1956 Trivia, History and Fun Facts

Quick Facts from 1956

• World Changing Event: Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, 1956. Over 60 million Americans watched — roughly 82% of the TV-viewing audience. Ed Sullivan himself was so nervous about Elvis’s hip movements that he ordered cameras to film him only from the waist up.
• Top Song: “Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley
• Influential Songs: “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard and “Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley
• Happy Earworm: “The Happy Whistler” by Don Robertson
• Must-See Movies: The Ten Commandments, Giant, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Love Me Tender, Carousel, Bus Stop, Forbidden Planet, High Society, Seven Wonders of the World, and The King and I
• Most Famous American: William Holden — though Elvis was making a strong case
• Soap Operas: As the World Turns and The Edge of Night both premiered on CBS in 1956
• Notable Books: Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and Eloise by Kay Thompson
• Nestlé Chocolate Chip Morsels (6 oz): 19¢ | Basketball (official size): $2.89 | Hockey Stick: 79¢ | Hockey Puck: 25¢
• The Funny TV Guy: Ernie Kovacs
• The Funny Late Night Host: Steve Allen
• The Funny TV Lady: Lucille Ball
• The Bald Guy: Yul Brynner
• Tween and Teen Dancing: Sock Hops — named because students had to remove their shoes to protect the varnished gymnasium and cafeteria floors
• The Conversation: Was Elvis Presley dancing with too much sex appeal on television?

Top Ten Baby Names of 1956

Girls: Mary, Debra, Linda, Deborah, Susan Boys: Michael, James, Robert, David, John

Fashion Icons and Sex Symbols

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

Hollywood Hunks and Leading Men

James Dean, Harry Belafonte, Elvis Presley, Gregory Peck

The Quotes

“That’ll be the day.” — John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, The Searchers

“You’re in good hands with Allstate.” — Allstate Insurance tagline, introduced in 1956

“We will bury you.” — Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, addressing Western ambassadors, November 1956

“Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.” — James Dean — though he said it before dying in a car crash in 1955, it defined his legacy through 1956 and beyond

“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” — Timex watches campaign, 1956

“Away go troubles, down the drain.” — Roto-Rooter jingle, 1956

28th Academy Awards

The ceremony took place on March 21, 1956, at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, hosted by Jerry Lewis.

Marty won Best Picture, Best Director (Delbert Mann), and Best Actor (Ernest Borgnine). Anna Magnani won Best Actress for The Rose Tattoo. Marty was the first American film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Best Picture Oscar in the same year.

8th Primetime Emmy Awards

Held March 17, 1956, at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, hosted by Art Linkletter.

The Phil Silvers Show won Best Comedy Series. Producers’ Showcase won Best Dramatic Series. Phil Silvers won Best Actor; Loretta Young won Best Actress for Letter to Loretta.

Time Magazine Person of the Year

The Hungarian Freedom Fighter — honoring the people of Hungary who rose up against Soviet occupation in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, which was crushed by Soviet tanks in November.

Miss America and Miss USA

Miss America: Sharon Ritchie, Denver, CO
Miss USA: Carol Morris, Iowa

We Lost in 1956

Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionist painter, died on August 11, age 44, in a drunk-driving accident he caused. His 1948 work No. 5 was later sold for $140 million.
Albert Woolson — died August 2, age 106, the last surviving Union soldier of the Civil War
A.A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh — died January 31, age 74
Bela Lugosi, actor best known for Dracula, died August 16, age 73
H.L. Mencken, journalist and critic, died January 29, age 75
The DuMont Television Network folded in 1956 after operating as America’s fourth broadcast network since the 1940s. Most of its archives were destroyed, leaving a significant gap in early television history.

The Scandals

Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel, the leading competitors on the TV quiz show Twenty-One, were revealed to have been coached by the show’s producers, who gave them answers in advance. The scandal shook public trust in television and was later dramatized in Robert Redford’s film Quiz Show (1994).

At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Barry Larkin, a veterinary student at Sydney University, impersonated an official Olympic torchbearer and handed the Mayor of Sydney a painted chair leg topped with flaming underwear in front of thousands of spectators. The mayor carried it proudly for several blocks before realizing what had happened.

