50 Fun Facts About 1953

Which cold curried dish did flower arranger Constance Spry and chef Rosemary Hume create for a royal banquet in 1953?

Coronation chicken was Hume's recipe: cold chicken in a curry cream sauce. She and Spry ran the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London, and the dish is still eaten cold as a salad or a sandwich filling.

Which men's magazine launched in Chicago in December 1953 with an undated first issue, in case no second one followed?

Playboy was put together by Hugh Hefner in the kitchen of his Hyde Park apartment. Its centerfold photograph had been taken for a calendar, not for the magazine.

Which American sports car debuted in 1953 with all 300 hand-built examples painted Polo White with red interiors?

The Chevrolet Corvette was first assembled on a makeshift line in an old truck plant in Flint, Michigan. The prototype had been unveiled that January at GM's Motorama in New York.

Which sitcom's January 1953 birth episode drew more viewers than President Eisenhower's inauguration the next day?

I Love Lucy drew about 44 million viewers for the episode, against 29 million for the swearing-in. Lucille Ball had given birth to her real son, Desi Arnaz Jr., twelve hours before it aired.

Which peak did New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first to summit on 29 May 1953?

Mount Everest's first ascent was announced in London on the morning Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, four days after the climb. A Times reporter had sent the news from Base Camp in code.

Which molecule's structure did James Watson and Francis Crick describe in a brief paper in Nature in April 1953?

DNA's double helix was set out in an article that filled just two pages of the journal. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery.

Which company launched the TV dinner in 1953, packing it in a tray modelled on airline food service?

Swanson's first TV dinner was a Thanksgiving-style plate of turkey, cornbread stuffing, peas and sweet potatoes. Smaller firms had frozen whole dinners before, but this was the first lasting hit.

Which Ian Fleming novel, published in London in April 1953, introduced secret agent James Bond to readers?

Casino Royale was drafted at Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica while he waited for his wedding day. The first British printing sold out in less than a month.

Which household spray was invented in San Diego in 1953 to protect the Atlas missile's outer skin from rust?

WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula, a nod to the attempts it took to get the mix right. It did not go on sale to the public as a commercial product until 1958.

Which Soviet leader died at the age of 74 after a stroke at his Kuntsevo dacha in March 1953?

Joseph Stalin's funeral drew such crowds to the capital that at least 109 mourners were later acknowledged to have died in a crush. Hundreds of thousands had come to pay their respects.

Which war's fighting stopped on 27 July 1953 under an armistice that created a 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone?

The Korean War has never formally ended, because no peace treaty followed the armistice. The truce talks themselves dragged on for two years, first at Kaesong and then at Panmunjom.

Which disease's vaccine did Jonas Salk give his own children in 1953, the year he reported early success on CBS radio?

Polio struck about 35,000 Americans in 1953 alone. Salk never patented the vaccine or took any profit from it, and it was declared safe and effective in April 1955.

In which London church was Queen Elizabeth II crowned on 2 June 1953, in the first such ceremony televised in full?

Westminster Abbey had been closed to television cameras when her parents were crowned in 1937. Preparing for the one-day ceremony took 14 months.

Which actress wore a pink gown to perform a number about diamonds in the 1953 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes?

Marilyn Monroe shared top billing with Jane Russell in the Howard Hawks comedy. Her routine has been recreated by later artists so often that the dress became a pop-culture fixture.

Which Disney animated feature, based on a 1904 J. M. Barrie play, opened at Radio City Music Hall in February 1953?

Peter Pan had been on Walt Disney's mind since 1935, when he first considered animating the play. It was his last animated feature released through RKO before he set up his own distributor.

Which actress won the Best Actress Oscar as a princess exploring Rome on her own in the 1953 film Roman Holiday?

Audrey Hepburn starred opposite Gregory Peck as a reporter. The script was by Dalton Trumbo, who was on the Hollywood blacklist and had to let another writer take the credit.

Which singer won an Oscar for playing Private Angelo Maggio in the 1953 war drama From Here to Eternity?

