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Born in 1955? Here's the world you arrived into

In 1955, "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" topped the charts, Lady and the Tramp packed theaters, a stamp cost 3¢, the average home went for about $9,650.

What things cost in 1955

A $0.54 movie ticket in 1955 has the buying power of roughly $6.30 in 2024 dollars, and gas at $0.29 a gallon works out to about $3.40 today.

The biggest moments of 1955

• Disneyland opened its gates in Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955.
• Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, sparking the famous bus boycott.
• "Rock Around the Clock" topped the charts and helped launch the rock and roll era.

• Ray Kroc opened his first franchised McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois, in April 1955 — 15-cent hamburgers and all.
• The $64,000 Question premiered in June 1955 and set off a national quiz-show craze.
• Gunsmoke rode onto CBS in September 1955, beginning a 20-year run as television's definitive western.

Toys, TV & trends of 1955

• The Davy Crockett craze peaked, with coonskin caps flying off store shelves by the millions.
• The Mickey Mouse Club premiered in October 1955, and kids everywhere sang along with the Mouseketeers.
• Gumby, the bendable green clay boy, made his television debut.

• Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans welcomed kids to the Treasure House starting October 3, 1955.
• Crest, the first fluoride toothpaste, arrived on store shelves in 1955.
• The very first Guinness Book of Records was published in August 1955 — and soon became a record-breaking bestseller itself.

The music scene

Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" hot-rodded up the charts in the summer of 1955, and Little Richard hollered "Tutti Frutti" into a New Orleans microphone that September. In November, RCA bought Elvis Presley's contract from tiny Sun Records for an unheard-of $35,000 — one of the great bargains in music history. Rock and roll was no longer a rumor; it was a business.

At the movies

Marty, a modest black-and-white story about a lonely Bronx butcher, upset the big spectacles to win Best Picture. James Dean died in a car crash on September 30, 1955, at just 24 — Rebel Without a Cause opened weeks later and sealed his legend forever. And Oklahoma! brought Rodgers and Hammerstein to the screen in the giant new Todd-AO widescreen process.

Cartoons kids loved

• Lady and the Tramp (Disney)
• Mighty Mouse Playhouse
• Gumby

In 1955 the cartoon began migrating from the movie palace to the living room, as Hollywood started selling its older theatrical shorts to television by the hundreds. CBS gave Mighty Mouse a regular Saturday-morning berth, helping invent the Saturday-morning cartoon ritual a generation would grow up on. Lady and the Tramp, meanwhile, was Disney's first animated feature in widescreen CinemaScope — that spaghetti scene needed the room.

The world in 1955

• World population: about 2.8 billion
• U.S. President: Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Disneyland, the world's first Disney theme park, opened in California in July 1955.

• Winston Churchill stepped down as prime minister in April 1955, handing Britain over to Anthony Eden.
• The Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies signed the Warsaw Pact in May 1955.
• Albert Einstein died in Princeton in April 1955 at age 76, and the world mourned its most famous scientist.

1955 birthday questions

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