1958 Trivia, Fun Facts, and Pop Culture History

In 1958, NASA was created, the Space Race had its institutional American answer to Sputnik, and the Hula Hoop sold 25 million units in its first four months. The first credit card appeared in Fresno. Elvis went into the Army. The Greatest Game Ever Played was played at Yankee Stadium in December. Vertigo opened. Touch of Evil opened. Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago and then refused it under pressure from the Soviet government. The peace symbol was designed in London. The LEGO was patented. Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit. It was a year that established more foundations than it was recognized for at the time.

Quick Facts from 1958

• World-Changing Event: President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958, creating NASA in direct response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik launches in 1957
• Top Song: Volare by Domenico Modugno was the best-performing single of the year on the Billboard Year-End Hot 100; At the Hop by Danny and the Juniors spent 7 weeks at number one and was the year’s most culturally resonant rock and roll hit
• Influential Songs: Tequila by The Champs, Tom Dooley by The Kingston Trio, Rebel Rouser by Duane Eddy
• Must-See Movies: Vertigo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones, Auntie Mame, South Pacific, Touch of Evil, The Fly, and The Blob
• Most Famous Person in America: Elizabeth Taylor, who was simultaneously the most commercially successful actress in Hollywood and the subject of considerable tabloid coverage
• Notable Books: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
• Price of a Postage Stamp: 4 cents
• Price of a Used 1957 Ford Fairlane: $1,995.00
• The Bald Guy: Yul Brynner
• Chinese Zodiac: Year of the Dog, associated with loyalty, honesty, and a tendency to worry — qualities distributed unevenly across 1958
• The Habit: Playing with the Hula Hoop, reading Doctor Zhivago
• The Conversation: Did you hear Elvis got drafted? And have you tried this Hula Hoop?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1958

Girls: Mary, Susan, Linda, Karen, Patricia
Boys: Michael, David, James, Robert, John

Mary held the top spot for girls. Michael continued its long dominance for boys. Patricia had been in the top five for girls since the mid-1940s, reflecting a naming convention that was beginning to give way to newer arrivals. The list’s remarkable year-to-year stability in this era reflected a cultural conservatism in naming that the following decade would disrupt.

Fashion Icons and Sex Symbols of 1958

Carroll Baker, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Doris Day, Diana Dors, Anita Ekberg, Annette Funicello, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Julie Newmar, Kim Novak, Elizabeth Taylor, Mamie Van Doren

Elizabeth Taylor’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was in theaters. Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida had made Italian-American co-productions a commercially reliable format and had, in the process, become two of the most recognizable faces in the world. Brigitte Bardot was generating in France the kind of publicity that would eventually reach international proportions.

Hollywood Hunks and Sex Symbols of 1958

Paul Newman, Elvis Presley

Paul Newman had Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Long, Hot Summer in the same year and was in the process of establishing himself as the most compelling leading man of his generation. Elvis Presley reported to the draft board on March 24, 1958, received his regulation haircut, and became Private #53310761.

The Quotes

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” — President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech to the Republican National Committee, a line whose origins in earlier American oratory Eisenhower likely did not trace but whose rhetorical efficiency he recognized

“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!” — Rosalind Russell as Mame Dennis in Auntie Mame, a line that became the film’s defining statement and that has been used in contexts ranging from motivational speeches to dinner party toasts ever since

“Look, Ma, no cavities!” — Crest toothpaste, in a campaign backed by the American Dental Association’s endorsement that helped make Crest the best-selling toothpaste in America

Time Magazine’s Man of the Year

Charles de Gaulle, for his return to power in France’s Fifth Republic following the political crisis over Algeria. De Gaulle had been out of the French government since 1946; the Algerian War and the resulting political instability brought him back as Prime Minister in June 1958, and he was elected President in December. He wrote the constitution of the Fifth Republic, which remains France’s governing framework. His return to power was the most significant shift in French politics since the Liberation.

Miss America and Miss USA

Miss America: Marilyn Van Derbur, Denver, Colorado — she disclosed in 1991 that she had been a victim of incest by her father throughout her childhood, becoming a prominent advocate for survivors
Miss USA: Eurlyne Howell, Louisiana

We Lost in 1958

Mike Todd, the theatrical and film producer who had been one of Hollywood’s most flamboyant personalities and who had produced Around the World in 80 Days, died March 22, 1958, at age 48, when his private plane The Liz — named after his wife, Elizabeth Taylor — crashed in New Mexico. He had been flying to New York. Elizabeth Taylor had been ill with a cold and had not made the flight.

