• Politics: Congress passed the Interstate Highway Bill.
• The Top Song was Don’t Be Cruel/ Hound Dog by Elvis Presley
• The Big Movies included The Ten Commandments, Around the World in 80 Days, and War and Peace
• Minimum Wage in 1956: $1.00 per hour
  Price of an Oldsmobile, “88” Holiday sedan: $2,929.29
  Price of a movie ticket: 50 cents
• The World Population was ~ 2,856,000,000
• US Life Expectancy: Males: 66.7 years, Females: 72.9 years
• ‘Sock Hops’- 50s school dances, were named after you had to remove your shoes to protect the varnished cafeteria and gymnasium floors.
• And… The first guest to ring the opening bell on the NYSE was Leonard Ross (age 10). Young Ross got this chance by winning a television quiz show answering questions about the stock market.

“You’re in good hands with Allstate.”
-Allstate

“We will bury you.”
– Nikita Khrushchev

“Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.”
– James Dean

“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”
-Times (watches)

“Away go troubles down the drain.”
– Roto-Rooter

On his wedding day in 1956, Beryl Lailey promised to keep a canned whole chicken until his 50th Anniversary, when he would eat it. He did and did not become ill.

Swedish sailor Ake Viking sent a bottled message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” found in Sicily by a 17-year-old Sicilian girl named Paolina, sparking a correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1958.

The Chrysler Corporation offered an under-the-dash-mounted record player (phonograph). The option was discontinued the following year.

One reason The Ten Commandments are on display at so many courthouses in the US is that Cecil B DeMille gave away 4,000 tablets engraved with the scripture to promote the 1956 film The Ten Commandments.

NBC introduced its multicolored peacock logo in 1956 to entice people to buy color TVs manufactured by RCA, which owned the network.

In 1956, the IBM 350 hard disk drive had 3.75 MB of storage, weighed over 2000 lbs, and had to be moved around with forklifts.

For a bet, while drunk, Thomas Fitzpatrick stole a small plane from New Jersey and then landed it perfectly on a narrow Manhattan street in front of the bar he had been drinking at. Then, two years later, he did it again after a man didn’t believe he had done it the first time.

Grace Kelly’s family paid a $2 million dowry when she married Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956.

The first Republican (and president) that The New York Times endorsed was Abraham Lincoln. The last Republican they endorsed was Dwight Eisenhower, in 1956.

In February 1956, the last surviving eyewitness to the Lincoln assassination, Samuel Seymour, appeared on the television show, “I’ve Got a Secret”.

Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan Kenobi) converted to Catholicism in 1956 after playing a Catholic priest in a film. While filming Father Brown in Burgundy in 1954, Guinness was in costume as a Catholic priest, and was mistaken for a real priest by a local child.

Monkee’s Mike Nesmith’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, invented “Mistake Out,” later renamed Liquid Paper.

In September, IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data.

Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman took acting classes together in 1956. Their classmates voted them “Least Likely to Succeed.”

A contestant on The Price Is Right was offered an elephant as a bonus prize to make for extra ivory for the grand piano he had just won. The real prize was $4,000, but the contestant insisted he wanted the elephant. The show eventually delivered an elephant from Kenya to him.

On October 8, Game 5 of the World Series, NY Yankee right-hander Don Larson pitched a ‘perfect game.’

Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, known as the conservative Harvard, was the first college to have discrimination based on sex, religion, or race in admissions prohibited in its charter, and also refused to play in the 1956 Tangerine Bowl when its black players were not allowed on the field.

A killer fog blanketed London in 1952, leaving as many as 12,000 people dead. It led to Parliament passing the first Clean Air Act in 1956.

The Olympic Closing Ceremony tradition of athletes mingling and celebrating together began at the 1956 games following a suggestion by a 17-year-old Chinese student, John Wing, who thought the idea would ease the many political tensions at those games.

The United States passed the Refrigerator Safety Act, which required all fridges to be magnetically sealed. This was due to the high amount of children who suffocated in latched refrigerators.

Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft.

The infamous ‘Priory of Scion’, which many people believe is a secret organization that protects the ongoing Merovingian bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, is not an ancient organization. It was founded in 1956 “to defend the rights and the freedom of affordable housing.”

Twenty-five people were hospitalized after a melee at a Bill Haley concert in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

ALCOHOL-RELATED ARTIST DEATH: Jackson Pollock died in a car accident. His 1948 work, No. 5 sold to David Geffen for $140,000,000.

Bon Appétit began publication

Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel, the leading competitors on TV’s quiz show Twenty-One, admitted to being coached by the show’s producers.

American Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr., the first official death of the Vietnam War, was not killed in action but instead was murdered by another American airman.

Due to air friction and a steepened dive path, an F-11 Tiger shot itself down with its gunfire.

Scriptores rerum Germanicarum septentrionalium, vicinorumque populorum diversi (Various historians of the Northern Germans and of neighboring peoples), a book borrowed in 1667-68 from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, was not returned until 1956.

Commercial flights were allowed to fly any course to their destination and would often detour over points of interest. This ended in 1956 when two planes crashed mid-flight over the Grand Canyon.

At the 1956 Olympics, an Australian student successfully impersonated an Olympic torchbearer, handing the mayor of Sydney a painted chair leg topped with a pair of burning underwear in front of a crowd of thousands.

Dick Clark took over hosting duties on Bob Horn’s Bandstand after Bob allegedly ‘twiddled’ with female teenage dancers who appeared on his show. They changed the name to American Bandstand.

(Data is compiled from charts, including Billboard’s Pop, Rock, Airplay, R&B/Dance, and Singles Charts. The Hot 100 is the primary chart used for this list.)

December 8, 1956 – February 8, 1957: Guy Mitchell – Singing The Blues