Can You Remember 1959?

The Entertainment World

Some Like It Hot

Ben Hur
Pillow Talk
North By Northwest
Diary Of Anne Frank

Music

Price and Logan
"You've Got Personality"

Ray Charles
"What'd I Say"

Deaths

Ethel Barrymore
Louis Costello
Errol Flynn
Billie Holiday

Births

Mary Chapin Carpenter

Randy Travis

In 1959, former boxer Berry Gordy launched an enterprise that soon became the world's most successful black- owned music concern. After failing as a record- store owner and succeeding as a rhythm- and- blues songwriter, one of his artists, Smokey Robinson, persuaded him to start a record label.

Mowtown was named after its car- manufacturing hometown, Detroit. 75% of the company's records made the national charts. Gordy launched the careers of The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Little Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5.

Barbie

In March 1959, Mattel Toys unveiled what would become the most successful doll in history: Barbie Teenage Fashion Model. A curvaceous eleven and a half inches tall, Barbie retailed for $3.00.

Fads of the Fifties

Hard on the heels of the panty raid, a zany new craze infected American college campuses in 1959: phone- booth packing. The idea was to stuff as many bodies as possible into a standard seven- foot- tall pay- phone. Students in California claimed a record 34.

Mason City, Iowa, February 3, 1959 a tour plane crashed immortalizing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper. The tragedy marked the end of rock 'n' roll's first wave of creativity.

Quiz Show Fixed

Herbert Stempel, former champion on the TV quiz show "Twenty- One", was given the answers to questions, told which questions to miss, and coached in presentation. After a two- month run, he was "defeated" by handsome English professor Charles Van Doren. Likewise coached, Van Doren "won" $129,000 during a four- month period and became a national celebrity. After Steeple blew the whistle, public outrage was so great that in 1959 Congress opened hearings on the great American quiz show fix and later outlawed the quiz show deception. The networks canceled most of their quiz programs, replacing them with new, "fun and easy' game shows not meant to be taken too seriously.

The scandal was the subject of a 1994 film, Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford.