50 Fun Facts About 1955

Which theme park opened in Anaheim in July 1955 with a live TV special co-hosted by Ronald Reagan?

Disneyland was built on 160 acres of orange groves and walnut trees. Art Linkletter and Bob Cummings shared the hosting on ABC, a day before the public was let in.

Which seamstress was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat?

Rosa Parks was fined $10 plus $4 in court fees. She was not the first: 15-year-old Claudette Colvin had been arrested for the same act on a Montgomery bus nine months earlier.

Which burger chain dates its founding to a restaurant Ray Kroc opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955?

McDonald's was already trading in San Bernardino under the McDonald brothers, who ran eight of the milkshake machines Kroc sold for a living. He became the owner in 1961.

Which disease did Jonas Salk's vaccine, announced as safe on April 12, 1955, protect millions of children against?

Polio made Salk a household name, yet he chose not to patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it, so that it could be distributed as widely as possible.

Which 1985 film drops a teenager into November 5, 1955, the day a scientist conceived his time machine?

Back to the Future strands Marty McFly in 1955 with no plutonium for the trip home. The only thing that can supply the 1.21 gigawatts he needs is a bolt of lightning.

Which Muppet did Jim Henson create in 1955 from his mother's discarded coat and two ping-pong ball halves?

Kermit the Frog started out as a vague lizard-like creature on Henson's local TV series Sam and Friends. The coat was a turquoise spring coat his mother had thrown out.

Which reference work, first bound in August 1955, grew out of an argument over Europe's fastest game bird?

The Guinness Book of Records was the idea of brewery boss Sir Hugh Beaver, who had missed a shot at a golden plover. Twins Norris and Ross McWhirter compiled it, and it was a bestseller by Christmas.

Which fastener, patented in 1955, was inspired by burrs that stuck to George de Mestral's dog in the Alps?

Velcro came from the burdock burs de Mestral examined after a hunting trip. When his patent expired in 1978, low-cost imitations from Asia flooded the market.

Which physicist died in Princeton in April 1955, after which a pathologist removed his brain without permission?

Albert Einstein was 76 and had kept working almost to the end. Pathologist Thomas Harvey preserved the brain, hoping later science could discover what made him so intelligent.

Which Bill Haley & His Comets single from the film Blackboard Jungle spent two months at number one in 1955?

Rock Around the Clock was the first rock and roll record to top the pop charts in both the US and UK. It plays under the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle and four more times in the film.

Which 1955 animated feature, the first shot in CinemaScope, is famous for two dogs sharing a plate of spaghetti?

Lady and the Tramp almost went out without that scene. Animator Frank Thomas found it on a discarded story reel and animated the whole sequence himself.

Which 1955 Billy Wilder comedy has Marilyn Monroe's white dress blown upward as she stands on a subway grate?

The Seven Year Itch was shot in late 1954 and is the only film Wilder made for 20th Century-Fox. He and co-writer George Axelrod complained of working under straitjacketed conditions.

Which frontiersman, played on TV by Fess Parker, set off a 1955 craze for coonskin caps and bubble gum cards?

Davy Crockett merchandise worth over $300 million had been sold by the end of 1955. Parker later said a voided contract for a share of those sales cost him millions.

Which Apple co-founder was born in San Francisco in February 1955 and adopted shortly afterward?

Steve Jobs went to Paul and Clara Jobs only after a lawyer and his wife pulled out on learning the baby was a boy. His birth mother had asked for college graduates.

Which software billionaire was born in Seattle in October 1955 to a prominent lawyer and a bank board member?

Bill Gates met Paul Allen at Seattle's private Lakeside School. He dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft with him and ran it as CEO for the next 25 years.

Which British prime minister resigned in April 1955 at the age of 80 and handed over to Anthony Eden?

Winston Churchill had returned to office at nearly 77 and was in declining health. He stayed on in the House of Commons as an MP until 1964.

Which TV western, adapted from a radio drama in 1955, ran for 20 seasons with James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon?

