The Saga of Western Man 1964 Part Two

Duration: 2000

Year Published: 1964

Creator: ABC News

Complete Record: This is part 2 in a series of Western man’s achievements up to 1964. Begins with a segment on teenagers. Shows teenage boys surfing, teenage girls driving in a convertible, walking, laughing, talking. Then features statistics on school children. Footage of children in classrooms, children leaving school, and children running; one school is all white students, the other is all black students. A small schoolhouse in rural Kentucky. Students stand in a circle outside, they wash their hands with bars of soap and a stream as they have no running water. The students sit at their desks inside and each take turns reading aloud from a book. Cuts to a science classroom in a school with more money. Teenage boys have created a machine and are testing it in front of their class. Another set of boys demonstrates an experiment. A teenage girl watches a spinning device on a machine she works on with her partner. A room full of teenagers at computers that administer tests. CU of the teens pressing different buttons. A young boy, about 4 years old, enters an office and has a paper stamped in front of him. He is led into a small room with a teacher, a typewriter and computer. The boy learns at the typewriter and practices spelling. Footage of a young girl being taught. Another girl reads from ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll. One boy is struggling with his spelling lessons and furrows his brow throughout. A young man stands in front of a computer. A bulb lights up with ‘You Win’ above. Shots of construction, materials being hoisted, workers, buildings. Cuts to schoolchildren running and a white light blocks the screen, dissolve to an atomic bomb explosion with a mushroom cloud. A surgery room has doctors in scrubs surrounding a child having open-heart surgery. The boy’s beating heart is seen and the doctor sews it up. Shots of children playing on a playground, jump rope, patty cake; children smile. People looking up, and pointing. Flowers and messages of mourning line an upper balcony. People dress in black for a funeral for John F. Kennedy. VO of a speech by Kennedy. Ends with a colonial ship in the water, a row boat and an oar, waves reaching the shore.