March 4, 1925: The Inauguration of Calvin Coolidge

March 4, 1925, 100 years ago: Calvin Coolidge, who became the 30th President of the United States upon the death of Warren Harding in 1923, and won a full term of his own in 1924, is sworn in as President. Charles G. Dawes, a former U.S. Ambassador to Britain, is sworn in as Vice President.

A 52-year-old native of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, and Governor of Massachusetts when he was elected Vice President in 1920, he is sworn in on the West Front of the Capitol Building, by the Chief Justice, himself a former President, William Howard Taft.

This was the 1st time that a former President swore in an incoming President. In spite of this, Taft goofed on the Oath of Office: Instead of asking Coolidge to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," it came out, "protect, preserve and defend." Four years later, for Herbert Hoover, Taft goofed again, making it "preserve, and maintain, and defend…"

His reputation as "Silent Cal" led to a story that two women at a White House party made a bet, and one walked up to Coolidge and said, "I made a bet with my friend that I could get you to say at least three words to me," and Coolidge said, "You lose." Belying this reputation, this speech was, and remains, the 6th-longest Inaugural Address of any President. His Inaugural Address is the 1st to be broadcast on radio. Unfortunately, no sound recording of the Address survives.

The Address is not especially memorable. He closes by saying, "America seeks no earthly empire built on blood and force. No ambition, no temptation, lures her to thought of foreign dominions. The legions which she sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the cross. The higher state to which she seeks the allegiance of all mankind is not of human, but of divine origin. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favor of Almighty God."

The theme of his 1924 election campaign was "Keep Cool with Coolidge"; alternately, "Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge." The scandals of the late President Harding were forgotten: Coolidge was a model of propriety. And the country enjoyed "Coolidge Prosperity," and enjoyed an isolationist foreign policy: There were no international entanglements during his time in office.

On vacation in the Summer of 1927, he told the press, "I do not choose to run for President in 1928." Maybe he saw the writing on the wall, that an economic crash was coming. Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, was elected, and was left holding the bag for the Crash of 1929. Coolidge escaped blame for the Great Depression.

He died on January 5, 1933, 2 months before his 2nd full term, had he sought it and won it, would have ended. He remains the modern model for a boring President: When told he had died, theater critic Dorothy Parker said, "How can you tell?"

March 4, 1825: The Inauguration of John Quincy Adams

March 4, 1825, 200 years ago: John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, the 2nd President of the United States, is Inaugurated as the 6th President of the United States, in the House of Representatives Chamber of the U.S. Capitol Building.

John C. Calhoun, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of War, is sworn in as Vice President.

Certainly, Adams was qualified for the office. He had been a U.S Senator from Massachusetts; U.S. Minister to the Netherlands, Prussia (Germany), Russia and Britain; and Secretary of State under the previous President, James Monroe.

But he becomes President under controversial circumstances, having not won the popular vote or the initial Electoral Vote, and having been elected by the U.S. House of Representatives thanks to a competitor, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, throwing Adams his support, in what appears to have been a quid pro quo, as Adams appointed Clay to be Secretary of State -- at the time, tantamount to being named heir presumptive as President -- allowing him to win over the man who led in both the popular and the Electoral Vote, General Andrew Jackson.

Sworn in by Chief Justice John Marshall, he is the only President to swear the Oath of Office with his hand on a book other than a Bible, using a book of laws. And, as the 1st President who could not be counted among the "Founding Fathers," he changed the fashion of the ceremony: Instead of long hair tied in a queue, he had his hair cut short; and instead of the traditional knee breeches, he wore long trousers.

As Thomas Jefferson had, following the previous most contentious election, he tried a conciliatory tone in his Inaugural Address, saying, "The collisions of party spirit which originate in speculative opinions or in different views of administrative policy are in their nature transitory." He noted his status as the 1st minority-vote President by saying, "I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence."

His Presidency was a failure. The Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with him, and what had become the National Republican Party discovered that the natural contentious personality common to the Adams men was rather strong in him. He got very little done, and when his rematch with Andrew Jackson came in 1828, he was soundly defeated.