Gunsmoke aired 635 episodes, the most of any scripted American primetime series until The Simpsons passed it. On radio, the marshal had been voiced by William Conrad.

Which organization's Santa-tracking tradition traces back to a 1955 Sears ad that invited children to phone Santa?

NORAD tells it this way: the ad's number was one digit away from the Continental Air Defense Command's line, and Colonel Harry Shoup found himself answering a child who wanted Santa.

Which film director began hosting a CBS anthology series in October 1955, walking into a caricature of his own profile?

Alfred Hitchcock drew the line caricature himself. The theme music, Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, was suggested by his regular composer Bernard Herrmann.

Which baseball team beat the New York Yankees in 1955 for its only World Series title before moving west?

The Brooklyn Dodgers had lost all five of their earlier World Series meetings with the Yankees. Johnny Podres shut New York out in Game 7, and the team left for Los Angeles after 1957.

Which heavyweight champion beat Archie Moore in September 1955 in the last fight of an unbeaten career?

Rocky Marciano finished 49–0 with 43 knockouts and retired as champion without ever losing. Moore, who floored him in the second round, was one of just two men ever to knock him down.

Which young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church was chosen in December 1955 to lead the Montgomery bus boycott?

Martin Luther King Jr. had been called to the church only the year before. The boycott lasted 385 days, his house was bombed, and it made him the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

Which novel narrated by Humbert Humbert was first published in Paris in 1955 after American publishers turned it down?

Lolita first appeared from Olympia Press as a pair of green paperbacks full of typographical errors. Graham Greene then named it one of the three best books of 1955.

Which final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings reached British bookshops in October 1955?

The Return of the King was a title Tolkien disliked, because he felt it revealed too much of the story. He would have preferred The War of the Ring.

Which British royal announced in October 1955 that she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend?

Princess Margaret wrote the statement together with Townsend, who had been her father's equerry. It was the first official confirmation that the two had been in a relationship at all.

Which Soviet-led military alliance was created in May 1955, days after West Germany was admitted to NATO?

The Warsaw Pact bound the Soviet Union to seven other Eastern European states. Czechoslovak president Václav Havel formally ended it in Prague in July 1991, after 36 years.

Which singer's Sun Records contract did RCA Victor buy in November 1955 for an unprecedented $40,000?

Elvis Presley was 20 and legally still a minor, so his father signed the contract. Heartbreak Hotel, his first RCA single, came out two months later and went to number one.

Which US president suffered a serious heart attack while on vacation in Colorado in September 1955?

Dwight D. Eisenhower recovered at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center. His personal physician had first misdiagnosed the symptoms as indigestion and failed to call in urgently needed help.

Which gemstone did General Electric announce in February 1955 that its scientists had made in a laboratory press?

Diamond was first made in a commercially successful way by GE's Tracy Hall on December 16, 1954. Hall left the company in 1955 and later built a different press to get around a secrecy order on GE's patents.

Which actress won the Best Actress Oscar in March 1955 for The Country Girl, in an upset over favorite Judy Garland?

Grace Kelly only had the part because a pregnant Jennifer Jones bowed out. Garland had just given birth, and the cameramen waiting to film her acceptance speech left when the winner was read out.

Which 1955 film about restless teenagers features a field trip to Griffith Observatory and a fatal cliffside car race?

Rebel Without a Cause was treated by its studio as a B-movie and begun on black-and-white film stock. Natalie Wood almost lost the role of Judy because the director thought she didn't fit a wild teen.

Which Jackie Gleason sitcom about bus driver Ralph Kramden debuted as a filmed half-hour series on CBS in October 1955?

The Honeymooners grew out of a recurring sketch on Gleason's variety show. As a series of its own it ended after only 39 episodes, which fans now call the Classic 39.

Which CBS quiz show, launched in June 1955 with Revlon as sponsor, knocked I Love Lucy off the top of the ratings?

The $64,000 Question shut each contestant in a Revlon isolation booth once the stakes reached $8,000. It was later embroiled in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s.

Which children's TV character, played by Bob Keeshan, began a 29-year run on CBS mornings in 1955?

