What
we perceive as The Sixties began in the late Fall
of 1963 with the assassination of John Kennedy
and a post Christmas song calledI Want To
Hold Your Hand by The Beatles. 1960 and
the two years following were an extension of the
rather dull Fifties.
The
average income $5,315
A gallon
of gas 25 cents
A gallon of milk 50 cents
A US Postage stamp 4 cents
Unemployment Rate 5.5%
It was not until 1960 that the
Supreme Court began to enforce integration they had unanimously decided upon with Brown vs. Education in 1954.
Norman Rockwell's famous painting of six year old Ruby
Bridges suffering a hail of racial
epitaphs and tomatoes as she integrated the
first school in New Orleans.
We are doing the
twist with Chubby Checker and
laughing at Don Knotts on black & white TV.
Nightly news aired
for 15 minutes at 7:30pm EST. The anchors are Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, John Daly on ABC and Douglas Edwards on CBS.
The Kennedy - Nixon debate is the story of the year which was to
portend the new power of television in our
electoral process. What we saw became more
important than what we read or what we heard.
John Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson win the Presidency with one of
the smallest margins in history - 113,000 votes
out of 68.3 million.
The first rumblings of an organized civil rights movement begin at a lunch counter in Greensboro,
North Carolina.
The
Class of 1960
The World 1960
The
cold war is in full swing with Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on
the table at the UN telling us he would bury us
Communist China and
Soviet Union split in conflict over Communist
ideology.
The Berlin Wall is under construction and the Soviet Union
was ahead in the Space Race
Capt. Gary PowersU-2 Spy Plane Shot Down
Over Russia
France tests its first atomic bomb in the Sahara
desert to
join the US, UK and USSR as a Nuclear Power
Israelis Kidnap Adolf Eichman from Argentina to
Jerusalem
Fidel
Castro confiscates $770 million of U.S. property
900 U.S. military
advisers are sent to Vietnam.
The
sexual revolution of the Sixties begins with
women using birth control pills and the first Playboy Club opening in Chicago.
Nobel prizes 1960
Physics - Donald Arthur Glaser Chemistry - Willard Frank Libby Physiology or Medicine - Sir Frank Macfarlane
Burnet, Peter Brian Medawar Literature - Saint-John Perse Peace - Albert John Luthuli