Frank Sinatra took Best Supporting Actor, one of eight Oscars for a film set in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbor. Co-star Donna Reed won the supporting actress award.

Which Ray Bradbury novel, finished and published in 1953, imagines a future in which firemen burn books?

Fahrenheit 451 is named for the temperature at which, its title page says, book paper catches fire. Bradbury typed the story it grew from on a UCLA library typewriter rented for ten cents per half hour.

Which baseball team beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in six games in 1953 to win a fifth straight World Series?

The New York Yankees' run of five straight titles has never been equalled. It was the fourth time in seven seasons that the same two clubs had met in the Series.

Which California senator was sworn in as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice president in January 1953?

Richard Nixon had saved his place on the ticket months earlier with the televised Checkers speech. About 60 million Americans heard the address, which took its name from the family dog.

Which fast-food chain began in Jacksonville, Florida, in July 1953, cooking patties in an oven called the Insta-Broiler?

Burger King started life as Insta-Burger King. When the founders ran into money trouble, two Miami franchisees, David Edgerton and James McLamore, bought the company in 1959.

Which restaurant chain began in 1953 as a doughnut stand on a street corner in Lakewood, California?

Denny's started out as Danny's Donuts. It became Denny's Coffee Shops in 1959 to avoid confusion with a Los Angeles chain called Coffee Dan's, and switched to round-the-clock opening.

Which marshmallow candy brand has Just Born made since 1953, when it bought the Rodda Candy Company of Pennsylvania?

Peeps came with the purchase of a Lancaster firm that also made jelly beans. Rodda had been selling its Easter chicks since at least 1948.

Which British toy car brand did Lesney Products introduce in 1953, starting with a tiny green and red road roller?

Matchbox owes its name to a school rule: co-owner Jack Odell's daughter could only bring toys that fit inside a matchbox. He shrank the firm's road roller to suit, and the range grew from there.

Which backyard version of baseball did David Mullany develop in Fairfield, Connecticut, in 1953 for his 12-year-old son?

Wiffle ball takes its name from 'whiff', slang for striking out swinging. The hollow plastic ball has oblong holes in one half only, a design meant to curve easily.

Which movement did science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard first incorporate as a church in Camden, New Jersey, in 1953?

Scientology had begun a year earlier as a secular body, the Hubbard Association of Scientologists. A second church was incorporated in California in 1954.

Which American weekly magazine sold 1.56 million copies of its first national issue in April 1953 at 15 cents each?

TV Guide launched in just ten cities. Its first cover showed a television star's newborn son under a headline that valued the baby at $50 million.

Which country star died at 29 in a car's back seat on New Year's Day 1953, bound for an Ohio concert?

Hank Williams's heart failed near Oak Hill, West Virginia, as a driver took him towards a show in Canton. A date in Charleston the night before had already been cancelled.

Which actor played motorcycle gang leader Johnny Strabler in the 1953 outlaw biker film The Wild One?

Marlon Brando's biker became a cultural icon of the 1950s. The plot grew out of sensational press coverage of a 1947 motorcycle rally that got out of hand in Hollister, California.

Which Arthur Miller play about the Salem witch trials opened on Broadway in January 1953 as an allegory for McCarthyism?

The Crucible won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and convicted of contempt the next year for refusing to name names.

Which British prime minister won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for his histories, biographies and oratory?

Winston Churchill did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. His wife Clementine collected the prize for him that December, accompanied by their daughter Mary Soames.

Which American novelist won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with a short tale of an aging Cuban fisherman?

Ernest Hemingway built The Old Man and the Sea on a story he had first been told fifteen years earlier. It was the only work named when he won the Nobel Prize a year later.

Which golfer won the Masters, US Open and British Open in 1953, four years after a near-fatal collision with a bus?

Ben Hogan was 40 when he completed the sweep at Carnoustie in Scotland. New York welcomed him home with a ticker-tape parade down Broadway.

Which future British prime minister, born in Edinburgh in May 1953, sang in a student rock band called Ugly Rumours?

Tony Blair played guitar as well as singing with the band, and tried stand-up comedy as a student too. He was born at the Queen Mary Maternity Home in the Scottish capital.

