The White
House was remodeled.
New York’s United Nations Secretariat building was completed.
Miss Clairol hair coloring was introduced.
Orlon was introduced by E.I du Pont
Movies of the
year included
Sunset Boulevard starring Gloria
Swanson and William Holden
All About Eve starring Bette
Davis and Anne Baxter.
Fiction included Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Budd
Schulberg’s The Disenchanted, Ernest Hemingway’s Across the
River and Into
the Trees.
Popular songs included Bing Crosby’s “Dear Hearts and Gentle People,”
Eileen Barton’s “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake,” Bill
Snyder and His Orchestra’s “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and
Nat “King” Cole’s “Mona Lisa.”
Basquet-Banquet by Karl Knaths won the $3,500 first prize at the New
York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit “American Painting Today -
1950.”
Prevention magazine, advocating folk remedies, began circulation.
William J. Levitt expanded his mass-production techniques of building
houses in Levittown, New York. It is near Hicksville, Long Island
and adds a new suburban home every fifteen minutes.
Look Younger, Live Longer by Gayelord Hauser was published,
starting a yogurt craze.
Smoky the
Bear became the symbol of the U.S. Forestry Service after a
black bear cub is burned and orphaned in a New Mexico forest fire.
Snoopy,
Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts premiered in a comic
strip by Charles Schulz.
Betty
Crocker’s Picture Cookbook was published by General Mills, even
though she didn’t actually exist.
A court of appeals ruled in Alberty Food Products Co Versus the U.S.
that medicine labels must state the purpose of the drug.
January: Charlie Parker ended his
month-long series of performances at Birdland.
January 5: Carson McCullers’s novel
The Member of the Wedding was dramatized and began a run of 501
performances at New York’s Empire Theater.
March: Roberta Peters debuted at the
metropolitan Opera.
The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art with the New York Metropolitan
Museum and the Whitney Museum issued a statement against “any attempt
to make
art or opinion about art conform to a single point of view.”
July 17: The University of Michigan
library’s survey indicated that almost half of the United States
population
does not read books.
November 24: Guys and Dolls
with words and music by Frank Loesser opened at the 46th Street Theater.
December 10: William Faulkner
received the Nobel Prize in literature.