Dick Clark took over hosting duties on Bandstand after host Bob Horn was dismissed following accusations of inappropriate conduct with female teenage dancers. Clark renamed the show American Bandstand and turned it into one of the longest-running programs in television history.

Fallout

Nearly half the cast and crew of the 1956 film The Conqueror, 91 of approximately 220 people,  eventually developed cancer. The film was shot downwind of a Utah nuclear weapons testing site, and director Dick Powell later had tons of radioactive dirt shipped from the location to the studio for reshoots. Among those who died of cancer: John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendáriz. Howard Hughes, who produced the film, was reportedly so guilt-ridden that he bought every existing print for $12 million and kept them locked away for years.

1956 Firsts

Dodge produced the first car marketed explicitly to women — the La Femme, with a pink exterior, pink umbrella, and built-in lipstick holder. It did not sell well. Shockingly.

Dick Clark began hosting American Bandstand on July 9, 1956 — a run that would last until 1989.

The first backup camera in a car appeared in the 1956 Buick Centurion concept car — 64 years before backup cameras became federally mandated in the U.S.

Malcolm McLean invented and patented the modern shipping container in 1956, reducing his shipping cost from $5.86 per ton to 16 cents. It is one of the most consequential inventions of the 20th century, making modern global trade possible.

As the World Turns made its debut on CBS, becoming one of the longest-running soap operas in television history.

NBC introduced its multicolored peacock logo on May 22, 1956, specifically to encourage Americans to buy color TV sets manufactured by RCA, which owned NBC. The conflict of interest was obvious and apparently irrelevant.

Neutrinos were experimentally confirmed for the first time by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines in 1956.

Abigail Van Buren’s “Dear Abby” advice column debuted in newspapers in January 1956. Ann Landers had launched a competing column three months earlier. They were twin sisters who didn’t speak for years.

“In God We Trust” became the official motto of the United States in 1956, replacing the unofficial motto “E Pluribus Unum” after a congressional vote during the Cold War.

Tater Tots went on sale in 1956, introduced by Ore-Ida. They were created to use up potato scraps.

Batwoman (Kathy Kane) first appeared in Detective Comics #233 in July 1956.

Pop Culture Facts and History

Elvis Presley made his national television debut on January 28, 1956, on CBS’s Stage Show — not the Ed Sullivan appearance. By September, he was the most famous person in America.

On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash all gathered at Sun Studio in Memphis for an impromptu jam session — the only time all four were ever together. It was recorded and released as The Million Dollar Quartet.

Marilyn Monroe married playwright Arthur Miller on June 29, 1956. Norma Jean Mortenson had legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe that same year.

Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 19, 1956, in a ceremony watched by 30 million television viewers. She retired from acting at age 26 to become a princess.

Mike Nesmith’s mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, invented Liquid Paper (originally called “Mistake Out”) in 1956. Her son went on to join The Monkees. She eventually sold the company to Gillette for $47.5 million.

On October 8, 1956, New York Yankees pitcher Don Larsen threw the only perfect game in World Series history — in Game 5 against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yogi Berra ran to the mound and jumped into Larsen’s arms, creating one of the most iconic photographs in sports history.

Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina competed in her first Olympics in 1956, beginning a run that would earn her 18 Olympic medals across three Games — the most by any female athlete in Olympic history at that time.

Christopher Cockerell invented the hovercraft in 1956, using a cat food tin inside a coffee tin over a vacuum cleaner to prove the concept.

The IBM 350 hard disk drive — introduced in 1956 — had 3.75 megabytes of storage capacity and weighed over 2,000 pounds. It required a forklift and was leased for $3,200 per month.

The Wizard of Oz became the first major Hollywood film to run over 90 minutes and air uncut on television in a single evening, broadcast on CBS in 1956. An estimated 45 million people watched.

The U.S. passed the Refrigerator Safety Act in 1956, requiring all refrigerators to be openable from the inside after children suffocated playing in abandoned units.

Killer bees — Africanized honeybees — were created in Brazil in 1956 by entomologist Warwick Kerr, who crossbred African and Brazilian honeybees to increase honey production. Twenty-six swarms escaped his laboratory. The rest is a long and stinging history.

Twenty-five people were hospitalized following a melee at a Bill Haley and His Comets concert in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Rock and roll was already causing trouble.