In 1830, he became the 1st former President to be elected to the House of Representatives. He served a District outside Boston, becoming the House's leading advocate for the abolition of slavery, until his death in 1848.

March 3, 1875: The Premiere of "Carmen" & The 1st Indoor Hockey Game

Georges Bizet

March 3, 1875, 150 years ago: Carmen, an opera by French composer Georges Bizet, premieres, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. It is based on the 1845 novella of the same title, by French writer Prosper Mérimée. He died in 1870, and so did not live to see the opera.

The opera is not comic: It is set in southern Spain in 1820, in the wake of the country's devastating defense of itself against Napoleon in the Peninsular War, and with the loss of its Latin American colonies in progress.

Don José, a naïve soldier, is seduced by the wiles of the fiery Romani woman Carmen. (She is referred to as a "gypsy," but that term for the Romani is now considered a slur.) He abandons his childhood sweetheart, and deserts from his military duties, but loses Carmen's love to the bullfighter Escamillo, after which José kills her in a jealous rage.

The depictions of proletarian life, immorality, and lawlessness, and the tragic death of the main character on stage, broke new ground in French opera, and were highly controversial. It has become part of the trope that every opera is a tragedy, which is far from true.

Bizet died just 3 months after the premiere, on June 3, 1875, at 36, from a lingering fever and 2 heart attacks.

Just as most 20th Century Americans came to know "The March of the Swiss Soldiers," the end of the the Overture to Gioachino Rossini's 1829 opera William Tell as the theme from the 1949-57 TV show The Lone Ranger, many Americans came to know the songs "Habanera" and "The Toreador Song" from their inclusion in the 1976 baseball film The Bad News Bears.

*

On the exact same day, across the Atlantic Ocean, but also in a French-speaking city, the first recorded indoor ice hockey game took place.

Just as a young man named James Creighton was the 1st great pitcher in baseball, before a bizarre injury took his life at the age of 21, another James Creighton organized the 1st indoor hockey game. He put it together at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, between a local team and the Victoria Skating Club, a team captained by Creighton.

The game featured 9 players on each side, as opposed to the modern 6. And here is the entire report of the game, from the next day's Montreal Gazette -- originally a single run-on sentence, but I've added paragraphs for easier reading, although this writer uses the term "shinty" instead of the more common "shinny":

HOCKEY – At the Rink last night a very large audience gathered to witness a novel contest on the ice. The game of hockey, though much in vogue on the ice in New England and other parts of the United States, is not much known here, and in consequence the game of last evening was looked forward to with great interest.

Hockey is played usually with a ball, but last night, in order that no accident should happen, a flat block of wood was used, so that it should slide along the ice without rising, and thus going among the spectators to their discomfort. The game is like Lacrosse in one sense – the block having to go through flags placed about 8 feet apart in the same manner as the rubber ball – but in the main the old country game of shinty gives the best idea of hockey.

The players last night were eighteen in number – nine on each side – and were as follows: – Messrs. Torrance (captain), Meagher, Potter, Goff, Barnston, Gardner, Griffin, Jarvis and Whiting. Creighton (captain), Campbell, Campbell, Esdaile, Joseph, Henshaw, Chapman, Powell and Clouston.

The match was an interesting and well-contested affair, the efforts of the players exciting much merriment as they wheeled and dodged each other, and notwithstanding the brilliant play of Captain Torrance's team Captain Creighton's men carried the day, winning two games to the single of the Torrance nine. The game was concluded about half-past nine, and the spectators then adjourned well satisfied with the evening's entertainment.

Artist's depiction of the game

What the Gazette didn't report was that there was a fight after the game -- not between players, as would become so common in the sport, but between the players and the fans, as some members of the Skating Club didn't like that their rink, so used to the leisure of skating, was being used for a competitive sport, and causing damage to the ice.

Creighton went on to become the law clerk for the Canadian Senate in Ottawa, and lived until 1930. 

