1950s Pop History – 1951

Note: Music History and Song Lists for 1951 are located HERE

Site Bibliography is HERE

	Topps Company started it’s first baseball card series. The series consisted of two individual sets of 52 cards each.
	20 year old outfielder Willie Mays joins N.Y. Giants Baseball team, while Joe DiMaggio retires from baseball.for more sports or 1951 in sports
	11,000 new books will debut this year. James Jones novel, From Here to Eternity is published.Buy the Book or Buy the Movie.Also popular this year: Look Younger, Live Longer by Gayelord Hauser.
	J.D. Salinger published Catcher in the Rye. More InfoHerman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny, for which he will win the Pulitzer Prize, is published. Buy the Book or Buy the MovieAlso Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Buy the Book or Buy the Documentary and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. Buy the Book
	Gen. Douglas MacArthur, relieved of his duties by President Truman, bade farewell to Congress. The MacArthur story.
	UNIVAC 1 First commercial computer. You’ve Got mail!
	Florence Chadwick swims the English Channel from England to France in 16 hours.
	Direct-dial, coast-to-coast telephone service began as Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey called his counterpart mayor Frank Osborn in Alameda, California.
	A.E.C. produces electricity from atomic energy.
	Swanson introduces beef, chicken, turkey pot pies. Hard to imagine there was life before this feast of gourmet treats.
	The U.S. produced 100 million tons of steel and 400,000 lbs. of penicillin
	Maureen Connolly becomes the youngest woman to win the U.S. Open in tennis.
	J. Andre-Thomas invents the first heart-lung machine, allowing advanced life-support during open-heart surgery.
	Oscar stuff Marlon Brando puts on an undershirt and stars in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in a big year for movies. Buy the Movie A cult classic debuts. The Day the Earth Stood Still. Buy the Movie DVD The robot was Gort and Michael Rennie communicated with him by saying Klaatu Barata Nikto.
	American automobile manufacturer Chrysler Corporation introduces power steering., which they called Hydraguide.
	Yes! Tupperware!
	Gerber Products starts using MSG (monsodium glutamate) in its baby foods to make them taste better.
	The first Jack-in-the-Box opens in San Diego.
	There are 15,500,000 TV sets in 15,750,000 homes.
	In Sports… – Tom Fears, Otto Graham, Johnny Lujack, (football) and George Kell,Bob Lemon and Ralph Kiner (baseball) get their own Wheaties boxes!
	American casualties in Korea by the end of 1951 – 15,000 dead and 75,000 wounded.
	Walt Disney’s “Alice In Wonderland” released.Buy the Movie

	S&H Green Stamps get their start at the Denver store chain King Sooper.
	Taco holder thingee enables fast tacos! I’ll explain
	The U.S. Congress ratifies the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting presidents to two terms in office. (Some say that’s still one too many.)
	Still camera gets built-in flash units.
	The Temple Beth Israel of Meridian, Mississippi became the first Jewish congregation to allow women to perform the functions of a rabbi.
	A Crosley automobile with a steering wheel on the right side became the first such vehicle placed in service for mail delivery – in Cincinnati, Ohio.
	The comic strip, Dennis the Menace, written by Hank Ketchum, debuts and is picked up by 750 newspapers.
	There are 900 fewer inmates in prison than the previous year. Although that still leaves 164,896 of ’em in jail.
	Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted of selling atomic secrets to the Soviets.
	There are now 8.2 million trucks in the U.S.
	The first section of the New Jersey Turnpike opens.
	17 million Americans now own TV sets. Just in time for I Love Lucy and the Cisco Kid to debut.
	Citation becomes the first race horse to earn more than one million dollars.
	There was a 30.7% business failure rate. Chart for 1946-1964
	There were 36,996 motor vehicle related deaths.While in the air, there were 11 accidents resulting in 185 fatalities.
	Unemployment: 3.3%
	Fifties Web contributor Tony Rogerson was born on 1/01/51 in a small industrial town called Widnes on the outskirts of Liverpool, England.
	US GNP (Gross National Product) is $329.6 billion