most of his run.) Did the huge numbers of Union troops make a lasting impact on DC? Did his family know people on both sides of the war? Did he see any of the heroes from war later on in his life? Attend a speech they made or a book-signing? Did he see Grant on any of his famous carriage rides through the city? Know anybody who had personally spoken with any of the presidents? (Back then you could just show up at the WH and ask for an audience.) What did he think of the many civil war reunions and joint parades that previous fighters from both sides participated in?

You know, there's a finite number of these questions, and they can be broken down into an ontology and recorded. You could even make such and information system interactive, and 3D. It's a shame we don't have startups that could record and organize this same type of information from present-day folks who witnessed history -- like those that saw the D-Day invasion, or the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. We are losing precious pieces of our past, and we have tech that could make a big difference here. We spend more time worrying about polygon counts on shooters and less time about capturing these incredible stories that are disappearing all around us.

Similar to this idea, Steven Spielberg established a foundation called the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to interview holocaust and warcrime survivors. According to their about page, they've done over 52,000 video testimonials so far.

You can check it out on the University of Southern California's website here: http://dornsife.usc.edu/vhi/

Sounds sort of like StoryCorps: http://storycorps.org/

It seems like he would not have been old enough to even be able to answer those first few questions.

On that note, I wonder how many of these questions actually have been asked and documented of survivors of the time, between all the books and news articles that have been written on the subject.

In fact, I found a book on this very subject, which according to the index, actually references Samuel Seymour's article in the American Weekly they mentioned in the video.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Gc6BmV3D1bMC&lpg=PA196&...

Its amazing we actually got to see an eyewitness of something this historical on tv. The fact that tech had evolved this fast in this man's 96 years of life is amazing in itself. Just imagine going from a time where you didn't have electricity in your home to having a camera recording you. The cigarette ads are irrelevant.

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