The Victoria Skating Rink opened in 1862, on a block bordered by Drummond Street, St. Catherine Street, Stanley Street and Dorchester Boulevard (now Boulevard René-Léveseque). In 1886, it became the home of the 1st amateur hockey league, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada. In 1894, it was the location of the 1st Stanley Cup Playoff games. (The Cup was a challenge trophy, and when the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association won the AHAC title in 1893, no champion of another league challenged them, so there was no playoff that 1st season.)

Moving the sport indoors forced, for the 1st time, a standardized rink size, which became 200 feet long by 85 feet wide. On March 3, 1925, 50 years to the day after the 1st game, the last game was held there, a tournament semifinal for an amateur league. But times had changed: The Rink was in bad shape, and, a mile to the west, the Montreal Forum had opened the previous November. The Rink was soon demolished, and a parking garage was built in its place. The garage still stands.

No, it doesn't look much like a historical site. But, while not the place where hockey was "invented," it can legitimately be called "the place where hockey as we know it was born."

March 1, 1965: The Moynihan Report

March 1, 1965, 60 years ago: The Moynihan Report is released, although that is not its title, and the name "Moynihan" doesn't appear anywhere on it. That's the name that it got, because some people insist upon assigning credit, while others insist upon assigning blame.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan may have seemed like the most Irish of New Yorkers, but he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1927, before moving to Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's West Side with his family as a boy. He worked as a longshoreman before getting a free education at City College of New York, then serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and getting a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University, in the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts.

"Pat" went to the London School of Economics, where he began to cultivate, in his own words, "a taste for Savile Row suits, rococo conversational riffs and Churchillian oratory," even as he maintained that "nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York Democrat who had some friends who worked on the docks and drank beer after work."

He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, an old-money Democrat, before being appointed an Assistant Secretary of Labor under President John F. Kennedy. The night that JFK was assassinated, he spoke with Mary McGrory of The Washington Star, invoking the heritage of both of them, and also that of the fallen President: "There's no point in being Irish if you don't know that the world will break your heart eventually."

He remained under the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who wanted the Department of Labor to give him as much information as he could for his "War On Poverty." The result was The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, published on March 1, 1965. Moynihan wrote the report on his own initiative, hoping to persuade White House officials that civil-rights legislation, alone, would not produce racial equality. Few people doubted this.

But Moynihan didn't suggest an additional solution, only an additional subject to address: Black families. He pointed out that the out-of-wedlock birthrate was much higher for black people than for white people. And he used the phrase "tangle of pathologies" to describe conditions within black families.

Conservatives loved it: Only 5 months after their epic electoral defeat at LBJ's hands, here was a lifeline, and it was coming from inside their enemy's own house: Not just a sub-Cabinet official, but a man who was respected by both JFK and LBJ. The report seemed to back up their idea that spending money on achieving racial equality shouldn't be done, giving them the justification that it was pointless.

Liberals hated it: The report seemed to "blame the victim" for his own problems. This presaged later conservative "dog whistles," like "race hustler," "poverty pimp," "welfare queen," and "superpredator."

Between the backlash against this report, and LBJ's perception that Moynihan was too close to his intraparty rival, JFK's brother, now-Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, Moynihan realized that his position in the Johnson Administration was untenable. Before the year was out, he resigned to take a professor's position at Harvard University.

But the Republicans remembered. In 1969, the new President, Richard Nixon, appointed Moynihan to be Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy; and, later in the year, as Counselor to the President. (He would be succeeded in these offices by John Ehrlichman and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively.)

But his support for a guaranteed national income, or a "negative income tax," was too close to socialism for Tricky Dick and his tricksters. At the end of 1970, he left the Administration, and went back to Harvard. In 1973, Nixon appointed him to be U.S. Ambassador to India. In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1976, despite still officially living in Massachusetts, he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York, for the seat formerly held by RFK, and won it.

He would serve 4 terms, becoming, as I eventually put it, in language that wouldn't go over well today, "a political transvestite." He was reliably Democratic on education, the environment, civil liberties and abortion, and was a reliable vote for federal judges appointed by Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But he seemed to side with the Republicans on taxes, and absolutely sided with them on health care and welfare.

