50 Fun Facts About 60th Birthday

Which gemstone names the 60th wedding anniversary, the first to earn Commonwealth couples a royal message?

Diamond follows ruby at 40 years and gold at 50, and the same gem names a jubilee held after 60 years on a throne or in business.

Which ancient people inherited base-60 counting from the Sumerians and handed down our 60-minute hour?

Babylonians worked in base 60, a good fit for clocks: 60 is the smallest number that divides evenly by every number from one to six.

Which Los Angeles Lakers star scored 60 points against the Utah Jazz in the final game of his career?

Kobe Bryant took a career-high 50 shots that night and outscored the whole Jazz team 23–21 in the fourth quarter of a 101–96 win.

Which party game became a hit after Eva Gabor played it with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1966?

Twister was the first popular American game to use the players' own bodies as playing pieces, and rival toy firms attacked Milton Bradley for selling something too racy.

Which fast-food founder was 65 and living on Social Security when he took to the road selling franchises?

Colonel Sanders sold his Kentucky restaurant after a new interstate drained its traffic, then collected a few cents for every chicken his franchise partners sold.

Which television host introduced the Beatles to more than 73 million American viewers in February 1964?

Ed Sullivan booked the band for three shows, two live and one taped, and the first of them is credited with launching American Beatlemania.

Which Beatle wrote the melody of When I'm Sixty-Four at about age 14, a decade before Sgt. Pepper?

Paul McCartney came up with the tune around 1956, when he assumed he would end up writing for cabaret instead of rock and roll.

Which New York Yankees slugger hit 60 home runs in 1927, a record that stood until Roger Maris hit 61?

Babe Ruth beat his own record by one that year, hitting number 60 off Tom Zachary on September 30 to break a 2–2 tie in the eighth inning.

Which animal opens the Chinese zodiac, whose full cycle of animals and elements takes 60 years to complete?

Rat comes first because, in the best-known folk tale, it crossed the river on the back of the Ox and jumped off just ahead at the finish.

Which 1969 music festival was held on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York?

Woodstock kept the name of an artists' town in the next county; the concert moved to the farm after the town of Wallkill shut it out only weeks before opening day.

Which British monarch marked 60 years on the throne in June 1897 with a grand procession through London?

Queen Victoria was by then the longest-reigning monarch in British history, and the day was declared a bank holiday in Britain, Ireland and India.

Which word, built on the Latin for sixty each, describes a person between 60 and 69 years old?

Sexagenarian comes from the Latin sexagenarius, meaning containing sixty; a plainer modern synonym is sixtysomething.

In which country is a 60th birthday called hwangap, traditionally a feast paid for by the children?

Korea counts the hwangap by international age, so the guest of honour is already 61 in traditional reckoning, and seaweed soup called miyeok-guk must be on the table.

Which Roman numeral for sixty labelled the Super Bowl played at Levi's Stadium in February 2026?

LX puts L for 50 ahead of X for 10; reverse the two letters and the smaller numeral is subtracted, so XL means 40.

In which pub sport is 60 the most a single throw can earn, for landing in the treble 20?

Darts pays more for that narrow band than for the bullseye, which is worth 50; three treble 20s make 180, the highest score from one turn.

Which American network launched the newsmagazine 60 Minutes, known for its on-screen stopwatch, in 1968?

CBS began the programme as a bi-weekly Tuesday show hosted by Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, alternating with its other news productions.

Which actor plays reformed car thief Memphis Raines in the 2000 action film Gone in 60 Seconds?

Nicolas Cage's character has to steal 50 luxury cars to save his brother, in a loose remake of H. B. Halicki's 1974 film of the same name.

Which metal, atomic number 60, makes the powerful magnets in audio gear, hard drives and wind turbines?

Neodymium is combined with iron and boron to make permanent magnets that produce strong fields from small, lightweight parts, including electric car motors.

The 60-carbon molecule shaped like a soccer ball is named after which American architect of geodesic domes?

Buckminster Fuller designed domes whose lattice the molecule resembles, and chemists nicknamed the 60-atom cages buckyballs.

Which 1959 agreement reserves all land south of 60 degrees south latitude for peaceful science?

The Antarctic Treaty was the first arms control agreement of the Cold War, banning military activity and making the continent a scientific preserve.

Which type of triangle, the usual shape of a pool-ball rack, has three interior angles of 60 degrees?

Equilateral triangles also give the yield road sign its outline, and their three sides are always the same length as each other.

Which country decreed a ten-hour day with 100-minute hours in 1793, briefly abandoning the 60-minute hour?

France made decimal time official during its Revolution, but the idea never caught on and mandatory use was suspended in April 1795.

Which medical term, from the Greek for slow heart, describes a resting pulse under 60 beats per minute?

Bradycardia is not always a worry: rates below 50 are often normal during sleep in healthy young adults and athletes.

Which biblical patriarch was 60 years old when his wife Rebekah gave birth to the twins Esau and Jacob?

Isaac prayed for Rebekah after many childless years of marriage, and Genesis says the twins struggled with each other even in the womb.

Which sport's professional games last 60 minutes of play, split into three 20-minute periods?