W.C. Handy, the composer and musician known as the Father of the Blues — whose compositions St. Louis Blues, Memphis Blues, and Beale Street Blues had helped define and popularize blues as a musical form — died March 28, 1958, at age 84, of pneumonia. He had been blind for the last two decades of his life.

America in 1958 — The Context

The Space Race was the defining anxiety of American strategic life. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957 and Sputnik 2 in November 1957, demonstrating orbital capability the United States had not yet matched. The political and strategic implications — if the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they could put a warhead anywhere — generated a national response that culminated in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of July 29, 1958.

The United States had launched its own satellite — Explorer 1 — on January 31, 1958, ending the immediate gap in orbital capability. Vanguard 1, launched March 17, 1958, was smaller but survived; it remains the oldest man-made satellite in Earth orbit, having outlasted every spacecraft launched before or after it in its duration aloft, though it has not communicated since 1964.

The recession of 1957-58 was the most severe of the postwar period to that point, with unemployment reaching approximately 7.5 percent in mid-1958. The economy recovered in the second half of the year, but the recession had political consequences — Democrats gained 49 seats in the House and 15 in the Senate in the November midterm elections, the largest gain for either party since the New Deal era.

Civil rights were advancing unevenly and often violently. The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decisions of 1954 and 1955 mandated school desegregation; its implementation was actively resisted across the South. In 1958, Clennon King Jr. applied to the University of Mississippi and was committed to a state psychiatric hospital for doing so, on the grounds that any Black man who thought he could attend the all-white university must be insane.

The Greatest Game Ever Played

The 1958 NFL Championship Game, played December 28 at Yankee Stadium in New York City between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, is known as “The Greatest Game Ever Played” and was the first NFL playoff game to be decided in sudden-death overtime. The Colts trailed 17-14 with two minutes remaining, drove for a tying field goal, and then won in overtime when Alan Ameche scored on a one-yard run. The game was watched by approximately 45 million television viewers and is credited with establishing professional football as a major American television sport. Johnny Unitas’s drive in the final two minutes — 73 yards on 10 plays with no timeouts — was the moment that established him as the defining quarterback of the era.

Pop Culture Facts and History

The Hula Hoop, produced by Wham-O and introduced to the American market in the spring of 1958, sold 25 million units in four months. By 1960, an estimated 100 million had been sold worldwide. The modern plastic version was invented by Arthur “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr, who had been inspired by accounts of bamboo hoops used in Australian gym classes. The toy itself had existed in various forms for centuries — ancient Greek athletes used hoops for exercise, and metal, wooden, and vine hoops had been children’s toys in many cultures. The Wham-O version was a marketing triumph rather than an invention.

Vertigo, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, was released on May 9, 1958. It was not a commercial success on its initial release and received mixed reviews. It was re-released in 1983, re-evaluated, and is now consistently ranked among the greatest films ever made — the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound poll placed it at number one in 2012.

Touch of Evil, directed by Orson Welles, opened on February 22, 1958. The film’s opening shot — a continuous take lasting approximately three and a half minutes tracking a car through a border town — is one of the most analyzed sequences in cinema. Universal Studios edited the film without Welles’s approval; he submitted a 58-page memo detailing the changes he wanted. A restored version approximating his intentions was released in 1998.

NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act signed by Eisenhower on July 29, 1958, and began operations on October 1. It absorbed the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics along with its 8,000 employees, three research laboratories, and two small test facilities. Project Mercury, the first American human spaceflight program, was announced in October 1958. The first American in space was still two and a half years away.

Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments demonstrated the first working integrated circuit on September 12, 1958 — a germanium device that combined a transistor, a capacitor, and resistors on a single piece of semiconductor material. The invention solved the “tyranny of numbers” problem — the increasing complexity and unreliability of circuits as the number of individual components increased. Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for the invention. Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently developed a silicon version months later; both are credited with the invention.