Captain Kangaroo was built on what Keeshan called the warm relationship between grandparents and children. He played the Captain more than 9,000 times, after starting out as Clarabell the Clown.

Which guitarist reworked the fiddle tune Ida Red into Maybellene, his first hit for Chess Records in 1955?

Chuck Berry turned the tune into the story of a hot rod race and a broken romance. It was a major hit with both Black and white audiences, topping Billboard's rhythm and blues chart.

Which 1955 ballad, written as the theme for a prison film, became a Righteous Brothers standard a decade later?

Unchained Melody has been recorded more than 1,500 times. In 1955 alone three different versions reached the US top 10, and the 1965 recording found a new audience through the 1990 film Ghost.

Which Broadway musical starring Mary Martin drew a then-record 65 million viewers when NBC aired it live in March 1955?

Peter Pan was the first full-length Broadway production shown on color TV, with nearly all of the original cast. The stage run had closed in February so the company could prepare for the broadcast.

Which term did John McCarthy coin in a 1955 proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College?

Artificial intelligence was the subject McCarthy, then a young mathematics professor, wanted about ten people to study for two months. The workshop met in the summer of 1956 and is seen as the field's founding event.

Which action star was born in March 1955 in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, where his American father was a soldier?

Bruce Willis spoke with a stutter as a boy and found that acting on stage reduced it. He first became famous on the TV series Moonlighting, then played John McClane in Die Hard.

At which motor race did a car fly into the crowd in June 1955, the deadliest accident in motorsport history?

The 24 Hours of Le Mans crash killed at least 82 people when a Mercedes disintegrated into a spectator area. Several European countries banned motorsport outright, and Switzerland kept its ban for decades.

Which 14-year-old from Chicago was abducted and killed while visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955?

Emmett Till's mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket, and tens of thousands came. An all-white jury acquitted the two men tried for his murder the following month.

Which country, occupied by four Allied powers since 1945, regained full independence under a State Treaty in May 1955?

Austria had promised perpetual neutrality, one reason the Soviet Union agreed to sign. The treaty was signed at Vienna's Schloss Belvedere, and the last occupation troops left that October.

Which Argentine president was overthrown in September 1955 by a coup that called itself the Liberating Revolution?

Juan Perón had been elected in 1946 and re-elected in 1951. His party was outlawed and he was exiled, yet he came back in 1973 and was elected president for a third time.

Which US Navy vessel first put to sea in January 1955 as the world's first nuclear-powered submarine?

USS Nautilus shares its name with the submarine in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. In 1958 it made the first submerged transit of the North Pole, and it is now a museum ship in Connecticut.

Which Himalayan peak, the world's third highest, was first climbed in May 1955 by Britons Joe Brown and George Band?

Kangchenjunga's first climbers stopped just short of the true summit. They were keeping a promise to the ruler of Sikkim that the top of the mountain would remain inviolate.

Which country hosted the leaders of 29 Asian and African states at the Bandung Conference in April 1955?

Indonesia's President Sukarno was a key organizer alongside Jawaharlal Nehru, both hoping to build a nonaligned movement. The countries taking part held 1.5 billion people, 54% of the world's population.

Which contralto became the first Black American singer to perform at New York's Metropolitan Opera in January 1955?

Marian Anderson sang Ulrica in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. In 1939, refused Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, she had sung on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead.

Which bebop saxophonist nicknamed Bird died in New York City in March 1955 at the age of 34?

Charlie Parker had arrived in ill health at Baroness Pannonica's suite in the Stanhope Hotel and refused to go to the hospital. The coroner estimated that the body belonged to a man of between 50 and 60.

Which French car drew 12,000 orders on the first day of the Paris Motor Show in October 1955?

The Citroën DS took 743 of those orders in the first 15 minutes. After 18 years of secret development, it was the first mass-production car with both hydropneumatic suspension and disc brakes.

Which computer scientist, born in London in June 1955, went on to invent the World Wide Web?

Tim Berners-Lee grew up with computing in the family. His parents were both mathematicians who worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first general-purpose electronic computer sold commercially.