During the health care reform debate in early 1994, he was the Chairman of the Senate's Committee on Finance, which had to approve any reform bill. Clinton had been pushing for universal coverage, saying there was a crisis on the issue. But the Republicans were saying there wasn't any crisis. In other words, the Republicans were lying.

Moynihan appeared as a guest on NBC's Meet the Press, hosted by a former aide of his, Tim Russert, and said, as if he were a Republican, "We don't have a health care crisis in this country. But we do have a welfare crisis." Russert asked him if there would be a new health care reform law. Moynihan said, "Ah, in this Congress? No." By refusing to even consider holding hearings in the Finance Committee on such a bill, he did as much to kill health care reform for the next 16 years as any conservative, in Congress or in the media.

Clinton did sign a welfare reform bill in 1996, after vetoing 2 others he thought too draconian, vetoes that Moynihan criticized on the Senate floor. But, as someone with more days dealing with medical difficulties than days at work between 1994 and 2010, I have never forgiven Moynihan -- or the Republicans -- for killing health care reform, offering it as a sacrifice to the god of welfare reform.

Moynihan continued to officially be a Democrat, while taking some Republican positions, until, bowing to advancing age, he retired in advance of the 2000 election. His seat was won by Hillary Clinton, Bill's wife. She had been careful to get on good terms with him, despite the fact that the health care reform movement was as much her pet project as it was her husband's. So Hillary winning Moynihan's seat must have given both Clintons satisfaction on more than one level.

Moynihan died in 2003. In 2021, something for which he had long advocated and attempted to fund, an expansion of New York's Pennsylvania Station, opened in the former main post office across 8th Avenue. Designed to handle Amtrak traffic, so that the station between 8th and 7th Avenues could handle New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road more easily, the new facility was named Moynihan Train Hall.

When this honor was offered to him during his lifetime, Moynihan said he didn't want it, saying the building should continue to carry the name it had, honoring James A. Farley, an old-line New York Democrat whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had named Postmaster General, and who had gotten the building built. Farley died in 1976, the last survivor of FDR's Cabinet (the position is no longer Cabinet-level), and had been pretty much forgotten by people younger than Moynihan and his fans.

If anything, the commuter portion of Penn Station should have been named for Moynihan, given how often he commuted between America's 2 main political parties.

March 1, 1945: FDR's Last Speech

March 1, 1945, 80 years ago: President Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses a Joint Session of Congress, at the Capitol Building in Washington.

Just 18 days earlier, he had concluded the Yalta Conference, meeting with Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, in the Crimea, on Stalin's home turf. They discussed how to finish the European and Pacific phases of World War II, and what to do with the defeated nations afterward, and how to rebuild the postwar world.

Due to having contracted polio in 1921, whenever FDR had to give a public speech, would be "walked" up to the podium by holding onto a cane with one hand and an aide's arm with the other. His braces would be adjusted so that he could stand, and he would then deliver his speech.

But now, early in his 4th term, he was 63 years old, tired, and sick: His blood pressure was much too high, and he had heart disease. As I said, it had been 18 days since Yalta had wrapped up. Had he been healthy, then, given the transportation modes then available, he could have needed only about half that to get home and prepare his remarks for Congress.

And it wasn't just rest he needed: He wasn't going to be able to stand to make the speech. For the 1st time, he addressed Congress from his wheelchair. Also for the 1st time during his Presidency, in an address broadcast coast-to-coast over the nation's radio networks, he made a public reference to his disability. 

He began as follows: "I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say. But I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip." The members of Congress applauded.

He added, "First of all, I want to say, it is good to be home." More applause. He went on: "It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree that it has been, so far, a fruitful one. Speaking in all frankness, the question of whether it is entirely fruitful or not lies to a great extent in your hands. For unless you here in the halls of the American Congress, with the support of the American people, concur in the general conclusions reached at Yalta, and give them your active support, the meeting will not have produced lasting results."

In other words, unless Congress properly funded the Department of War to end the job of the war, and the Department of State to start the job of the peace, then the war effort, which had already killed about 300,000 Americans, would have amounted to nothing.

