T
he young, beautiful Elizabeth II was imprinted
on my mind at the time of her Coronation and there for
six decades she has stayed. The Coronation, which,
as a child of seven, I saw both on television and on
the big screen of the Paramount Theatre in Salem,
Massachusetts, is among the earliest, weighty moving
images I recall.
The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain on
June 2, 1953 was the first truly international televised
event. ���Televised��� in the sense of live coverage is not
completely accurate in this case, for technology at the
time was such that reels of film from London were actually
developed and edited on a plane and rushed to CBS
and other networks in New York City and elsewhere in
the world. This process, which seems incredible to us
today, was recounted to me by Lowell Thomas, whom
I met over thirty years ago during an event at Lincoln
Center commemorating the donation, by Twentieth
Century Fox, of their entire news archive to the University
of South Carolina.
HYLAND