Test pilot Thomas Attridge Jr. accidentally shot himself out of the sky in 1956 by flying his Grumman F-11 Tiger faster than the 20mm cannon shells he had just fired — and catching up to them. He survived the crash landing.

The phrase “I cried all the way to the bank” was popularized by Liberace in 1956 after he sued a British newspaper that implied he was homosexual — and won. The phrase predated him; he was, in fact, gay, and the lawsuit was eventually seen as an ironic footnote in LGBTQ history.

Alfred Hitchcock remade his own 1934 film, The Man Who Knew Too Much, in 1956 with James Stewart and Doris Day. He remains the only major director to officially remake one of his own films with a bigger budget and bigger stars.

President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act on June 29, 1956, authorizing 41,000 miles of interstate highways — the largest public construction project in American history at that time. Eisenhower pushed for it partly because he wanted evacuation routes in the event of a nuclear attack.

The first Eurovision Song Contest was held on May 24, 1956, in Lugano, Switzerland. Seven countries participated. Switzerland won. Nobody made a big deal about it yet.

Rocky Marciano retired from boxing on April 27, 1956, with a perfect 49-0 professional record — the only heavyweight champion in history to retire undefeated. He died in a plane crash in 1969.

13-year-old Bobby Fischer defeated chess grandmaster Donald Byrne in the 1956 Rosenwald Tournament in what chess historians called “The Game of the Century.”

The world’s first commercial nuclear power plant — Calder Hall in the United Kingdom — began operations on October 17, 1956.

The first transatlantic telephone cable — TAT-1 — began operating in 1956, connecting the U.S. and the UK. Prior to this, transatlantic calls were routed via short-wave radio.

Ampex publicly demonstrated videotape recording for the first time on April 14, 1956, at a broadcaster convention in Chicago. Television would never be the same.

The Habit

Reading Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

Christmas Gifts, Toys, and First Appearances of 1956

Yahtzee, Ticklebee Game, Play-Doh (first came in white; color versions followed in 1958), Ant Farm

Nobel Prize Winners

Physics — William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Houser Brattain (for the invention of the transistor)
Chemistry — Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood and Nikolay Semyonov
Medicine — André Frédéric Cournand, Werner Forssmann, and Dickinson W. Richards
Literature — Juan Ramón Jiménez
Peace — Not awarded in 1956
Economics — Prize not yet established (first awarded 1969)

Popular and Best-Selling Books of 1956

A Certain Smile — Françoise Sagan
Andersonville — MacKinlay Kantor
Auntie Mame — Patrick Dennis
Boon Island — Kenneth Roberts
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle — C.S. Lewis
Diamonds Are Forever — Ian Fleming
Don’t Go Near the Water — William
Brinkley Eloise — Kay Thompson
The Last Hurrah — Edwin O’Connor
The Mandarins — Simone de Beauvoir
Peyton Place — Grace Metalious
The Tribe That Lost Its Head — Nicholas Monsarrat

Broadway in 1956

My Fair Lady (musical) opened March 15, 1956, starring Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle, and ran until September 29, 1962 — at the time the longest-running Broadway musical in history.

Best Film Oscar Winner

Marty, directed by Delbert Mann and starring Ernest Borgnine, won Best Picture at the 28th Academy Awards in 1956, presented for the 1955 film year. At 90 minutes, it remains one of the shortest Best Picture winners in Oscar history.

The Bomb

Movie: The Conqueror — John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Enough said. Also, it irradiated half its cast. TV: Crunch and Des — a syndicated adventure series that came and went without leaving a discernible trace.

Top Movies of 1956

1. The Ten Commandments
2. Giant
3. The King and I
4. High Society
5. Friendly Persuasion
6. Around the World in 80 Days
7. Bus Stop
8. Picnic
9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
10. Love Me Tender

Most Popular TV Shows of 1956

1. I Love Lucy (CBS)
2. The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS)
3. General Electric Theatre (CBS)
4. The $64,000 Question (CBS)
5. December Bride (CBS)
6. Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS)
7. I’ve Got a Secret (CBS)
8. Gunsmoke (CBS)
9. The Perry Como Show (NBC)
10. The Jack Benny Show (CBS)