Which actor, born in Drogheda, Ireland, in May 1953, was announced in 1994 as the fifth man to play James Bond?

Pierce Brosnan was born a month after the first Bond novel reached British bookshops. He played 007 in four films, from GoldenEye in 1995 to Die Another Day in 2002.

Which New York singer, born in June 1953, won the Best New Artist Grammy after her debut album She's So Unusual?

Cyndi Lauper was the first woman to take four top-five Hot 100 singles from a debut album. 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' and 'Time After Time' were two of them.

Which lawyer led about 136 rebels in a failed dawn attack on Cuba's Moncada Barracks on 26 July 1953?

Fidel Castro received a 15-year sentence and used his time in prison to write up his courtroom defence as a speech. A general amnesty for political prisoners freed him in 1955.

Which supposed 'missing link', announced from Sussex gravel beds in 1912, was definitively exposed as a hoax in 1953?

Piltdown Man combined a small modern human skull with an orangutan's jaw and filed-down teeth. A 2016 review pinned the fraud on its finder, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson.

In which New England resort town did Senator John F. Kennedy marry Jacqueline Bouvier on 12 September 1953?

Newport was home to Hammersmith Farm, the estate of the bride's stepfather. The wedding Mass at St. Mary's Church was celebrated by Boston's Archbishop Cushing.

Which California governor did President Eisenhower pick as chief justice after Fred Vinson died in September 1953?

Earl Warren got the job only after Thomas Dewey turned it down. A month earlier he had agreed to become solicitor general, an appointment that was overtaken before it was even announced.

At which New York prison were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed on 19 June 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union?

Sing Sing's state execution chamber was borrowed by the federal government for the case. The couple were the first American civilians executed on such charges, and the first in peacetime.

Which country's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was ousted in August 1953 in a coup instigated by MI6 and the CIA?

Iran had nationalized its oil industry under Mosaddegh, and protecting British oil interests was a key motive. London called the plot Operation Boot, while Washington called it Ajax.

Which widescreen process did 20th Century Fox launch in 1953 with the biblical epic The Robe?

CinemaScope was so new that many theaters could not show it. Every scene of The Robe was therefore shot twice, once through the anamorphic lenses and once in a flat version.

Which American teenager became the first woman to win tennis's calendar Grand Slam in 1953?

Maureen Connolly, nicknamed Little Mo, was 18 when she swept all four majors. A horse-riding accident the following July injured her right leg and ended her tennis career at 19.

Which American pilot borrowed a Canadair Sabre jet in May 1953 and became the first woman to break the sound barrier?

Jackie Cochran had first asked the U.S. Air Force for an F-86 and been refused. The Royal Canadian Air Force then arranged the loan of its only Sabre Mk.3.

Which visiting team beat England 6–3 at Wembley in November 1953 in football's so-called Match of the Century?

Hungary arrived as Olympic champions on a run of 24 unbeaten games. The defeat pushed England to rethink its training and tactics, and a rematch the next year ended 7–1.

Which country recorded 1,836 deaths when a North Sea storm surge broke through its sea defences on 31 January 1953?

The Netherlands suffered its worst natural disaster since the Middle Ages that night. The country answered with the Delta Works, a vast system of dams and storm surge barriers.

Which composer of Peter and the Wolf died on 5 March 1953, the very day the Soviet dictator died?

Sergei Prokofiev could barely be given a funeral, because crowds mourning the leader filled the streets for three days. His coffin had to be carried by hand through back streets.

Which gray colt, the first racehorse made famous by television, lost only once, in the 1953 Kentucky Derby?

Native Dancer, nicknamed the Gray Ghost, lost to a 25-1 outsider called Dark Star. He rebounded to win the Preakness and Belmont, and retired with 21 wins from 22 starts.

Which crooner made 'That's Amore' his signature hit after it featured in the 1953 comedy film The Caddy?

Dean Martin's hit was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar, but it lost to 'Secret Love' from Calamity Jane, the Doris Day musical.