40 Fun Facts About 1963

Which sports car, shown at Frankfurt in 1963 as the 901, was renamed after Peugeot objected to the zero in the middle?

The Porsche 911 kept its 901 name for just 82 cars before Peugeot claimed exclusive French rights to three-digit names with a middle zero; internally the part numbers stayed 901 for years.

Which earl renounced his peerage to become prime minister on 19 October, after Macmillan resigned citing ill health?

Alec Douglas-Home was the last prime minister to take office while sitting in the House of Lords; two of Macmillan's cabinet ministers refused to serve under him.

Who became the first honorary citizen of the United States on 9 April, under an Act of Congress signed by Kennedy?

Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa are the only people given the honour in their lifetimes; Lafayette, widely assumed to have come first, was not made an honorary citizen until 2002.

Which Worcester graphic artist drew the yellow smiley face for an insurance company in 1963 and was paid $45?

Harvey Ball never trademarked his smiley, designed for State Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, Massachusetts, so he earned nothing from the billions of copies that followed.

Which diet drink, Coca-Cola's first, took its name from a list of four-letter words generated by an IBM computer?

Tab was picked from about twenty finalists after an IBM 1401 spat out over 185,000 one-vowel, four-letter words; Coca-Cola was chasing Royal Crown's Diet Rite, then the only sugar-free cola.

Which club beat Leicester 3–1 in the FA Cup final of 25 May, pushed back three weeks by the Big Freeze?

Manchester United's final was pushed from 4 May to 25 May by the Big Freeze backlog; Denis Law opened the scoring and David Herd struck twice, five years after eight players died at Munich.

What machine actually carried the Washington–Kremlin hotline that went live in August 1963 after the Cuban crisis?

A teleprinter sent typed text over a cable, and no red phone was ever used, despite the legend; leaders wrote in their own language and the message was translated at the other end.

Which British heavyweight floored Cassius Clay at Wembley on 18 June, before losing in the next round to a cut eye?

Henry Cooper's left hook, 'Enry's 'Ammer, put Clay down in round four; Clay's trainer Angelo Dundee then drew the referee's attention to a split in one of his fighter's gloves before the stoppage in the fifth.

Which country put the first cat into space on 18 October 1963, recovering her alive 13 minutes after launch?

France's Félicette, a Paris cat with electrodes implanted in her skull, was recovered alive 13 minutes after lift-off; the press then renamed her Félix after the cartoon cat.

Which island rose from the sea off Iceland in November, first spotted as a column of smoke by a trawler's cook?

Surtsey is named after Surtr, the fire giant of Norse myth; the eruption began 130 metres down and kept building the island until June 1967.

What do the letters of the five-digit ZIP code, introduced across the United States on 1 July 1963, stand for?

The Zone Improvement Plan codes were voluntary at first, yet within three months they were on an estimated 30 per cent of all mail; the first digit marks a region of the country.

Where did Britain, America and the USSR sign the treaty of 5 August banning nuclear tests in the air, space and sea?

Moscow hosted the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which still allowed underground blasts; its arrival coincided with a sharp fall in radioactive particles in the atmosphere.

Which British Railways chairman's report of 27 March proposed closing 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles of line?

Richard Beeching, an ICI physicist, called his report The Reshaping of British Railways; it targeted 55 per cent of all stations, and just over 4,000 route miles were eventually removed.

Which Great Train Robber, traced by a fingerprint on a tomato sauce bottle, escaped Wandsworth in 1965 by rope ladder?

Ronnie Biggs's share of the £2.6 million was £147,000, and the raid on 8 August 1963 fell on his 34th birthday; he served 15 months of a 30-year sentence before the 1965 escape.

Which East African colony, where the Mau Mau had risen a decade earlier, became independent of Britain on 12 December?

Kenya's first prime minister was Jomo Kenyatta, who became its first president when the country turned republican a year later; it stayed inside the Commonwealth throughout.

Which Belfast-born author died in Oxford on 22 November, his death buried beneath the news from Dallas?

C. S. Lewis died of kidney failure a week short of his 65th birthday, on the same day as Aldous Huxley and President Kennedy, so two major authors passed with barely a headline.

Which 1963 Maurice Sendak picture book sends Max, in his wolf suit, to rule an island of monsters?

Where the Wild Things Are won the 1964 Caldecott Medal as the year's most distinguished American picture book, and Max ends by sending the monsters to bed without supper in turn.

Which Betty Friedan book, grown from a survey of her Smith classmates, named 'the problem that has no name' in 1963?

The Feminine Mystique sold over a million copies and is credited with sparking second-wave feminism; Friedan's 15th-reunion survey had found her classmates unhappy as housewives.

Which basketball star, born in Brooklyn in February 1963, was turned down by his high-school varsity team as too short?

Michael Jordan stood 5 feet 11 inches when Laney High in Wilmington turned him down; he starred on the junior varsity instead, posting some 40-point games before making the senior team.

Which 23-year-old's three-foot par putt on the last hole beat Tony Lema for the first of his six Masters titles?

Jack Nicklaus built his one-stroke win on a second-round 66 at Augusta; three months later he bogeyed the last two holes of the Open at Royal Lytham and missed the playoff by a stroke.

Who became England's youngest football captain, at 22, against Czechoslovakia in May, in only his 12th international?

Bobby Moore got the armband because Johnny Haynes had retired and Jimmy Armfield was injured; England won 4–2, and Alf Ramsey made the job his permanently in 1964.

