Dick Silver from Coral Gables, Florida: “I own
my own country”
Silver and
his brother claimed a small coral reef in international waters about twelve
miles off the coast of Miami, and have documentation from the United States,
the United Nations and The Hague in support.
Silver has hopes of shoring up the island, which in its current state is
submerged during high tides. Silver’s
project, which would have been called, appropriately, Silver Island, was one of at least three rival efforts to “colonize” the same stretch of reef, primarily for
commercial purposes. The one-two punch
of unfavorable court rulings and the destruction caused by Hurricane Betsy in
September 1965 would render all the projects untenable.
Mr. X and Mr. Y are standing in front of a
draped stand, under which is: “The Davis Cup (for tennis)…We just won it back
for the United States”
Chuck McKinley and Dennis Ralston were
the key members of an American team that won the Cup last December for the
first time since 1958. Australia had won
the previous four years, and would win the four following years as well. The Davis Cup competition began in 1900 as a
match between US and UK players, and remains the preeminent international team
event in men’s tennis. Today more than a
hundred nations compete annually for a spot in the 16-team “World Group.” Both McKinley and Ralston would go on to have
illustrious careers (McKinley also won Wimbledon in 1963), and both have been
inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Also on the American team that year was
future legend Arthur Ashe.
Special guest Bobby Darin plays a brief
recording of the Irving Berlin standard “All By Myself” (1921) featuring Darin
and an unknown female vocalist: “The girl singing on that record is me!...I
sang both parts”
In an era
before Auto-Tune and other computerized methods for changing tone, Darin
recorded the second part more slowly, and the recording was played back at a
faster speed to match the first track, but at a higher pitch. Darin brings recordings by other artists
(Paul Anka, Ethel Merman, Eartha Kitt and even Bill Cullen!) with their pitch
similarly adjusted. Two engineers on
stage, looking slightly like today’s modern club DJs, manipulate the records
for the desired effect. Though
unidentified, one appears to be longtime CBS sound man Orville White. The most famous early examples of this sort
of audio trickery are probably the original recordings of David Seville and the
Chipmunks, whose first songs were released in 1958.
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