The Coasters
Are an American rhythm and blues/rock and roll vocal group who had a string of hits in the late 1950s. Beginning with “Searchin'” and “Young Blood”, their most memorable songs were written by the songwriting and producing team of Leiber and Stoller. Although the Coasters originated outside of mainstream doo-wop, their records were so frequently imitated that they became an important part of the doo-wop legacy through the 1960s.
The Coasters were formed in October 1955 when only two of The Robins were willing to go to Atlantic Records, those two were dubbed The Coasters because they went from West to East coast.
The Robins, a Los Angeles–based rhythm-and-blues group that included Carl Gardner and Bobby Nunn. The original Coasters were Gardner, Nunn, Billy Guy, Leon Hughes (who was replaced by Young Jessie on a couple of their early Los Angeles recordings), and the guitarist Adolph Jacobs. Jacobs left the group in 1959.
The songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller started Spark Records and in 1955 produced “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” for the Robins (their sixth single with Leiber and Stoller). The record was popular enough for Atlantic Records to offer Leiber and Stoller an independent production contract to produce the Robins for Atlantic. Only two of the Robins—Gardner and Nunn—were willing to make the move to Atlantic, recording their first songs in the same studio as the Robins had done (Master Recorders). In late 1957, the group moved to New York and replaced Nunn and Hughes with Cornell Gunter and Will “Dub” Jones. The new quartet was from then on stationed in New York, although all had Los Angeles roots.
The Coasters’ association with Leiber and Stoller was an immediate success. Together they created a string of good-humored “storytelling” hits that are some of the most entertaining from the original era of rock and roll. According to Leiber and Stoller, getting the humor to come through on the records often required more recording “takes” than for a typical musical number.
Their first single, “Down in Mexico”, was an R&B hit in 1956 and appears (in a re-recording from 1973—still with Gardner singing the lead) on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. The following year, the Coasters crossed over to the pop chart in a big way with the double-sided “Young Blood”/”Searchin'”. “Searchin'” was the group’s first U.S. Top 10 hit and topped the R&B chart for 13 weeks, becoming the biggest R&B single of 1957 (all were recorded in Los Angeles).
“Yakety Yak” (recorded in New York), featuring King Curtis on tenor saxophone, included the famous lineup of Gardner, Guy, Jones, and Gunter, and became the act’s only national number 1 single, topping the R&B chart. The next single, “Charlie Brown”, reached number 2 on both charts. It was followed by “Along Came Jones”, “Poison Ivy” (number 1 for almost two months on the R&B chart), and “Little Egypt (Ying-Yang)”.
Changing popular tastes and changes in the group’s lineup contributed to a lack of hits in the 1960s. During this time, Billy Guy was also working on solo projects; the New York singer Vernon Harrell was brought in to replace him for stage performances. Later members included Earl “Speedo” Carroll (lead of the Cadillacs), Ronnie Bright (the bass voice on Johnny Cymbal’s “Mr. Bass Man”), Jimmy Norman, and guitarist Thomas “Curley” Palmer. The Coasters signed with Columbia Records’ Date label in 1966, reuniting with Leiber and Stoller (who had parted ways with Atlantic Records in 1963), but never regained their former fame. In 1971, the Coasters had a minor chart entry with “Love Potion Number Nine”, a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Coasters but instead gave to the Clovers in 1959. In Britain, a 1994 Volkswagen TV advertisement used the group’s “Sorry But I’m Gonna Have To Pass”, which led to a minor chart placement in that country.
In 1987, the Coasters became the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, crediting the members of the 1958 configuration. The Coasters also joined the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1999.
Several groups used the name in the 1970s, touring throughout the country, though original member Carl Gardner held the legal rights to it. Gardner continued to tour with the Coasters and made many attempts to stop bogus groups with no connection to the original group using the name. In late 2005, Carl’s son Carl Gardner Jr. took over as lead with the group when his father retired. The Coasters’ lineup then consisted of Carl Gardner Jr., J. W. Lance, Primo Candelara, and Eddie Whitfield. Carl Jr. later left this group and has started his own group with Curley Palmer. Carl’s widow Veta owns the rights to the Coasters name.
Leon Hughes is the last surviving member of the original Coasters and performs with his own group. Some of the former members suffered tragic ends. The saxophonist King Curtis (the “fifth Coaster”) was stabbed to death by two junkies outside his apartment building in 1971. Cornelius Gunter was shot to death while sitting in a Las Vegas parking garage in 1990. Nate Wilson, a member of one of Gunter’s offshoot Coasters groups, was shot and his body dismembered in 1980. Former manager Patrick Cavanaugh was convicted of the murder, which took place after Wilson threatened to notify authorities of Cavanaugh’s intent to buy furniture with stolen checks. Cavanaugh was convicted of the murder and given the death sentence in 1984, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He died at 60 in 2006, in Ely State Prison, in Nevada.
US Mint began to print the Lincoln Memorial on the penny in honor of the 16th President Abraham Lincoln of his 150th Birthday.