Ice hockey stops the clock whenever the puck is out of play, so a 60-minute game takes about two hours and twenty minutes from the opening face-off.

Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?

Michael Collins circled the Moon thirty times on the 1969 mission, three years after making two spacewalks on Gemini 10.

Which Republican faced John F. Kennedy in a Chicago TV studio in 1960 for the first US presidential debate?

Richard Nixon and Kennedy debated four times that autumn, and no presidential candidates met in a debate again until 1976.

Which Canadian actor first played Captain James T. Kirk when Star Trek reached television in 1966?

William Shatner took command of the Enterprise in the show's second pilot and kept the role through seven feature films, ending with Star Trek Generations.

Which London designer gave the miniskirt its name, after her favourite make of car, the Mini?

Mary Quant is often called the style's inventor, a claim rivals dispute; she said the girls shopping on the King's Road kept asking for shorter hems.

Which nation won the 1966 World Cup after Geoff Hurst struck a hat-trick in the final?

England needed extra time to win 4–2, and no other man scored three in a World Cup final until Kylian Mbappé in 2022.

Which team, coached by Vince Lombardi, beat the Kansas City Chiefs in the first Super Bowl in 1967?

The Green Bay Packers won 35–10 and took the next title as well, and the Super Bowl trophy was later named after their coach.

Which Scottish actor became the first big-screen James Bond in the 1962 spy film Dr. No?

Sean Connery got the part after the producers gave up on Cary Grant, who would commit to only one film when they wanted a series.

Which Mattel toy cars, unveiled at the 1968 New York Toy Fair, raced along bright orange track sections?

Hot Wheels launched with a range of just 16 cars, the invention of Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler.

Which European city woke on 13 August 1961 to find troops and barbed wire cutting it in two?

Berlin was sealed by East German troops and workers, who tore up roads along the border and strung wire around the three western sectors.

In which country did surgeon Christiaan Barnard perform the first human heart transplant in December 1967?

South Africa made headlines when patient Louis Washkansky woke and talked easily with his wife; he died of pneumonia 18 days later.

Which Soviet cosmonaut became the first person in space when Vostok 1 circled the Earth in April 1961?

Yuri Gagarin made a single orbit lasting 108 minutes, and it turned out to be the only spaceflight of his life.

Which children's series premiered on American television in November 1969 with Muppets created by Jim Henson?

Sesame Street gained Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch after test audiences of children lost interest whenever the human street scenes ran without puppets.

In which Austrian city is The Sound of Music, a 1965 musical starring Julie Andrews, set and partly filmed?

Salzburg hosted months of location filming in 1964, and the real Maria von Trapp slipped into the picture in a brief uncredited cameo as a passer-by.

Which city was home to Hitsville U.S.A., the house where Berry Gordy's Motown label recorded its 1960s hits?

Detroit's car industry gave the label its name, a blend of motor and town, and the house on West Grand Boulevard had been a photographers' studio.

Which San Francisco district drew as many as 100,000 young people for the Summer of Love in 1967?

Haight-Ashbury filled with hippies inspired by the Beat writers, who had gathered a decade earlier across town in North Beach.

At which Washington landmark did Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his I Have a Dream speech in August 1963?

The Lincoln Memorial steps faced more than 250,000 civil rights supporters, and King left his prepared text to improvise the speech's most famous passage.

Which London teenager, born Lesley Hornby, was named The Face of 1966 by the Daily Express?

Twiggy was also voted British Woman of the Year, and within twelve months her fame as a model had spread around the world.

Which Hanna-Barbera cartoon, inspired by The Honeymooners, became prime time's first animated series in 1960?

The Flintstones ran on ABC until 1966 and is also counted as television's first animated sitcom.

Under which birth name did Muhammad Ali take the world heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in February 1964?

Cassius Clay won as a heavy underdog at 22 when Liston failed to come out for the seventh round, and within weeks he had dropped the name he was born with.

Which director made 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, co-writing the script with Arthur C. Clarke?

Stanley Kubrick drew the plot from several of Clarke's short stories, chiefly The Sentinel, first published in 1951.

Which pop artist first showed his 32 paintings of Campbell's soup cans at a Los Angeles gallery in 1962?

Andy Warhol gave each canvas a different variety of soup in the same 20-by-16-inch format, and the Ferus Gallery hung them that July.

Which banking innovation did Barclays unveil at its Enfield branch in north London in June 1967?

Cash machine customers in Enfield got there first by only nine days: a rival Swedish device followed, then a British competitor within the month.

Which satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live television pictures across the Atlantic?

Telstar 1 was also the first privately sponsored space launch, lifted from Cape Canaveral for its owners on a NASA rocket.

Which metal's radioactive isotope 60 supplied the gamma rays for cancer radiotherapy units from the 1950s?

Cobalt in its ordinary form is placed inside a nuclear reactor, where a bombardment of neutrons turns it into the intensely radioactive isotope.

Which American won 1968 Olympic high jump gold by sailing over the bar backwards, a style that took his name?

Dick Fosbury sprinted at the bar on a curve and went over head-first on his back, keeping his centre of mass lower than older techniques allowed.