YEARS of LIGHT by Stan Miller The following is the keynote speech delivered by Stan Miller, President of Rosco Laboratories, at the 1985 USITT Conference in New York. This is a momentous year for me, for the USITT and, I hope, for you. It's a year of milestone anniversaries. Rosco is celebrating seventy-five years of operation and the Institute is observing its twenty-fifth year. It was in September, 1960 that the USITT's certificate of incorporation was accepted. Anniversaries. . .. Moments in the present that link the past and the future. Occasions when we stop and look back to where we were-stop to consider how much has changed in tiny steps almost imperceptible as we live through them. 1960. What were you doing in 1960? Looking around, many of you weren't twenty-five years ago ... But Dwight Eisenhower was President and the cold war was at its chilliest. The Russians shot down a U2 reconnaissance plane and Krushchev stunned the UN diplomats by pounding the table with his shoe. Nixon and Kennedy met in the first television debate and the matter of lighting and makeup outweighed the issues. Kennedy was elected in November. Television was shaken by the quiz show scandals. Otto Preminger hired blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write the script for Exodus, but the major studios deferred to the House Un-American Activities Committee and continued to ban listed writers. To qualify for a government student loan in 1960 it was necessary to sign a loyalty oath vowing not to support the forcible over4 Theatre Design & Technology / US ITT / Fall 1985