The BankAmericard, the first general-purpose credit card with a revolving credit feature, was introduced by Bank of America in September 1958 when it mailed cards with a $500 credit limit to 60,000 residents of Fresno, California. The experiment was a planned test of the consumer credit market; it was sufficiently successful for the program to expand nationally. The BankAmericard became Visa in 1976.

The peace symbol was designed by Gerald Holtom, a British artist and designer, in February 1958, as the logo for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The symbol combines the semaphore signals for the letters N and D — nuclear disarmament — within a circle. Holtom later said he had also intended it to represent a human figure in despair. It was used publicly for the first time at a march from London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston on Good Friday 1958. It became one of the most widely recognized symbols of the 20th century.

Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, published in Italy in 1957 after being refused publication in the Soviet Union, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. Pasternak accepted the prize, then withdrew his acceptance under intense Soviet government pressure — the Soviet Writers’ Union threatened to expel him, and the government threatened to exile him. He wrote to the Nobel Committee: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it.” He died in 1960. Doctor Zhivago was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was published in 1958 by Heinemann. The novel, set in the Igbo village of Umuofia in Nigeria during the period of British colonial expansion, told the story of the Igbo people from the inside — in contrast to the long tradition of African fiction written from the colonial perspective. It is considered the founding text of modern African literature in English and has sold over 20 million copies.

Phil Spector, then 18 years old, recorded To Know Him Is to Love Him with his high school group the Teddy Bears in 1958. The song reached number one in December. Spector took the title from the inscription on his father’s gravestone. He went on to become one of the most influential — and eventually notorious — record producers in American music history.

Bossa Nova, the Brazilian musical genre that combined samba rhythms with jazz harmony and guitar, emerged in 1958 with João Gilberto’s recording of “Chega de Saudade” in Rio de Janeiro. The genre’s international commercial breakthrough came in 1962 with The Girl from Ipanema, but its foundations were laid by this recording.

The LEGO building block was patented on January 28, 1958, by Ole Kirk Christiansen’s son, Godtfred, in Denmark. The design — the interlocking stud-and-tube system — remains the same today. The company name came from the Danish phrase “leg godt,” meaning “play well.” Over 400 billion LEGO bricks have been produced since 1958.

CliffsNotes was founded in 1958 in Lincoln, Nebraska, by Clifton Hillegass, who began by reprinting Canadian Shakespeare study guides and expanded to cover the literary canon. The series provided plot summaries and literary analysis for students, generated significant academic controversy over whether it replaced or supplemented reading actual books, and has been used by every generation of American students since.

Robert Heft, a 17-year-old junior at Lancaster High School in Ohio, designed the 50-star American flag as a school project in 1958, earning a B-minus. He submitted the design to Congress when his teacher suggested that if the government accepted it, his grade would be changed. It was accepted and adopted. The grade was changed to an A.

Alan Freed, the disc jockey who coined the term “rock and roll” and was instrumental in bringing Black rhythm-and-blues music to white audiences, was fired from WABC in November 1959 following the congressional investigation into payola — the practice of accepting payments to promote specific recordings. Freed’s career effectively ended. The Payola scandal was developing through 1958 as congressional interest in the practice grew.

Jerry Lee Lewis’s career collapsed in 1958 when it became public during his UK tour that he had married Myra Gale Brown, his 13-year-old second cousin once removed. British press coverage was immediate and damning. He was booed off stage, and his UK tour was canceled after three shows. American radio programmers dropped his records. He had been one of the most commercially successful rock-and-roll performers in America; he would not return to the top of the charts for a decade.

Lana Turner’s 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed Turner’s boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, at their Beverly Hills home on April 4, 1958, after witnessing Stompanato physically threaten Turner. Stompanato died of his wounds. A coroner’s inquest ruled the killing a justifiable homicide, determining that Cheryl had acted to defend her mother. The incident was one of the most-covered celebrity stories of the year.

Disney’s nature documentary White Wilderness, released August 12, 1958, included a sequence depicting lemming mass suicide that was subsequently revealed to have been staged entirely by the production. Lemmings from the Canadian province of Manitoba — where mass migrations did not occur — were transported to Alberta, agitated, and filmed; some were herded off a cliff by production staff. The sequence entered popular culture as documentary evidence of a phenomenon that does not actually occur; lemmings do not commit mass suicide. The Disney film is the primary reason most people believe they do.

