November 28 · This Day in America
Inside a Nashville insurance building, a Memphis announcer named George D. Hay sits a champion fiddler at a single microphone. Uncle Jimmy Thompson is seventy-seven years old and knows hundreds of tunes by heart. Hay lets him play. For two solid hours the old man saws away at the breakdowns and reels of the Tennessee hills, and listeners across the dark countryside lean toward their radio sets and hear their own music coming back at them. There is no script and no studio audience — just a barn dance pushed out over the airwaves of WSM. Two years later Hay names it the Grand Ole Opry, almost as a joke, after the grand opera that aired before it. It never stops. A century later it is the longest-running radio show in the world, and the front porch of American country music. It started with one fiddle and an old man who would not quit.
Source: www.opry.com
Also on this day · 1964
An Atlas rocket lifts off from Cape Kennedy carrying a small spacecraft toward a planet no one had ever truly seen. Mariner 4 will cruise 228 days through the dark, then sweep past Mars in the summer of 1965 and send home 21 grainy photographs — the first close pictures of another world. A cratered, silent place, not the canals dreamers imagined. The age of planetary exploration begins on this launch pad.
Source: www.nasa.gov