■ The Pop Edition
September 26: Gilligan's Island Bows, Serena Turns 45
Born On This Day
Serena Williams
BORN 1981 · TURNS 45
Twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles and a rivalry with her own sister that produced some of the era's best tennis. She turned athletic dominance into a media empire, a fashion line, and a Super Bowl ad presence that outlasted most of her competitors' careers.
Linda Hamilton
BORN 1956 · TURNS 70
She played Sarah Connor twice, a decade apart, and reshaped what an action heroine could look like — sinewy, sleepless, and completely done asking for permission. She returned to the role three more times over the following years.
Olivia Newton-John
BORN 1948 · WOULD HAVE BEEN 78
Sandy in Grease, a country-pop crossover star before that was a common career move, and later an advocate whose own cancer diagnosis pushed her into public health work. She died in 2022, and her music still shows up at every wedding reception with a DJ over fifty.
Melissa Sue Anderson
BORN 1962 · TURNS 64
Mary Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie, a role that included a plotline about going blind that stuck with an entire generation of kids who watched it in syndication. She largely stepped back from acting by the 1990s.
T.R. Knight
BORN 1973 · TURNS 53
George O'Malley on Grey's Anatomy, and one of the more talked-about cast exits in early-2000s television when he left the show after five seasons amid on-set friction that made tabloid headlines at the time.
Prime Time: Gilligan's Island Bows
CBS put Gilligan's Island on the air on September 26, 1964, and critics of the era mostly hated it. Sherwood Schwartz had pitched a comedy about seven castaways stranded after a three-hour tour goes wrong, and the reviews called it juvenile, implausible, and a waste of a decent cast that included Alan Hale Jr. and Bob Denver.
None of that mattered once the show hit syndication. CBS canceled it after three seasons — the story goes that a network executive's wife wanted Gunsmoke renewed instead and the numbers favored her — but reruns turned it into a permanent fixture of American afternoons for the next three decades. The theme song alone did more to fix character names in the national memory than most shows manage with their entire run.
Sixty-two years later, the premise still gets cited as shorthand for a certain kind of broad, colorful, unkillable sitcom — the kind that networks kept trying and mostly failing to replicate. The cast reunited for TV movies well into the 1980s, and the show never really left the air.
The Moment: Ben Johnson Stripped of Gold
On September 26, 1988, the International Olympic Committee formally stripped Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson of his 100-meter gold medal from the Seoul Games, two days after he'd run 9.79 seconds and shattered the world record. A post-race drug test had come back positive for stanozolol, a steroid, and the fallout was immediate.
The race itself had been billed as track's ultimate showdown — Johnson against American Carl Lewis — and it was watched by an enormous global television audience that saw a world record fall in real time. Losing the medal turned that broadcast moment into something else entirely: the first time a huge number of casual sports fans watched doping scandal unfold on live television rather than read about it after the fact.
Lewis inherited the gold. Johnson's name became permanently attached to the scandal rather than the record, and the episode reshaped how seriously international athletics treated drug testing going forward. Track and field commentary has referenced the Seoul 100 meters ever since, almost always in connection with the positive test rather than the time on the clock.
Meanwhile...
1960The first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon airs, and it changes how candidates think about appearing on camera forever.
1970The Partridge Family franchise is quietly taking shape behind the scenes, ahead of its premiere the following week.
1988Track and field headlines dominate front pages worldwide as the Ben Johnson fallout continues to unfold.
1991College radio stations across the country are still spinning grunge records that will define the decade's sound.
2005The fall broadcast season is in full swing, with networks jostling for position after a summer of reruns.
2012Tennis fans are already looking ahead to the next Grand Slam season, with Serena Williams entrenched at the top of the rankings.