Roosevelt went on to explain the progress of our fighting men. U.S. troops had already crossed into German territory. Six days later, they would cross the Rhine River at the Ludendorff Bridge. He spoke of why Yalta was chosen as the site, because it was once a Black Sea resort, and of what the Nazis had done to devastate it. So he spoke of how the Nazis had to pay for what they'd done, but that the German people shouldn't have to suffer any further.

And he spoke of building a new international organization to replace the failed League of Nations, the United Nations, with a Charter that would be based on the Constitution of the United States.

He also said, "On the way back from the Crimea, I made arrangements to meet personally King Farouk of Egypt; Halle Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia; and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Our conversations had to do with matters of common interest. They will be of great mutual advantage because they gave me, and a good many of us, an opportunity of meeting and talking face to face, and of exchanging views in personal conversation instead of formal correspondence."

He said, "Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world again to survive."

Ever since the Yalta Conference, conservatives have claimed that FDR "betrayed" Eastern Europe by leaving it to Stalin there. But the war was not over. Germany was still fighting, even if the end, there, was in sight. Japan was still fighting, with no end in sight. The Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were yet to come. FDR needed the Soviet Union in that fight.

The Red Army was already in control of most of Poland by the time they met at Yalta. In other words, Poland and Eastern Europe were not Roosevelt's to "sell." Stalin already had already "bought" them, his "currency" being the lives of millions of Soviet soldiers.

FDR also knew that the United Nations would be stronger after the war if the Soviets were in it. He agreed to some concessions at Yalta, for the same reason he cut his social programs short, telling a reporter, "Dr. New Deal had to give way to Dr. Win the War."

FDR never made another public speech. This address, and his Inaugural Address on January 20, would be his only public appearances in the U.S. during his 4th term. He left Washington, and returned to his home in Hyde Park, New York. But he didn't think he was getting the rest he needed there. So, on March 30, he left for his "Little White House" in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had previously gone in his vain attempt to regain the use of his legs. He died there on April 12. Not only was the war not finished, but Adolf Hitler was still alive and in charge -- albeit of a quickly crumbling Third Reich.

After FDR's death, it was 18 days before Hitler killed himself, rather than be taken by Soviet troops; 26 days before Germany surrendered, V-E Day; and 134 days before Japan surrendered, V-J Day.

Between the lasting legacy of the New Deal, and the way he set things up for the postwar world, perhaps FDR's greatest achievement was building a world that didn't need him anymore.

February 25, 2000: The Murderers of Amadou Diallo Are Acquitted

February 25, 2000, 25 years ago: Four New York police officers are acquitted of the charge of second-degree murder.

It was a disgraceful miscarriage of justice.

In 1996, Amadou Diallo, a native of the African nation of Liberia, came to America, and settled in New York City. On February 4, 1999, at about 12:40 AM, he was standing outside his apartment building on Wheeler Avenue in the Soundview section of The Bronx, when an unmarked police car pulled up.

Inside the car were Officers Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy. They were looking for a serial rapist. They saw Diallo. Since they were white New York cops, and he was a young black male, they fell back on their prejudices, and assumed he was the man they were looking for.

They ordered Diallo to show his hands. He reached into his pocket to show his wallet, with his identification. All 4 officers assumed he was reaching for a gun, and pulled theirs, and opened fire.

They fired 41 shots, 19 of which hit Diallo. He never had a chance. He was dead at age 23. Sherrie Elliott, a witness, said that they continued to shoot after Diallo was down. When the body was searched, it was found to have nothing that could have been defined as a weapon.

The officers were not punished by the New York Police Department: An investigation ruled that they had acted within policy, based on what "a reasonable police officer would have done." On March 25, a Bronx grand jury disagreed, and indicted all 4 officers on the charges of second-degree murder and reckless endangerment.

In hindsight, the charge of criminally negligent homicide might have been easier to prove. On December 16, a court ordered a change of venue for the trial, thinking that the officers could not get a fair trial within the City of New York. The trial was moved to the State capital, Albany.

On February 25, 2000, after 3 days of deliberation, a jury -- 4 black people and 8 white people -- found the officers Not Guilty on all charges.

