1960s Facts

Until the 1960's men with long hair were not allowed to enter Disneyland.

The first computer mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart in around 1964 and was made of wood.

The Grateful Dead were once called 'The Warlocks'.

It would take twenty new mid-size cars to generate the same amount of pollution that a mid-size 1960's car did.

The first Ronald McDonald was Willard Scott in 1963.

Canada's new flag, with its maple leaf design, was unfurled in 1965 in Ottawa!

Blue Peter pet, Petra the mongrel puppy, died two days after being introduced. A replacement was found.

In the 1960s, neuroscientist John Lilly conducted NASA-funded experiments where researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt lived with a dolphin named Peter for months, attempting to teach him to vocalize English words.

On April 4, 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jimi Hendrix opened a concert in Newark by performing a haunting, improvised instrumental elegy. The spontaneous tribute was never officially recorded, and no known audience recordings exist.

A 7-year-old boy went over Niagara Falls with only a life jacket, and lived. In 1960, Roger Woodward, his 17-year-old sister and a family friend were in a small boat that lost power and flipped above the falls. Two tourists pulled his sister out 20 feet from the edge, but Roger and the friend went over, and the friend drowned. Below the falls, the Maid of the Mist crew got a life ring to Roger and hauled him aboard.

Four months before England hosted the 1966 World Cup, the Jules Rimet Trophy was taken from a London exhibition. A week later, a mongrel named Pickles sniffed out a newspaper-wrapped package in a south London hedge - and returned the trophy to the nation. Corbett collected a £6,000 reward. Pickles got invited to the victory banquet.

Skateboards were flat planks. In 1969 a Venice Beach lifeguard named Larry Stevenson bent the back end upward. He patented the bend. It gave the back foot something to slam. Thirteen years later a Florida teenager slammed it on flat pavement and the whole board came off the ground with him. Every ollie still starts on that tail.

Homer Jones had just caught his first NFL touchdown in 1965, an 89-yard catch for the Giants, and he planned to throw the ball into the stands. A new league rule fined players for doing exactly that, so at the goal line he changed his mind and slammed the ball into the turf instead. The Giants credit him with inventing the spike, and it remains an NFL touchdown celebration.

Creed Bratton played a character on The Office named after himself. Off screen, he was the real lead guitarist of The Grass Roots. He toured with the band from 1967 to 1969. The band had two gold records. "Let's Live for Today" hit No. 8. "Midnight Confessions" was their biggest hit, at No. 5. His character's real name was later revealed as William Schneider, his actual birth name. He's still touring today, at 83.

Hot Wheels came out in 1968 built to outrun every other toy car. Mattel handed the problem to its head of research. He had come from Raytheon, where he worked on the Sparrow and Hawk missiles. The fix was a thin music-wire axle spinning in low-friction plastic bearings. Rival Matchbox cars were still rolling on nail axles. Mattel still makes 22.5 Hot Wheels a second.

The senator had shut down every witness all morning. Fred Rogers had 6 minutes to save $20 million in PBS funding. No charts. No statistics. No prepared speech. He sat down and read a children's song about managing anger to a room full of politicians who wanted to go home. The senator went quiet. Then he said: "Looks like you just earned the $20 million."

Ken Harrelson played golf all day in 1964 and came to a night game in Kansas City with a blistered hand that could barely grip the bat, so he wore his red golf glove at the plate. His teammates laughed until he homered twice. The next day Mickey Mantle bought 20 pairs of golf gloves and the Yankees warmed up in them, calling him Mrs. Harrelson. Almost every hitter wears a pair now.

They turned Niagara Falls off. In 1969, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped 28,000 tons of rock into the Niagara River, stopping the American Falls completely for five months. Tourists walked the dry riverbed and found millions of coins - and engineers discovered the fallen boulders below were holding the falls up.

Howard Johnson's was once America's biggest restaurant chain. It had over 1,000 orange-roofed diners selling 28 flavors of ice cream and fried clams. In the 1960s it was bigger than McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC. The chain shrank for decades. Only one restaurant was left, in Lake George, New York. That last Howard Johnson's closed in 2022. Today there are zero left in America.