Nobel Prize Winners in 1958

Physics was awarded to Pavel Cherenkov, Ilya Frank, and Igor Tamm for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect — the characteristic blue glow emitted when charged particles travel through a medium faster than light travels through that medium. The effect is visible in water-cooled nuclear reactors and has applications in particle detection.

Chemistry went to Frederick Sanger for his work on the structure of proteins, especially insulin — the first complete determination of a protein’s amino acid sequence, completed in 1955 after a decade of painstaking work. Sanger would win a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, making him one of only four people to win two Nobel Prizes and the only person to win the Chemistry prize twice.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to George Beadle, Edward Tatum, and Joshua Lederberg for their discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of bacterial genetic material. Beadle and Tatum received the prize for their work showing that genes control specific chemical reactions — the “one gene, one enzyme” hypothesis. Lederberg received the prize for discovering that bacteria could exchange genetic material through a process he called conjugation.

Literature was awarded to Boris Pasternak of the Soviet Union for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition. Pasternak accepted, then withdrew under Soviet government pressure — one of the most politically coerced Nobel decisions in the prize’s history.

Peace was awarded to Georges Pire, a Belgian Dominican priest, for his work establishing villages in Western Europe to house displaced persons — specifically the hard-core refugees who had been left in camps in Germany, Austria, and Greece after the Second World War.

1958 Toys and Christmas Gifts

Hula Hoops, LEGOs, skateboards, the Crayola 64-box with the built-in sharpener (which had been available in a 48-color box since 1949 and was expanded to 64 in 1958), and the Concentration TV Game home version rounded out a holiday season dominated by the Hula Hoop craze. The 64-color Crayola box — with its distinctive palette of names, including Burnt Sienna, Cornflower Blue, and the recently renamed Midnight Blue (formerly Prussian Blue) — became one of the most recognizable consumer products in American childhood.

Broadway in 1958

No major Broadway productions opened in 1958 that are noted in the source data, though the season included the continuing run of My Fair Lady, which had opened March 15, 1956, and was in its third season as one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history.

Best Film Oscar Winner

The Bridge on the River Kwai, directed by David Lean and starring Alec Guinness and William Holden, won Best Picture at the 30th Academy Awards on March 26, 1958, for the 1957 film year. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Guinness, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The screenplay was credited to Pierre Boulle — the author of the source novel — because the actual writers, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, were blacklisted and could not be credited. They received posthumous Academy recognition in 1985. The whistled march — Colonel Bogey March — became one of the most recognized pieces of music associated with a film in the decade.

Top Movies of 1958

1. South Pacific
2. Auntie Mame
3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
4. Vertigo
5. No Time for Sergeants
6. Gigi
7. The Defiant Ones
8. The Old Man and the Sea
9. Damn Yankees!
10. I Want to Live!

South Pacific, the film adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical, was the highest-grossing film of the year. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof gave Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman two of their most celebrated performances. Vertigo was commercially unsuccessful upon release and has since been retroactively recognized as one of the greatest films ever made. The Defiant Ones, Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped prisoners chained together, was the most politically direct film of the year and earned Poitier his first Academy Award nomination.

Most Popular TV Shows of 1958

1. Gunsmoke (CBS)
2. Wagon Train (NBC)
3. Have Gun, Will Travel (CBS)
4. The Rifleman (ABC)
5. The Danny Thomas Show (CBS)
6. Maverick (ABC)
7. Tales of Wells Fargo (NBC)
8. The Real McCoys (ABC)
9. I’ve Got a Secret (CBS)
10. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (ABC)

Westerns dominated television in 1958 so thoroughly that seven of the top ten shows were Westerns. Gunsmoke had been running since 1955 and was in its fourth season. The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors as a widowed rancher raising his son in 1880s New Mexico, premiered September 30, 1958, and immediately entered the top ten. Maverick, starring James Garner as an anti-heroic gambler who preferred wit and money to violence, premiered on September 22, 1957, and offered a gentle parody of Western conventions while the genre was at its commercial peak.