It had been just 8 years since the acquittal of 4 police officers for the brutal beating of a suspect in Los Angeles had led to some of the worst race rioting in American history. I was sure there would be a riot in New York. There was not.

Within days, Diallo's parents filed a $61 million lawsuit against the City, and the individual officers, charging gross negligence, wrongful death and racial profiling. In 2004, they accepted a $3 million settlement.

In 2001, McMellon and Murphy switched from the NYPD to the Fire Department of New York. They both served 10 years, and retired. Carroll left the NYPD in 2005. Boss remained, and was actually promoted to Sergeant, before retiring in 2019.

None of them was ever punished. Think about it: They fired 41 shots at an unarmed man, hitting him 19 times. That means they missed 23 times, an average of 6 misses per officer. They didn't get prison time for being too good at shooting; they didn't even get fired for being too bad at it.

Songs about the killing abound. Oddly, the most famous isn't by a black rapper, it's by a white rocker who was already 50 years old at the time: "American Skin" by Bruce Springsteen. The chorus of "41 shots" permeates the song. Some cops said they would refuse to provide security for Springsteen when he performed in the City.

Forty-one shots.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Bang.

Except the song sees the story from their perspective as well: "Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life." For both cops and suspects, Bruce sang, "You can get killed just livin' in your American skin."

Not for the first time, nor for the last, white conservative men had ignorantly misinterpreted a Springsteen song.

A person sympathetic to the police would say that these four men have to live with what they did for the rest of their lives, and that this should be punishment enough. A person who accepts that each officer fired at least one bullet that, all by itself, would have killed Amadou Diallo knows that they got away with, at the least, criminally negligent homicide; and, at the most, murder.

Police brutality in America has gotten worse since. And, as we have seen, the race of the cop matters less than the race of the suspect.

Black Lives Matter.

Blue Lives Matter.

All Lives Matter.

Even the lives of people who believe that some of those lives don't.

February 25, 1950: Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" Premieres

February 25, 1950: Your Show of Shows premieres on NBC. It is a 90-minute variety show, specializing in sketch comedy, hosted by Sid Caesar. It may have been the funniest show that the young medium of television had yet seen.

It may still be the funniest TV show of all time.

Isaac Sidney Caesar was born on September 8, 1922 in Yonkers, just north of New York City. When his father immigrated from Poland, the family name was "Ziser." As a teenage waiter in his parents' luncheonette, Sid learned how to mimic the customers' various accents, and developed a flair for language.

He learned the saxophone and the clarinet, and played in dance bands at the resort hotels in the Catskill Mountains, which led New York Jews to "the country" in the Summer. He served in the Coast Guard during World War II. While serving, he married Florence Levy, and they had 3 children: Michele, Rick and Karen.

While playing in a military revue, the show's director, Max Liebman, noticed that Sid's comedy got bigger applause than anyone's music. Liebman got him movie roles, and a spot as the opening act for comedian Joe E. Lewis at New York's famed Copacabana nightclub.

In 1949, Caesar and Liebman met with Pat Weaver, vice president of television at NBC (and eventually the father of actress Sigourney Weaver). They put together Sid's 1st TV show, The Admiral Broadway Revenue, which also starred Imogene Coca. The show became a victim of its own success: Admiral, an appliance company that was one of the first manufacturers of TV sets, could not keep up with the demand for new sets, and the show was canceled after 1 season.

But Weaver knew he had a genius on his hands, and convinced NBC to try again. Your Show of Shows debuted in 1950, with Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris and James Starbuck. The 90-minute show was a mix of sketch comedy, satires of movies and TV shows, Caesar's monologues, musical guests, and big production numbers.

And the writers. What writers the show had. Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, his brother Danny Simon, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, Joseph Stein, Michael Stewart and Tony Webster. Webster was the only one who wasn't Jewish, and Jewish humor was vital for the show.

The show seemed to take special joy in parodying situation comedies, or "sitcoms," with Caesar and Coca playing "The Hickenloopers." Just the title was a funny-sounding name, and their arguments, predating I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, were a big reason why the overall show was popular.

