Today In History

The NY Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, cross-town rivals, had tied for first place at the end of the 1951 season and were now knotted at 1 game apiece in their best of three tie-breaker series to determine the NL pennant. The Dodgers led the deciding game 4-1 entering the bottom of the ninth inning. In the bottom of the ninth, three of the first four Giants got base hits off Dodgers’ pitcher Don Newcombe, cutting the Dodgers’ lead to 4-2. With one out and runners on 2nd and 3rd base, the Dodgers were just two outs from the pennant when Ralph Branca relieved Newcombe to face the Giants’ Bobby Thomson. Thomson had hit a career-best 32 home runs that season with 101 RBIs, and had two hits already in this game. Should the Dodgers walk him to set up a possible game-ending double play with twenty year-old rookie Willie Mays on deck? …or should they follow standard baseball strategy and not intentionally put the winning run on base? Dodger manager Chuck Dressen elected to pitch to Thomson, and on the 0-1 pitch from Branca, Thomson hit a dramatic pennant-winning 3-run home run, forever known as the “Shot Heard Around the World.” As Bobby Thomson jubilantly circled the bases, Giants’ play-by-play radio announcer Russ Hodges gleefully and repeatedly proclaimed “The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant!”.

On a typical cold and foggy May morning, an estimated 200,000 people came to celebrate the pedestrian opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. Autos will be allowed to cross at a later date. By 6am, the starting hour of Pedestrians Day, 18,000 people were waiting to cross the span from both the San Francisco and the Marin sides. When the hour struck, foghorns gave great blasts, the toll gates opened and the young and eager, mostly high school students -- ran or walked out onto the bridge. During the day, thousands of people competed to be the first to cross the bridge in some unique manner. Donald Bryan, a sprinter from San Francisco Junior College, was the first person to cross the entire span. People roller-skated, walked on stilts, walked backwards, walked dogs and cats, tap-danced, rode on unicycles, played harmonicas and tubas, all setting first-time records. That evening there was spectacular production, "The Span of Gold", a musical pageant of California history. "Photo courtesy of Golden Gate Bridge, www.goldengatebridge.org"