Saving their comic routines for strong-lead games, the Globetrotters continued serious ball play. From this point on, the Globetrotters toured internationally and would also, throughout the 50s, continuously compete against NBA teams. They played in the Allied section of Berlin to an enthusiastic crowd. In following years they played for three different popes, for the Hollywood cameras during the making of the film "The Harlem Globetrotters," on the Ed Sullivan show and for sold-out crowds in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
In , they won their ninth-straight World Series of Basketball, and in they achieved their 7,th career game and finished the season undefeated. They had risen to become one of the finest basketball teams in the world.
A turning point came when the NBA broke their "whites only" ruling in , and began to draft black players. This made it more difficult for Saperstein to keep the competitive edge in the Globetrotters, because many black players began to receive flashy offers from the NBA. Nonetheless, by the time owner Abe Saperstein passed away in , the Globetrotters had played 8, games, in more than 1, cities and 82 foreign countries. They were known as serious athletes, but their image was evolving towards an entertainment troupe and national icon.
In , the Globetrotters signed the first woman to play official basketball with men, Olympic gold medalist Lynette Woodard. Today there are at least three different Harlem Globetrotters teams touring the country. Congress sets January 7, as the date by which states are required to choose electors for the country's first-ever presidential election. A month later, on February 4, George Washington was elected president by state electors and sworn into office on April 30, The confessed Colorado cannibal Alferd Packer is released from prison on parole after serving 18 years.
One of the ragged legions of gold and silver prospectors who combed the Rocky Mountains searching for fortune in the s, Alferd Packer also supplemented his meager income Although at the time of her death in , Hurston had published more books than any other Black woman in America, she was unable to capture a mainstream audience in her lifetime, and A massive mine explosion leaves nearly dead in Krebs, Oklahoma, on January 7, Southeastern Oklahoma was a prime location for mining at Six-year-old Suzanne Degnan is kidnapped from her home in an affluent Chicago neighborhood.
Just six days after the fall of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, U. Despite fears that Fidel Castro, whose rebel army helped to overthrow Batista, might have communist leanings, the U. Truman tells the world that that the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb. It was just three years earlier on January 31, , that Truman publicly announced that had directed the Atomic Energy Live TV.
This Day In History. Their pioneering history and considerable athletic skill over the years was honored in , when they were inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Some say the team was doing poorly and asked him to coach. Others say they needed a white man to book games around the Midwest.
In any case, Saperstein likely joined them in late , the group now ready to hit the road and try to make a living as barnstorming basketball pros. On January 7, , Saperstein and his team piled into Abe's jalopy. They were ready for their first road trip. For their first game they drove 50 miles west to the small town of Hinckley, Illinois, and took on the Hinckley Merchants team. Most written histories about the Globetrotters claim that Saperstein's team won that first game.
But that's not how former Hinckley resident Marvel Loring remembers it. She was at that first game. It was much more than they would make most nights, often satisfied if they could afford a sandwich on the way to the next town. The team would play anywhere it could find a willing opponent and a paying crowd; not an easy combination to put together in those days. They took a new name, the "Savoy Big Five.
Stars including Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington graced the stage. Club management hired the basketball team as an added attraction. In the spring of , after a dispute over money, Saperstein and some of the players left the Savoy and went back to barnstorming. Some of this jibes with the Globetrotters "official" history, some of it does not.
We only revised their history when we were fairly certain we had information to directly contradict the "official" story. When we couldn't prove the story wrong, we went with the widely reported version. So in the end, does it really matter? Is it important that scores of sources say that the Harlem Globetrotters started play in as the Savoy Big Five when, in fact, there was no "Savoy" until late? I guess that's up to the individual reader of history.
For our program, I simply stumbled upon this information while looking for some newspaper articles about the Savoy Big Five.
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