1958 Billboard Number One Hits

December 30, 1957 – January 10, 1958: April Love — Pat Boone (carryover from late 1957)
January 11 – February 14: At the Hop — Danny and the Juniors (5 weeks)
February 15 – March 21: Don’t (I Beg of You) — Elvis Presley (5 weeks)
March 22 – April 25: Tequila — The Champs (5 weeks)
April 26 – May 2: Twilight Time — The Platters
May 3 – May 16: Witch Doctor — David Seville
May 17 – June 13: All I Have to Do Is Dream — The Everly Brothers (4 weeks)
June 14 – July 25: Purple People Eater — Sheb Wooley (6 weeks)
July 26 – August 8: Hard Headed Woman — Elvis Presley
August 9 – August 22: Poor Little Fool — Ricky Nelson
August 23 – August 29: Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu) — Domenico Modugno August 30 – September 5: Little Star — The Elegants
September 6 – October 3: Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu) — Domenico Modugno (two non-consecutive runs, 5 weeks total)
October 4 – November 14: It’s All in the Game — Tommy Edwards (6 weeks) November 15 – November 21: It’s Only Make Believe — Conway Twitty
November 22 – November 28: Tom Dooley — The Kingston Trio
November 29 – December 5: It’s Only Make Believe — Conway Twitty (second non-consecutive run)
December 6 – December 26: To Know Him Is to Love Him — The Teddy Bears (3 weeks)
December 27, 1958 – January 18, 1959: The Chipmunk Song — David Seville and the Chipmunks (carrying into 1959)

Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu) by Domenico Modugno was the best-performing single of the year on the Billboard Year-End chart — an Italian recording that reached number one in America and introduced European pop to the American mainstream in a way that anticipated later international crossovers. It won the Grammy for Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the inaugural Grammy Awards ceremony in May 1959. Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley spent six weeks at number one and was one of the more cheerfully inexplicable chart-toppers in chart history. It’s All in the Game by Tommy Edwards spent six weeks at number one; the melody had been composed by future Vice President Charles G. Dawes in 1912. Elvis Presley had two separate number ones — Don’t and Hard Headed Woman — before his March induction into the Army. To Know Him Is to Love Him by the Teddy Bears, produced by the 18-year-old Phil Spector, closed the year at number one.

Sports Champions of 1958

World Series: The New York Yankees defeated the Milwaukee Braves four games to three, in a rematch of the previous year’s Series, which the Braves had won. The Yankees had trailed three games to one before winning three consecutive games. Bob Turley pitched brilliantly in the final three games and was named Series MVP.

NFL Champions: The Baltimore Colts defeated the New York Giants 23-17 in sudden-death overtime on December 28, 1958, at Yankee Stadium, in the game immediately known as the Greatest Game Ever Played. Johnny Unitas drove 73 yards with no timeouts in the final two minutes to tie the game, and the Colts won in overtime on Alan Ameche’s one-yard run. The game was watched by approximately 45 million television viewers.

NBA Champions: The St. Louis Hawks defeated the Boston Celtics four games to two, their only NBA championship. Bob Pettit, the first player in NBA history to score 2,000 points in a single season, was the series MVP. The victory ended the Celtics’ two-year championship run; Boston would win the title again in 1959 and hold it for the following decade.

Stanley Cup: The Montreal Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins four games to two, winning their third consecutive championship. Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau, and Boom Boom Geoffrion anchored a dynasty that would win five consecutive Cups from 1956 to 1960.

U.S. Open Golf: Tommy Bolt won at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in a performance that combined genuine brilliance with a legendary temper. Bolt was known for throwing clubs; he won the Open with a two-stroke margin despite or because of the emotional intensity he brought to every round.

U.S. Open Tennis: Ashley Cooper of Australia won the men’s title and Althea Gibson won the women’s — her second consecutive U.S. Open title. Gibson had also won Wimbledon that year, her second consecutive Wimbledon title, making her the dominant women’s player in the world.

Wimbledon: Ashley Cooper won the men’s title and Althea Gibson won the women’s. Gibson was the first Black player to win either Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, having broken the color barrier at both in 1956-57. Her back-to-back victories at both major tournaments in 1957-58 constitute one of the dominant stretches of women’s tennis in the modern era.

NCAA Football: Iowa and LSU shared the national championship for the 1958 season. LSU, under Paul Dietzel, finished 11-0 and won the Sugar Bowl. Iowa, under Forest Evashevski, finished 8-1-1. The split title was one of many in the decade that strengthened the argument for a playoff system.

