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.

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."

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.

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.

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.