1963 History, Trivia and Fun Facts

• Politics: The US Supreme Court ruled no locality may require recitation of Lord's Prayer or Bible verses in public schools in Abington School District v. Schempp.
• The Top Song was Sugar Shack by Jimmy Gilmore and the Fireballs
• The Big Movies included Cleopatra, Dr. No and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
• Minimum Wage in 1963: $1.25 per hour
• Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space.
  Price of VO5 Shampoo, 15 oz size: 77 cents
• The World Population was ~ 3,211,000,000
• Frank Sinatra's son was kidnapped in 1963 and Sinatra ended up paying $240,000 in ransom before his son was safely returned. The kidnappers were caught and most of the ransom was recovered.
• And... Perscription drug Valium was introduced by Swiss drug company Roche Labs.

"From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official ... President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time - 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago."
- Walter Cronkite

"Exterminate"
- Dalek, Doctor Who

"Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener. Thats is what I truly want to be."
- Oscar Meyer kids

Jackie Kennedy wore her blood-splattered pink Chanel suit for the rest of the day after JFK's assassination. When asked to change her outfit, she replied "I want them to see what they have done to Jack."

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. said to his wife, "This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society."

John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby were all pronounced dead at the Parkland Hospital.

A buddhist monk by the name of Thich Quang Quc burned himself in protest of the Diem regime of South Vietnam in Saigon in 1963. The only body part that didn't burn despite trying to burn it twice more with creamation was his heart.

The rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford was so strong that, when Davis was nominated for an Oscar in 1963, Crawford arranged with the other nominees to collect the award on their behalf. Anne Bancroft won, and Crawford read her speech for her, while Davis watched backstage. #teamcrawford

The San Diego Chargers became the first professional sports team to use steroids. After an abysmal 4-10 record the previous year, they went on to win the AFL Championship, crushing the Boston Pariots by a score of 51-10.

The Stanley Cup Champions 1963 Toronto Maple Leafs, 1972 Boston Bruins and 1981 New York Islanders have their engravings misspelled as Leaes, BQSTQN and Ilanders, respectively. There are also several player name errors.

In 1963, after the South African Football Association was suspended from FIFA due to apartheid, they attempted to regain their membership by proposing that they send an all-white team to the 1966 World Cup, and an all-black team to the 1970 World Cup. Their proposal was rejected.

The Italian government constructed a dam in 1959 despite multiple warnings of the instability of the region. In 1963, a landslide into the reservoir behind the dam triggered a tsunami over 800 ft high that breached the dam and killed nearly 2000 people, leaving a 200 ft deep impact crater.

Janis Joplin was voted "Ugliest Man on Campus" at the University of Texas in 1963

Donald Currey cut down a tree to retrieve his drill bit after it got stuck when he was trying to core it to study climate effects. After studying the core of the tree, he found that he'd just cut down the oldest tree (at least 4862 years old) found to date.

Airplane Celebrity Death: Patsy Cline

After the JFK assassination Jackie Kennedy was still wearing the blood covered pink dress during the emergency swearing in of Johnson. She wanted the people to see "What they had done".

Presidential assasination: John F Kennedy & Magic Bullet Theory. The JFK assassination is the mother of all modern conspiracy theories. After President Kennedy's death in 1963, the television networks aired 4 days of commercial-free coverage of his funeral, burial, and other proceedings, costing them about $100 million in lost advertising revenue. 93% of all American homes watched some coverage. What happened to JFK's brain?

John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis all died on the same day Nov. 22 1963. Famous murderer Robert Stroud, 'the Birdman of Alcatraz', died late on the day before, November 21. The Kennedy assassination kept his death out the headlines of most newspapers. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, was at the forefront of the counterculture's experimentation with psychedelics, which led to his 1954 work The Doors of Perception. Dying from cancer, he asked his wife to inject him with 100 µg of LSD. He died later that day.

June 17 - The Supreme Court ruled that laws requiring reciting The Lord's Prayer or Bible versus in public schools were unconstitutional.