Caesar loved wearing various uniforms, and one of his best-known sketches involved him putting on what looked like a military uniform. When he was done, he looked in the mirror, and said, "Mirror, mirror, on der vall, who's der schlickest of dem all?" (Not "the fairest," but "the slickest.") And then, after all his preening and posturing, comes the twist: He's not a general, he's a hotel doorman.

One of his recurring characters was the Professor, a shabby, top-hatted, double-talking, German-accented (of course) expert on, well, everything. In my lifetime, he would reprise this character on the PBS kids' show Sesame Street and in commercials for Saran Wrap.

After 4 years, the show was cut back to 60 minutes, and was renamed Caesar's Hour. There were fewer sketches, but that allowed for longer ones. Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen joined the writing staff. Cast additions included Janet Blair, Milt Kamen and Nanette Fabray. The show lasted 3 more seasons, until May 25, 1957.

In 1961, Reiner created The Dick Van Dyke Show, and wrote for it, based on his own experience having written for Your Show of Shows. So, essentially, Alan Brady was (hopefully, a very exaggerated version of) Sid, Rob Petrie was Carl, Laura Petrie was Carl's wife Estelle Reiner, and Richie is their son, actor and now director Rob Reiner. Though I don't think anybody ever called Richie, or his portrayer, Larry Matthews, a "meathead."

Carl and Mel would combine for "The 2,000-Year-Old Man." Carl would play an interviewer, and Mel played a 2,000-year-old man, not in old-age makeup, but wearing a hat and a cape, telling of his long and funny life:

Carl: What did you do for a living?
Mel: What didn't I do? I was a ten-of-all-trades!

Carl: A what?

Mel: A ten-of-all-trades!

Carl: You mean, a jack-of-all-trades?

Mel: I wasn't that good!

From there, Mel co-created the spy spoof series Get Smart with Buck Henry, and then became a film director, specializing in genre spoofs: Broadway shows with The Producers in 1968, Westerns with Blazing Saddles in 1974, horror films with Young Frankenstein in 1974, silent movies with Silent Movie in 1976, Alfred Hitchcock's films with High Anxiety in 1977, historical epics with History of the World Part I in 1981, and science fiction with Spaceballs in 1987.

In 1965, Neil Simon wrote the Broadway play The Odd Couple, basing the character of fussbudget Felix Ungar on his brother Danny. (The character's name would become "Felix Unger" for the 1970-75 TV show based on the play.)

In 2001, NBC aired its 75th Anniversary special. Sid Caesar, age 79, was brought on as a special guest, but he looked terribly old, was hunched over, with his mouth open, and walking on a cane. I thought this was terrible: Clearly, he wasn't well enough to do this. Then he started talking, and it was clear that his mind was still clear, as he went into his dialects, cracking the audience up as he had half a century earlier, and paid tribute to absent friends who were early NBC legends. He lived until February 12, 2014, at the age of 91. 

Selma Diamond died in 1985, while she was playing court matron Selma Hacker on the NBC sitcom Night Court. Milt Kamen died in 1977, Tony Webster in 1987, James Starbuck in 1997, Lucille Kallen in 1999, Imogene Coca in 2001, Howard Morris and Danny Simon in 2005, Janet Blair and Mel Tolkin in 2007, Larry Gelbart in 2009, Joseph Stein in 2010, Nanette Fabray and Neil Simon in 2018, Carl Reiner in 2020. As of February 25, 2022, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen are still alive.

In 2002, with TV Guide preparing for its 50th Anniversary the next year, Your Show of Shows was ranked Number 30 on their list of the 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, for their 60th Anniversary, it was ranked Number 37 on their 60 Best Series of All Time. In 2007, Time magazine named it one of its 100 Best TV Shows of All-Time, although it didn't rank any. In 2013, Entertainment Weekly ranked it Number 10 on its Top 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. The same year, the Writers Guild of America ranked it Number 41 on its list of the 101 Best Written TV Series of All Time.

In 1989, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of television, People magazine named him #4 on their list of the Top 25 TV Personalities of All Time. The article asked 2 questions: "Is he still funny? Yes. As funny as he was? Nobody may ever be that funny again."