50 Fun Facts About 1929

Which comic character debuted in January 1929, nine years into E. C. Segar's strip Thimble Theatre?

Popeye proved so popular that the strip was eventually renamed after him. His strength was first credited to spinach in 1931.

Which US president had been in office for under eight months when Wall Street crashed in October 1929?

Herbert Hoover was sworn in on 4 March 1929 after beating Al Smith in a landslide. In 1932, with the Depression deepening, he lost in a landslide himself.

Which Chicago crime boss was widely blamed when seven men were shot in the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre?

Al Capone was at his Florida home when the gunmen struck in a Lincoln Park garage. Two of the killers were disguised as police officers.

Which civil rights leader, born Michael in Atlanta in January 1929, was renamed by his father at the age of five?

Martin Luther King Jr. took the name of the German reformer Martin Luther. His father changed both their names in 1934, after a church trip that took him to Reformation sites in Germany.

Which diarist, born in Frankfurt in June 1929, got a checkered autograph book for her thirteenth birthday?

Anne Frank began writing in it almost at once. Within a month her family had gone into hiding in a secret annex behind a bookcase in Amsterdam.

Which actress, born in Brussels in May 1929, shot to stardom opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday?

Audrey Hepburn spent the war in the occupied Netherlands, studying ballet at the Arnhem Conservatory. By 1944 she was dancing to raise money for the resistance.

Which cartoon character spoke his first words on screen in 1929's The Karnival Kid, while selling hot dogs?

Mickey Mouse had starred in eight earlier shorts without saying a word. The voice came from composer Carl Stalling, not from Walt Disney.

Which tiny independent state was created by the Lateran Treaty that Mussolini's Italy signed in February 1929?

Vatican City is the smallest country in the world by both area and population. The treaty settled the long-running Roman Question between Italy and the papacy.

Which annual Hollywood prizes were first handed out in May 1929, in a fifteen-minute ceremony at a private dinner?

The Oscars began before 270 guests at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The winners had been announced three months earlier, so nobody was in suspense.

Which game did toy salesman Edwin Lowe spot at a Georgia carnival in December 1929, played with dried beans?

Bingo was known as Beano when Lowe watched players cover numbers on cardboard sheets. He took the game home to New York and tried it on friends.

What nickname was given to 29 October 1929, when about 16 million shares changed hands on Wall Street?

Black Tuesday capped a week of panic selling. Leading bankers had clubbed together days earlier to buy stock above market value, which bought only a brief recovery.

Which rival of Joseph Stalin was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey in February 1929?

Leon Trotsky was housed by the Turkish authorities on the island of Büyükada. He was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by a Stalinist agent wielding an ice axe.

Which airship circled the globe in 21 days in August 1929, part-funded by publisher William Randolph Hearst?

Graf Zeppelin made the first round-the-world flight by an airship, starting and finishing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, because Hearst insisted on it. A crowd of perhaps 250,000 turned out in Tokyo.

Which remote spot did American explorer Richard Byrd reach by air in November 1929 in a Ford Trimotor?

The South Pole flight nearly fell short: the crew had to dump empty fuel tanks and their emergency supplies to climb above the Antarctic Plateau.

Which aviator married Anne Morrow in May 1929, two years after flying solo from New York to Paris?

Charles Lindbergh wed the daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico at her family's New Jersey estate. She soon became the first woman in the United States to earn a glider pilot's licence.

Which lawman of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral died in Los Angeles in January 1929, aged 80?

Wyatt Earp had worked as an unpaid consultant on silent cowboy movies and counted the screen cowboys William S. Hart and Tom Mix among his friends.

Which mould-derived substance did Alexander Fleming name in March 1929 and describe in a paper few people noticed?

Penicillin had been known around the lab as mould juice for months. It was 1940 before an Oxford team under Howard Florey and Ernst Chain isolated the purified compound.

Which name did King Alexander I give the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in October 1929?

Yugoslavia means land of the South Slavs. Alexander imposed the name nine months after he had set up a royal dictatorship.

Which American astronomer confirmed in 1929 that the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it moves away?

Edwin Hubble's result implies that the universe is expanding. The Belgian priest Georges Lemaître had proposed the same relationship two years earlier.

Which 1929 musical about a vaudeville sister act became the first sound film to win Best Picture?

The Broadway Melody included an early Technicolor sequence that helped set off a rush of colour musicals. That sequence survives only in black and white.

Which director's 1929 thriller Blackmail began as a silent picture and was reworked into an early British talkie?

Alfred Hitchcock had a casting problem: his star Anny Ondra had a pronounced Czech accent, so the actress Joan Barry supplied the character's voice.

Which comedy team filmed 1929's The Cocoanuts by day while performing Animal Crackers on stage at night?

The Marx Brothers shot the film at Paramount's Astoria studio in New York and went on to the 44th Street Theatre each evening. Its plot sends up the Florida land boom.

Which song, later the title number of a 1952 film musical, was popularized by The Hollywood Revue of 1929?

Singin' in the Rain was performed in the revue by Cliff Edwards and the Brox Sisters, 23 years before the famous dance through the puddles.

Which author's 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms follows an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps?

Ernest Hemingway had driven a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front himself and was badly wounded by shrapnel in 1918. The book became his first best-seller.

Which German veteran wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, first published as a book in January 1929?

Erich Maria Remarque later saw the novel and its sequel banned and burned in Nazi Germany. Hollywood's film version followed in 1930 and won Best Picture.