Which osteopath, tried for living on immoral earnings in the Profumo affair, took a fatal overdose before the verdict?

Stephen Ward had introduced Christine Keeler to war minister John Profumo at a Cliveden pool party; he died three days after taking sleeping pills, and a 2017 review found the judge's summing-up could not be traced.

Which ex-MI6 officer vanished from Beirut on 23 January and was named in July as the spy ring's 'Third Man'?

Kim Philby had been cleared in Parliament in 1955 and sent to Beirut as correspondent for The Observer and The Economist; Izvestia announced on 30 July that he had been given asylum in the Soviet Union.

In which English city did a four-month boycott in 1963 end the bus company's refusal to employ Black or Asian crews?

Bristol's bus company gave in on 28 August, the very day Martin Luther King gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech; the boycott, led by youth worker Paul Stephenson, helped bring about the Race Relations Act of 1965.

Which Labour MP, unseated by inheriting a viscountcy in 1960, won the 1963 Peerage Act letting heirs disclaim titles?

Tony Benn, briefly the 2nd Viscount Stansgate, was the first peer to use the Act after it gained royal assent on 31 July; within months it also allowed a Conservative earl to leave the Lords and become prime minister.

The Big Freeze of 1962–63, with snow lying until April in places, was central England's coldest winter since when?

Only 1739–40 and 1683–84 were colder in the Central England Temperature record going back to 1659; snow drifted 20 feet deep, and the cover lasted more than two months in places.

Which South Vietnamese president was killed on 2 November, a day after his own generals launched a CIA-backed coup?

Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother Nhu escaped the palace but were recaptured and killed on the orders of General Dương Văn Minh, who took over; Diệm's treatment of Buddhist protesters had cost him American support.

Which Birmingham, Alabama place of worship was bombed by Klansmen on 15 September, killing four girls aged 11 to 14?

The 16th Street Baptist Church bomb was 19 sticks of dynamite on a timer under its east steps, yet the first conviction, of Robert Chambliss, came only in 1977 and two more not until 2001 and 2002.

Which golfer became the first left-hander to win a major, at the 1963 Open at Royal Lytham?

Bob Charles beat Phil Rodgers by eight strokes over the 36 extra holes, the last playoff of that length at the Open; he had worked as a bank teller in Masterton before turning professional.

Which Scottish farmer won a then-record seven Grands Prix in 1963 to take his first Formula One title in a Lotus 25?

Jim Clark clinched the 1963 championship with three races still to run, beating defending champion Graham Hill; he grew up on Edington Mains Farm near Duns in the Borders and also finished second at Indianapolis that year.

Which Welsh club beat Wilson Whineray's All Blacks 3–0 on 30 October, inflicting the tourists' only defeat?

Newport, captained by Brian Price, still rank the win as their greatest; the 1963–64 All Blacks lost no other match on the whole tour.

Who became the second woman to win the physics Nobel, for the nuclear shell model, 60 years after Marie Curie?

Maria Goeppert Mayer had worked unpaid for years because universities would not hire a professor's wife; her local paper greeted the 1963 prize with the headline 'S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize'.

Which organ did Thomas Starzl transplant into a human for the first time, at the University of Colorado in 1963?

The liver operations of 1963 all failed, and Starzl, later called the father of modern transplantation, did not achieve a lasting success until 1967; the first human lung transplant also came in 1963, by James Hardy.

Which tractor and boiler magnate founded a sports-car firm at Sant'Agata Bolognese in 1963 to compete with Enzo Ferrari?

Ferruccio Lamborghini banned factory racing from the start, seeing motorsport as a drain on money, which set him apart from Ferrari and irritated his own engineers; his first car, the 350 GTV, stayed a one-off.

Which Cliff Richard musical, premiered in January, has four bus mechanics drive a borrowed double-decker to Athens?

Summer Holiday's bus was an AEC Regent RT lent by London Transport, still showing route 9 to Piccadilly; the Shadows appear playing in a Paris nightclub along the way.

Which Disney cartoon, premiered in December, has Merlin turn the boy Wart into a fish, a squirrel and a sparrow?

The Sword in the Stone was Disney's only animated feature between One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Jungle Book; Merlin's owl Archimedes teaches Wart to fly, and Madam Mim challenges Merlin to a wizards' duel.

Which English comedy sketch, taped by German TV in Hamburg in 1963, is watched across Europe every New Year's Eve?

Dinner for One, with Freddie Frinton as a butler impersonating his employer's long-dead guests, became Germany's most repeated programme, yet Britain did not see it in full until 2018.

Which Beatle asked the Royal Variety Performance audience of 4 November to 'rattle your jewellery' instead of clapping?

John Lennon aimed the line at the royal box before 'Twist and Shout'; that autumn the Daily Mirror had printed the word 'Beatlemania' after the group's Cheltenham concert.

Which Liverpool singer, backed by the Dakotas, took the Beatles cast-off 'Bad to Me' to number one in 1963?

Billy J. Kramer's middle initial was added to toughen his name, and Brian Epstein had to find him a band from outside Liverpool because his own group would not turn professional; 'Little Children' gave him a second chart-topper in 1964.

Which Johnny Cash hit of 1963, with mariachi trumpets, was written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore?

'Ring of Fire' began as '(Love's) Ring of Fire' on Anita Carter's 1962 album; June Carter is said to have taken the image from a line underscored in an Elizabethan poetry book owned by her uncle.