Du Pont introduced no-iron Dracon.
George
deMestral patented Velcro.
Popular films
included
Marty starring Ernest
Borgnine
The
Seven Year Itch starring Marilyn
Monroe
Mister Roberts
starring Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell and Jack Lemmon
The
Rose Tattoo
starring Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster, and East
of Eden
starring James Dean.
Fiction of the year included Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar,Sloan
Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, MacKinley Kantor’s Andersonville,
Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good
Man
is Hard to Find, John O’Hara’s Ten North Frederick, and
Wright
Morris’s Field of Vision.
Popular songs included Joan Weber’s “Let Me Go Lover,” The Fontaine
Sisters’ “Hearts of Stone,” McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely,” Bill Hayes’s
“The Ballad of Davey Crockett,” Perez Prado’s “Cherry Pink and Apple
Blossom White,”
Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” and Tennessee Ernie
Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.”
The American Shakespeare Theater had its first season at Statford,
Connecticut.
Harland
Sanders began his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.
The two-seat Thunderbird car was introduced by Ford.
Coca-Cola
officially began using the name Coke.
March 24: Tennessee Williams’s Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the New York Morosco Theater.
June 7: The “64,000
Question”
premiered on CBS
July: Walt
Disney’s Disneyland
opened in California.
September 30: James Dean
was killed
after crashing his Porche.
October 1: “The
Honeymooners” first
appeared on CBS
October 3: “The Mickey
Mouse Club”
debuted on ABC, “Captain Kangaroo” debuted on CBS
October 13: Allen Ginsberg gave the
first reading of his poem “Howl.”
October 25: U.S. Air Force’s Donald
Quarles denounces the existence of flying saucers.
December 5: Thornton Wilder’s The
Matchmaker began its run on Broadway at the Royal Theater.