Fidel Castro (1926-2016)
On February 16, Castro takes the oath of office and was sworn in as premier of Cuba.
Pioneer I
On October 11, 1958, Pioneer 1 became the first spacecraft launched by NASA, the newly formed space agency of the United States. The flight was the second and most successful of the three Thor-Able space probes.
The Day the Music Died
On February 3, 1959, rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, together with pilot Roger Peterson. The event later became known as “The Day the Music Died“, after singer-songwriter Don McLean referred to it as such in his 1971 song “American Pie”.
At the time, Holly and his band, consisting of Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch, were playing on the “Winter Dance Party” tour across the United States Midwest. Rising artists Valens and Richardson had joined the tour, as well.
The long journeys between venues on board the cold, uncomfortable tour buses adversely affected the performers, with cases of flu and even frostbite. After stopping at Clear Lake to perform, and frustrated by such conditions, Holly chose to charter a plane to reach their next venue in Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson, who had the flu, swapped places with Jennings, taking his seat on the plane, while Allsup lost his seat to Valens on a coin toss. Soon after takeoff, late at night and in poor, wintry weather conditions, the pilot lost control of the light aircraft, a Beechcraft Bonanza, which subsequently crashed into a cornfield. Everyone on board was killed. The event has since been mentioned in various songs and films. A number of monuments have been erected at the crash site and in Clear Lake, where an annual memorial concert is also held at the Surf Ballroom, the venue that hosted the artists’ last performance.
Barbie
Mattel’s Barbie doll debuts in the US.
Mercury 7
were the group of seven Mercury astronauts announced by NASA on April 9, 1959. They are also referred to as the Original Seven or Astronaut Group 1. They piloted the manned spaceflights of the Mercury program from May 1961 to May 1963. These seven original American astronauts were Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton.
Members of the group flew on all classes of NASA manned orbital spacecraft of the 20th century — Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle. Gus Grissom died in 1967, in the Apollo 1 fire. The others all survived past retirement from service. John Glenn went on to become a U.S. senator and flew on the Shuttle 36 years later to become the oldest person to fly in space. He was the last living member of the class when he died in 2016.
lthough NASA planned an open competition for its first astronauts, President Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted that all candidates be test pilots. Because of the small space inside the Mercury spacecraft, candidates could be no taller than 5 feet 11 inches (180 cm) and weigh no more than 180 pounds (82 kg). Other requirements included an age under 40, a bachelor’s degree or the professional equivalent, 1,500 hours of flying time, and qualification to fly jet aircraft.
After an advertisement among military test pilots drew more than 500 applications, NASA searched military personnel records in January 1959 and identified 110 pilots—five Marines, 47 from the Navy, and 58 from the Air Force—who qualified. Sixty-nine candidates were brought to Washington, DC, in two groups; the candidates’ interest was so great, despite the extensive physical and mental exams from January to March, that the agency did not summon the last group. The tests included spending hours on treadmills and tilt tables, submerging their feet in ice water, three doses of castor oil, and five enemas. Six candidates were rejected as too tall for the planned spacecraft. Another 33 failed or dropped out during the first phase of exams. Four more refused to take part in the second round of tests, which eliminated eight more candidates, leaving 18.
From the 18, the first seven NASA astronauts were chosen, each a “superb physical specimen” with an IQ above 130, and the ability to function well both as part of a team and solo. Grissom, Cooper, and Slayton were Air Force pilots; Shepard, Carpenter, and Schirra were Navy pilots, and Glenn was a Marine Corps pilot.
All seven had attended a variety of postsecondary institutions in the 1940s. Of the five astronauts who had completed undergraduate degrees before being selected, two (Shepard and Schirra) were graduates of the United States Naval Academy. Having earned a Master of Arts degree in 1957 at the Naval War College, Shepard was the only selectee who held an advanced degree. Following a decade of intermittent studies, Cooper completed his degree as a mid-career student at a now-defunct Air Force Institute of Technology undergraduate program in 1956. Grissom also earned a second bachelor’s degree in aeromechanics from the latter institution as a mid-career student. Glenn and Carpenter, however, did not technically meet all of their schools’ degree requirements (including the completion of Glenn’s senior year in residence and final proficiency exam and Carpenter’s final course in heat transfer) due to wartime military service. Although both were admitted on the basis of professional equivalency, Glenn had also completed a wide array of additional coursework as a U.S. Navy aviation cadet from 1942 to 1943 and as a part-time student at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1956 to 1959. Both astronauts were ultimately awarded their bachelor’s degrees after their 1962 space flights.
Statehood
January 3rd, 1959, Alaska is admitted as the 49th State in the Union.
August 21st, 1959, Hawaii joined the Union as the 50th State. 
Bonanza
is an NBC television western series that ran from 1959 to 1973. Lasting 14 seasons and 431 episodes, Bonanza is NBC’s longest-running western, and ranks overall as the second-longest-running western series on U.S. network television (behind CBS’s Gunsmoke), and within the top 10 longest-running, live-action American series. The show continues to air in syndication. The show is set in the 1860s and it centers on the wealthy Cartwright family, who lives in the area of Virginia City, Nevada, bordering Lake Tahoe. The series initially starred Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon, and later featured at various times Guy Williams, David Canary, Mitch Vogel, and Tim Matheson. The show is known for presenting pressing moral dilemmas.