1956 Billboard Number One Songs

November 26, 1955 – January 13, 1956: “Sixteen Tons” — Tennessee Ernie Ford
January 14 – February 17: “Memories Are Made of This” — Dean Martin
February 18 – March 2: “The Great Pretender” — The Platters
March 3 – March 23: “Rock and Roll Waltz” — Kay Starr
March 24 – May 2: “Poor People of Paris” —
Les Baxter May 3 – June 15: “Heartbreak Hotel” — Elvis Presley
June 16 – August 3: “Wayward Wind” — Gogi Grant
August 4 – August 17: “I Almost Lost My Mind” — Pat Boone
August 18 – September 14: “My Prayer” — The Platters
September 15 – November 2: “Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog” — Elvis Presley
November 3 – November 16: “Green Door” — Jim Lowe
November 17 – December 7: “Love Me Tender” — Elvis Presley
December 8 – December 21: “Singing the Blues” — Guy Mitchell
December 22 – December 28: “Love Me Tender” — Elvis Presley (returned to #1)
December 29, 1956 – February 8, 1957: “Singing the Blues” — Guy Mitchell (returned to #1)

Elvis Presley had three separate #1 hits in 1956 — “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog,” and “Love Me Tender” — and dominated the year so completely that it is hard to remember anyone else was recording music.

Sports Champions of 1956

World Series: New York Yankees (Don Larsen’s perfect game in Game 5 remains the only one in World Series history)
NFL Champions: New York Giants
NBA Champions: Philadelphia Warriors
Stanley Cup: Montreal Canadiens
U.S. Open Golf: Cary Middlecoff
U.S. Open Tennis — Men: Ken Rosewall | Women: Shirley J. Fry
Wimbledon — Men: Lew Hoad | Women: Shirley Fry
NCAA Football: Oklahoma
NCAA Basketball: San Francisco
Kentucky Derby: Needles

Sports Highlight: Rocky Marciano retired undefeated on April 27, 1956, with a 49-0 record — the only heavyweight champion in history never to lose a professional bout.

FAQ — 1956 History, Facts, and Trivia

Q: What was the most-watched TV event of 1956?
A: Elvis Presley’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, 1956, drew over 60 million viewers — approximately 82% of the American television audience. Ed Sullivan ordered cameras to film Elvis only from the waist up.

Q: What was the #1 song of 1956?
A: Elvis Presley dominated 1956 with three separate #1 hits — “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog,” and “Love Me Tender.” The year-end chart leader was “Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog.”

Q: What famous gathering of musicians happened in 1956?
A: On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash gathered at Sun Studio in Memphis for the only time — recorded as The Million Dollar Quartet.

Q: What shipping invention changed the world in 1956?
A: Malcolm McLean patented the modern shipping container in 1956, reducing his cost from $5.86 per ton to 16 cents. It made modern global commerce possible.

Q: What actress became a princess in 1956?
A: Grace Kelly, Academy Award-winning actress, married Prince Rainier III of Monaco on April 19, 1956, and retired from acting at age 26 to become Princess Grace.

Q: What was the only perfect game in World Series history?
A: Don Larsen of the New York Yankees threw the only perfect game in World Series history in Game 5 on October 8, 1956, against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yogi Berra famously leapt into his arms at the final out.

Q: What TV quiz show scandal broke in 1956?
A: Contestants on the TV quiz show Twenty-One admitted to being fed answers by producers — a scandal that shook public confidence in television and was dramatized in the 1994 film Quiz Show.

Q: What Broadway show opened in 1956 and ran for six years?
A: My Fair Lady opened March 15, 1956, with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison, and ran until 1962 — at the time the longest-running Broadway musical in history.

Q: What did IBM introduce in 1956 that weighed over a ton?
A: The IBM 350 hard disk drive — the world’s first commercial hard drive — had 3.75 megabytes of storage and weighed over 2,000 pounds. It leased for $3,200 per month.

Q: What phrase became the official U.S. national motto in 1956?
A: “In God We Trust” was officially adopted as the U.S. national motto in 1956, replacing the unofficial E Pluribus Unum during the Cold War.

Q: What undefeated champion retired in 1956?
A: Rocky Marciano retired on April 27, 1956, with a perfect 49-0 professional record — the only heavyweight champion in history to retire undefeated.

More 1956 History and Trivia Resources