Life in 50s – 33 Popular Cultural & Mass Media Facts From the 1950s

In 1957, the BBC aired an April Fools segment showing a family harvesting spaghetti from the family spaghetti tree. When viewers asked how they could grow their own, they were told to place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.

27. In 1950, Ladislao Kubala signed for Barcelona after getting drunk on the way to join Real Madrid.

28. In 1958, Alaska was hit with a Mega Tsunami that measured 1720 feet tall. That’s taller than the Empire State Building.

29. In 1959, the USPS attempted to deliver mail via cruise missile and successfully shipped 3,000 pieces of mail from Virginia to Florida in 22 minutes.

30. In the 1950s, the United States military launched 480 million copper needles into space, effectively creating an artificial ionosphere. The needles were meant to be used to facilitate global communication. It was called Project West Ford.

In 1955, the US designed a nuclear-powered cruise missile. The SLAM's unshielded reactor would sicken, injure, and/or kill living things beneath its flight path and its strategically selected crash site would receive intense radioactive contamination.

32. In 1951, a 21-year-old Clint Eastwood was a passenger aboard a Douglas AD-1 bomber that ran out of fuel and ditched off the coast of California. He escaped serious injury and swam 3 miles to shore.

33. In 1957, American singer-songwriter Little Richard saw a bright red fireball flying across the sky, which he took as "sign from God" to repent from performing secular music and his wild lifestyle at the time until 1962. The fireball actually was the launching of the first artificial Earth satellite Sputnik 1.