NCAA Basketball: Kentucky defeated Seattle 84-72 in the national championship game in Louisville. Adolph Rupp was the Kentucky coach; the victory was his fourth national championship. Seattle’s Elgin Baylor, who had averaged 32.5 points per game during the season, scored 25 in the final.

Kentucky Derby: Tim Tam, trained by Horace A. Jones, ridden by Ismael Valenzuela, won the Derby and went on to win the Preakness, setting up a potential Triple Crown. He finished second in the Belmont after fracturing a sesamoid bone mid-race, completing the race on an injured leg in one of the more dramatic Belmont performances of the decade.

FIFA World Cup: Brazil defeated Sweden 5-2 in the final in Stockholm, winning their first World Cup championship on European soil. A 17-year-old named Pelé scored twice in the final, including a goal in which he controlled the ball on his chest, flicked it over a defender, and volleyed it into the net. The celebration photograph — Brazilian captain Hilderaldo Bellini lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy above his head — established the trophy-lifting gesture that has been standard in sports celebrations ever since.

Frequently Asked Questions About 1958

Q: Why was NASA created?
A: The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, demonstrated that the Soviets had developed the rocket capability to put a satellite in Earth orbit — and by extension, to deliver a nuclear warhead to any location on Earth. The political and strategic shock prompted the United States to create a civilian space agency. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958; NASA began operations on October 1. It absorbed the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and began planning Project Mercury.

Q: What was the Greatest Game Ever Played?
A: The 1958 NFL Championship Game, played December 28 at Yankee Stadium between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, was the first NFL playoff game decided in sudden-death overtime. The Colts trailed 17-14 with two minutes remaining, drove 73 yards with no timeouts for a tying field goal on a drive led by Johnny Unitas, and won in overtime on Alan Ameche’s one-yard run. The game was watched by 45 million television viewers and is credited with establishing professional football as a major American television sport.

Q: What was the Payola scandal?
A: Payola was the practice of record labels and promoters paying radio disc jockeys to play their recordings without disclosing the payment. A congressional investigation beginning in 1958-59 revealed that the practice was widespread. Alan Freed, who had coined the term “rock and roll” and had been central to bringing Black R&B to white audiences, was fired from WABC in November 1959, effectively ending his career. Dick Clark survived the investigation after divesting from his music publishing interests. The investigation revealed the economic infrastructure underlying rock and roll’s commercial rise.

Q: What was the significance of Things Fall Apart?
A: Chinua Achebe’s novel, published in 1958, told the story of the Igbo people of Nigeria during the period of British colonial expansion from the perspective of the colonized rather than the colonizer. It was the first widely read African novel to do so in English and established a new tradition in African literature. It is now considered the most widely read African book and has sold over 20 million copies.

Q: Who was Althea Gibson?
A: Althea Gibson was the first Black player to compete at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, breaking the color barrier at the U.S. Nationals in 1950 and at Wimbledon in 1951. She won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open back-to-back in 1957 and 1958. She was the dominant women’s player in the world during those years and received relatively little commercial recognition compared to her white contemporaries. She later became the first Black player to compete on the LPGA golf tour.

In a year when NASA was created, Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the Hula Hoop sold 25 million units in four months, Barbie was almost ready (she would arrive in March 1959), Elvis was in the Army, Vertigo was in theaters to mixed reviews, and the Greatest Game Ever Played was played at Yankee Stadium in December before 45 million television viewers, 1958 established more things than it was given credit for at the time. The peace symbol was designed in London. The LEGO was patented in Denmark. The credit card appeared in Fresno. The 50-star flag was designed by a high school student who got a B-minus. Most foundations look unimpressive before the building goes up.

More 1958 Facts & History Resources:

BabyBoomers.com (1958)
Most Popular Baby Names (BabyCenter.com)
Popular and Notable Books (popculture.us)
Broadway Shows that Opened in 1958X
1958 Calendar, courtesy of Time and Date.com
Fact Monster
Fifties Web (1958)
1950s, Infoplease.com World History
1958 in Movies (according to IMDB)
Retrowaste Vintage Culture
1958 Television
1950s Slang
Wikipedia 1958