A top city employee was a new dad on New Year’s Day, 60 years ago

On New Year’s Day of 1958, six babies were born in La Crosse hospitals.  The very first one, delivered at 8:19 a.m., was Scott Denny, born at St. Ann’s Hospital.  Scott’s father was La Crosse city treasurer Wesley Denny.  
 
Wedding bells were in the future for a La Crosse woman who had become a New York fashion model.  Ardelle Tank of La Crosse was engaged to Dr. Marion Ford, who had a practice as an orthodontist in New York.  Ardelle was known professionally as Ardelle Terry, and had appeared on some TV shows, including as a hostess on the popular quiz show “Twenty-One.”  Within a few months, “Twenty-One” and other big-money game shows would be taken off the air, because many contestants were given the answers backstage to make the programs more exciting.  
 
“I Love Lucy” wasn’t a weekly TV show any more in 1958, but Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had new hour-long adventures on CBS every few weeks, called the “Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show.”  In the first new episode of the year, the Ricardos and Fred and Ethel Mertz were hunting for uranium in the Nevada desert with guest star Fred MacMurray.  In real life, mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary completed an adventure of his own.  The first man atop Mt. Everest led a tractor brigade across Antarctica for two months, arriving at the South Pole in January, 1958…60 years ago, yesterday in La Crosse.