Which Mississippi novelist published The Sound and the Fury, the first story of the Compson family, in 1929?

William Faulkner had Twilight as his working title. The book sold slowly until his later novel Sanctuary sent readers and critics back to it.

Which comic hero created by Belgian cartoonist Hergé travelled to the Soviet Union in his January 1929 debut?

Tintin was sent there with his dog Snowy as a reporter for Le Petit Vingtième, the children's newspaper supplement that ran the strip as anti-communist satire.

Which Spanish painter co-wrote the 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou with director Luis Buñuel?

Salvador Dalí and Buñuel based the script on two of their dreams and kept one rule: nothing that could be explained rationally was allowed in.

Which New York institution opened in rented Fifth Avenue rooms in November 1929, nine days after the Wall Street crash?

The Museum of Modern Art was dreamed up by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two friends, Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, who took modest quarters in the Heckscher Building.

Which New York Yankees slugger was handed uniform number 3 in 1929 because he batted third in the lineup?

Babe Ruth and his team-mates were numbered so that fans in cavernous Yankee Stadium could tell them apart. The Yankees were the first club to wear numbers both at home and away.

Which Athletics manager gambled on sore-armed veteran Howard Ehmke to start Game 1 of the 1929 World Series?

Connie Mack was rewarded with a complete game and 13 strikeouts, then a Series record. His Philadelphia team went on to beat the Chicago Cubs in five games.

Which Riviera street circuit hosted its first Grand Prix in April 1929, won by a British driver in a Bugatti?

Monaco's first winner raced under the name Williams and later worked in occupied France as an agent of Britain's Special Operations Executive.

Which NFL team won its first league title in 1929 with an unbeaten 12–0–1 record under Curly Lambeau?

The Green Bay Packers settled the race in late November by beating the previously unbeaten New York Giants 20–6 at the Polo Grounds.

In which New Year's Day college football game did California's Roy Riegels run a fumble the wrong way in 1929?

The Rose Bowl turned on the blunder: Georgia Tech scored a two-point safety on the punt that followed and won 8–7. Riegels was known as Wrong Way ever after.

Which toy were Pedro Flores's California factories turning out at a rate of 300,000 a day by November 1929?

Yo-yo production had begun only a year earlier with a dozen handmade toys in Santa Barbara. Flores, a Filipino immigrant, soon had 600 workers.

Which accessory did Sam Foster begin mass-producing in 1929 and sell from a Woolworth on Atlantic City's Boardwalk?

Sunglasses became cheap once Foster moulded them from celluloid. Sales took off when Hollywood stars appeared in the advertising for his Foster Grant brand.

Which famous aviator placed third in the heavy class of the first Women's Air Derby in August 1929?

Amelia Earhart was trying air racing for the first time, in a nine-day dash from Santa Monica to Cleveland that Will Rogers nicknamed the Powder Puff Derby.

Which Edgar Rice Burroughs hero became a daily comic strip on the day Buck Rogers debuted in January 1929?

Tarzan was drawn for the newspapers by Hal Foster, who later created Prince Valiant. Both strips started on 7 January.

Which German author of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929?

Thomas Mann fled to Switzerland only four years later, when Hitler came to power.

Which Philadelphia-born star of High Noon, born in November 1929, quit acting at 26 to marry a prince?

Grace Kelly fitted her whole screen career into about five years, from her 1951 debut in Fourteen Hours to her wedding to Prince Rainier III.

Which future First Lady, born in Southampton, New York, in July 1929, began as a newspaper's inquiring photographer?

Jackie Kennedy took the job at the Washington Times-Herald after a degree in French literature, and was in the White House by the age of 31.

Which golfer, born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in September 1929, learned the game from his greenskeeper father?

Arnold Palmer drew galleries so loyal they were known as Arnie's Army, and he became the first man to earn $1 million in prize money on the PGA Tour.

Which comedian, born in Oak Park, Illinois, in September 1929, hit number one with a 1960 album of monologues?

Bob Newhart's record, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, also won the Grammy for Album of the Year, and he was named Best New Artist as well.

Which television host, born in November 1929, fronted American Bandstand for more than thirty years?

Dick Clark kept his boyish looks for so long that he was nicknamed America's oldest teenager. The show introduced rock and roll to many American homes.

Which English runner, born in Harrow in March 1929, became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes?

Roger Bannister set the record in 1954 on minimal training, fitted around his days at St Mary's Hospital in London. He went on to a long career as a neurologist.

Which Detroit-born record mogul, born in November 1929, boxed professionally before founding the Motown label?

Berry Gordy was a hit songwriter too, with credits on the R&B chart-toppers Lonely Teardrops and Shop Around.

Which Rome-born director of the Dollars Trilogy, born in January 1929, shared a classroom with Ennio Morricone?

Sergio Leone learned his trade as an assistant director on Hollywood epics shot at Cinecittà, among them the 1959 Ben-Hur.

Which Toronto-born actor, born in December 1929, played Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music?

Christopher Plummer was a great-grandson of John Abbott, a prime minister of Canada, and grew up in the Abbott family home near Montreal.

Which Boston-born journalist, born in September 1929, became the first woman to co-host NBC's Today show in 1974?

Barbara Walters had joined the programme as a writer of women's-interest stories. Two years after that promotion she became the first American woman to co-anchor a network evening newscast.

Which German engineer, whose 1885 Patent-Motorwagen is considered the first practical automobile, died in April 1929?

Karl Benz owed one improvement to his wife Bertha, who drove one of the cars a great distance and then suggested a third gear for climbing hills.