Sputnik launched | October 4, 1957 | HISTORY

On January 3, 1957 Dalip Singh Saund is sworn in as the congressional representative of California’s 29th district. Known to many as “Judge,” and also nicknamed “the Peacemaker,” he is the first Asian, first Indian American, first Sikh and first follower of a non-Abrahamic religion to be elected to the United States Congress.

In response to the increasingly tense situation in the Middle East, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a proposal to Congress that calls for a new and more proactive U.S. policy in the region. The “Eisenhower Doctrine,” as the proposal soon came to be known, established the Middle East as a Cold War battlefield.

On January 23, 1957, machines at the Wham-O toy company roll out the first batch of their aerodynamic plastic discs—now known to millions of fans all over the world as Frisbees.

On February 10, 1957, Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the best-selling Little House series of children’s novels based on her childhood on the American frontier, dies at age 90 in Mansfield, Missouri.

Noam Chomsky presents his groundbreaking theory about human speech with the publishing of Syntactic Structures on February 14, 1957 (although some scholars debate the exact date). The book launches his career as the father of modern linguistics and helps to trigger the "cognitive revolution" in psychology and other fields.

Following Israel’s withdrawal from occupied Egyptian territory, the Suez Canal is reopened to international traffic. However, the canal was so littered with wreckage from the Suez Crisis that it took weeks of cleanup by Egyptian and United Nations workers before larger ships could navigate the waterway.

With a $1,000 cash deposit against a sale price of $102,500, Elvis Presley agrees to purchase the home called Graceland on March 19, 1957.

On March 25, 1957, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg sign a treaty in Rome establishing the European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the Common Market. The EEC, which came into operation in January 1958, was a major step in Europe’s movement toward economic and political union.

The U.S. Customs Department confiscates 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s book Howl, which had been printed in England. Officials alleged that the book was obscene.

On April 22, 1957, John Irvin Kennedy becomes the first African American player on the Philadelphia Phillies, fully integrating the National League 10 years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier. In the eighth inning of a 5-1 loss to the Brooklyn Dodgers at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, N.J., Kennedy enters the game as a pinch-runner.

Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) succumbs to illness exacerbated by alcoholism and passes away at age 48. McCarthy had been a key figure in the anticommunist hysteria popularly known as the “Red Scare” that engulfed the United States in the years following World War II.

On May 12, 1957, during the famed Mille Miglia motorsport endurance race in Italy, Ferrari driver Alfonso de Portago dies in a horrific crash. The accident, which killed the 28-year-old Spaniard, his copilot Edmund Nelson and nine spectators, leads to the discontinuation of the Mille Miglia, an annual race established in 1927.

On May 12, 1957, race car driver A.J. Foyt (1935- ) scores his first professional victory, in a U.S. Automobile Club (USAC) midget car race in Kansas City, Missouri.

On May 28, 1957, National League owners vote unanimously to allow the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers to move to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, at the mid-season owner’s meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

On July 6, 1957, Althea Gibson claims the women’s singles tennis title at Wimbledon and becomes the first African American to win a championship at London’s All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

On July 6, 1957, two Liverpool music-minded teenagers named John Lennon and Paul McCartney meet for the first time in a church auditorium. It would be the start of one of the most fruitful musical partnerships in history. Seven years later, they—along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr—would become worldwide phenomenon known as the Beatles.

On July 12, 1957, Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes the first president to ride in the newest advance in aviation technology: the helicopter.

On August 5, 1957, TV's "American Bandstand" began broadcasting nationally beaming images of clean-cut, average teenagers dancing to the not-so-clean-cut Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” to 67 ABC affiliates across the nation. The show would become an iconic expression of American teen culture.

On August 17, 1957, Alice Roth experiences what surely is one of the worst days any spectator has had at a Major League Baseball game. After being struck by a foul ball off the bat of future Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn, Roth is being treated for a broken nose when the Philadelphia Phillies' star fouls off the very next pitch, hitting her in the leg and breaking it. The incredibly unlikely incident is unique in baseball history.

The Soviet Union announces that it has successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of being fired “into any part of the world.” The announcement caused great concern in the United States, and started a national debate over the “missile gap” between America and Russia.

