The Cheez-It Bowl on ESPN wasn’t doing much for me last week, so I switched the channel over to Turner Classic Movies. On the screen was the 1944 flick It Happened Tomorrow, starring Dick Powell and Linda Darnell. Powell plays an obituary writer for a newspaper who starts receiving a copy of the next day’s paper from a ghostly figure. It’s a surefire way for him to get scoops, as he’s able to show up at the scene of the day’s top stories.
The movie is set at the turn of the century (1900), when newspapers ruled the media world. Also portrayed is horse racing, the most popular sport of the time. Of course, Powell’s character figures that he can make a lot of dough if he knows which horses will win ahead of time. He goes to the track armed with the results from his advance copy of the paper. He parlays four straight winners into a thick wad of C-notes, but complications ensue (in large part because the same paper ran a late-breaking story that he was shot to death that evening).
It was a fun story, and it reminded me of the time I reported what happened tomorrow at the last turn of the century. I was covering the 2000 Summer Olympics at Sydney, Australia, which was 18 hours ahead of Santa Barbara time. When UCSB grad Eric Fonoimoana and Dain Blanton won the beach volleyball gold medal, the match ended at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday at Bondi Beach. The News-Press received my story Monday evening, and Tuesday morning’s paper reported that the Americans upset Brazil’s top team “on Tuesday afternoon.”