Late last week, it was announced that legendary Los Angeles Dodgers play-by-play man Vin Scully would return for another season with the club, marking his 67th campaign in the broadcast booth.

It’s the type of number that feels like it has to be a typo. After all, there are 55 countries on this planet in which the average life expectancy is below that total.

What was the world like when Scully took over as the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950? A list of 12 facts from that year:

1. The president was Harry S. Truman, who less than five years earlier dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of World War II.

2. Three-year veteran Jackie Robinson was coming off his first all-star appearance. Players on only four teams had broken the color barrier. Meanwhile, Ted Williams was the reigning American League MVP.

3. This was the year CBS introduced color television on an experimental basis, but it wasn’t used widely until later in the decade. When Scully first went on the air, there were 1.5 million television sets in America. One year later, that number skyrocketed to 15 million, and is now well above 250 million.

4. The world’s population was about 2.5 billion, a number that has now nearly tripled.

5. There were 48 states in the union. Scully beat Alaska and Hawaii by nearly a decade.

6. Nobody had heard of Rosa Parks, Malcolm Little (soon-to-be Malcolm X) or Martin Luther King Jr.

7. We were still a year away from using nuclear power to produce electricity for households, and still a couple months away from the beginning of the Korean War.

8. A gallon of gas cost 18 cents, a new house cost $8,500 and the average income was $3,200.

9. While John Wayne was the top-grossing Hollywood star, a 26-year-old Marlon Brando made his feature film debut in The Men.

10. Hillary Clinton was 2 years old, while George W. Bush and Donald Trump were 3. Not only had Barack Obama not been born, but his mother, Ann Dunham, was 7 years old. Meanwhile, an 86-year-old William Randolph Hearst and a 71-year-old Albert Einstein were still kicking, and John F. Kennedy was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts’s 11th district.

11. Scully called his first game five days before the Minneapolis Lakers were crowned the first-ever NBA champions. The fledgling league lost six of its 17 initial teams teams before its second season started the following fall.

12. James Dean was still several months away from making his first-ever television appearance, which took place in this Pepsi commercial:

(Photo from Getty Images via Sports Illustrated)

About Brad Gagnon

Brad Gagnon has been passionate about both sports and mass media since he was in diapers -- a passion that won't die until he's in them again. Based in Toronto, he's worked as a national NFL blog editor at theScore.com, a producer and writer at theScore Television Network and a host, reporter and play-by-play voice at Rogers TV. His work has also appeared at CBSSports.com, Deadspin, FoxSports.com, The Guardian, The Hockey News and elsewhere at Comeback Media, but his day gig has him covering the NFL nationally for Bleacher Report.

Comments are closed.