Arkansas governor Orval Faubus enlists the National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. The armed Arkansas militia troops surrounded the school while an angry crowd of some 400 whites jeered, booed, and threatened to lynch the frightened African American teenagers, who fled shortly after arriving. Faubus took the action in violation of a federal order to integrate the school. The conflict set the stage for the first major test of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in educational facilities is unconstitutional.

On September 5, 1957, New York Times writer Gilbert Millstein gives a rave review to On the Road, the second novel (hardly anyone had read the first) by a 35-year-old Columbia University dropout named Jack Kerouac. “Jack went to bed obscure,” Kerouac’s girlfriend told a reporter, “and woke up famous.”

On September 8, 1957, 30-year-old Althea Gibson becomes the first African American to win the U.S. Open, beating Louise Brough, 6-3, 6-2. Afterward, vice president Richard Nixon presents her with the championship trophy. "Now I have been doubly honored," Gibson says. "I won Wimbledon before Queen Elizabeth II and now I have won here before our vice president."

On September 19, 1957, the United States detonates a 1.7-kiloton nuclear weapon in an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a 1,375-square-mile research center located 65 miles north of Las Vegas. The test, known as Rainier, was the first fully contained underground detonation and produced no radioactive fallout. A modified W-25 warhead weighing 218 pounds and measuring 25.7 inches in diameter and 17.4 inches in length was used for the test. Rainier was part of a series of 29 nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons safety tests known as Operation Plumbbob that were conducted at the NTS between May 28, 1957, and October 7, 1957.

Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine Black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas on September 25, 1957. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.

On September 26, 1957, West Side Story, composed by Leonard Bernstein, opens at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. For the groundbreaking musical, Bernstein provided a propulsive and rhapsodic score that many celebrate as his greatest achievement as a composer. However, even without the triumph of West Side Story, Bernstein’s place in musical history was firmly established. In addition to his work as a composer, the “Renaissance man of music” excelled as a conductor, a concert pianist, and a teacher who brought classical music to the masses.

The Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of , the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for “fellow traveler,” was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic.

On October 8, 1957, bible-school-dropout-tuned-rockabilly-pianist Jerry Lee Lewis laid down the definitive version of “Great Balls Of Fire,” amid a losing battle with his conscience—and with the legendary Sam Phillips, head of Sun Records.

In the conclusion to an extremely embarrassing situation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower offers his apologies to Ghanian Finance Minister, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, who had been refused service at a restaurant in Dover, Delaware. It was one of the first of many such incidents in which African diplomats were confronted with racial segregation in the United States.

On October 14, 1957, the Everly Brothers, one of the most important and influential groups in the history of rock and roll, have their first #1 song: "Wake Up Little Susie." That success came hot on the heels of their first big hit, "Bye Bye Love," with which they had burst onto the music scene earlier that year.

U.S. military personnel suffer their first casualties in the war when 13 Americans are wounded in three terrorist bombings of Military Assistance Advisory Group and U.S. Information Service installations in Saigon. The rising tide of guerrilla activity in South Vietnam reached an estimated 30 terrorist incidents by the end of the year and at least 75 local officials were assassinated or kidnapped in the last quarter of 1957.

Movie audiences in New York City are treated to the science-fiction thriller The Amazing Colossal Man on October 25, 1957. The film revolves around a character named Colonel Manning, who strays too close to the test of an atomic device in the Nevada desert and is bombarded with “plutonium rays.”

The Soviet Union launches the first animal to orbit the earth into space—a dog nicknamed Laika—aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft.

In a long and rambling interview with an American reporter, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev claims that the Soviet Union has missile superiority over the United States and challenges America to a missile “shooting match” to prove his assertion. The interview further fueled fears in the United States that the nation was falling perilously behind the Soviets in the arms race.

On November 16, 1957, the body of Bernice Worden of Plainfield, Wisconsin, is found, the final victim of infamous killer Edward Gein. His grave robbing, necrophilia and copious corpse trophies gained national attention, and may have provided inspiration for the characters of Norman Bates in Psycho and serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

On December 20, 1957, while spending the Christmas holidays at Graceland, his newly purchased Tennessee mansion, rock-and-roll star Elvis Presley receives his draft notice for the United States Army.