The title “Bonanza” is a term used by miners in regard to a large vein or deposit of ore, from Spanish bonanza (prosperity), and commonly refers to the 1859 revelation of the Comstock Lode discovery, not far from the fictional Ponderosa Ranch that the Cartwright family operated. The show’s theme song, also titled “Bonanza,” became a hit song in its own right. Only instrumental renditions, absent Ray Evans’ lyrics, were ever used during the series’ long run.
Ben-Hur (1959)
Is a 1959 American biblical epic film, directed by William Wyler, produced by Sam Zimbalist for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and starring Charlton Heston as the title character. A remake of the 1925 silent film with the same title, Ben-Hur was adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The screenplay is credited to Karl Tunberg, but includes contributions from Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Gore Vidal, and Christopher Fry.
Ben-Hur had the largest budget ($15.175 million), as well as the largest sets built, of any film produced at the time. Costume designer Elizabeth Haffenden oversaw a staff of 100 wardrobe fabricators to make the costumes, and a workshop employing 200 artists and workmen provided the hundreds of friezes and statues needed in the film. Filming commenced on May 18, 1958, and wrapped on January 7, 1959, with shooting lasting for 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week. Pre-production began in Italy at Cinecittà around October 1957, and post-production took six months. Under cinematographer Robert L. Surtees, MGM executives made the decision to film the picture in a widescreen format, which Wyler strongly disliked. More than 200 camels and 2,500 horses were used in the shooting of the film, with some 10,000 extras. The sea battle was filmed using miniatures in a huge tank on the back lot at the MGM Studios in Culver City, California. The nine-minute chariot race has become one of cinema’s most famous sequences, and the film score, composed and conducted by Miklós Rózsa, is the longest ever composed for a film and was highly influential on cinema for more than 15 years.
Following a $14.7 million marketing effort, Ben-Hur premiered at Loew’s State Theatre in New York City on November 18, 1959. It was the fastest-grossing, as well as the highest-grossing film of 1959, in the process becoming the second highest-grossing film in history at the time after Gone with the Wind. It won a record 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Wyler), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Heston), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Griffith), and Best Cinematography – Color (Surtees). Ben-Hur also won three Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture for Stephen Boyd. Today, Ben-Hur is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, and in 1998 the American Film Institute ranked it the 72nd best American film and the 2nd best American epic film in the AFI’s 10 Top 10. In 2004, the National Film Preservation Board selected Ben-Hur for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” motion picture.
Pope John XXIII (1881-1963)
was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Vatican City State from 28 October 1958 to his death in 1963 and was canonized on 27 April 2014. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was the fourth of fourteen children born to a family of sharecroppers who lived in a village in Lombardy. He was ordained to the priesthood on 10 August 1904 and served in a number of posts, as nuncio in France and a delegate to Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. In a consistory on 12 January 1953 Pope Pius XII made Roncalli a cardinal as the Cardinal-Priest of Santa Prisca in addition to naming him as the Patriarch of Venice.
Roncalli was elected pope on 28 October 1958 at age 76 after 11 ballots. His selection was unexpected, and Roncalli himself had come to Rome with a return train ticket to Venice.
He was the first pope to take the pontifical name of “John” upon election in more than 500 years, and his choice settled the complicated question of official numbering attached to this papal name. Pope John XXIII surprised those who expected him to be a caretaker pope by calling the historic Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the first session opening on 11 October 1962. His passionate views on equality were summed up in his famous statement, “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.” John XXIII made many passionate speeches during his pontificate, one of which was on the day that he opened the Second Vatican Council in the middle of the night to the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square: “Dear children, returning home, you will find children: give your children a hug and say: This is a hug from the Pope!”
Pope John XXIII did not live to see the Vatican Council to completion. He died of stomach cancer on 3 June 1963, four and a half years after his election and two months after the completion of his final and famed encyclical, Pacem in terris. He was buried in the Vatican grottoes beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica on 6 June 1963 and his cause for canonization was opened on 18 November 1965 by his successor, Pope Paul VI, who declared him a Servant of God.
The Twilight Zone
is an American science-fiction, fantasy, psychological-supernatural horror anthology television series created by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964.
Each episode presents a self-contained drama in which characters find themselves dealing with paranormal, futuristic, Kafkaesque, or otherwise disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering “the Twilight Zone.” Episodes typically feature a surprise ending and a moral.
The series is notable for featuring both established stars and younger actors who would become more famous later on. Serling served as executive producer and head writer; he wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show’s 156 episodes. He was also the show’s host and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. Serling’s opening and closing narrations usually summarize the episode’s events encapsulating how and why the main character(s) had entered the Twilight Zone.
Rio Bravo (1959)
is a 1959 American Western film produced and directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, and Ward Bond.
Written by Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, based on the short story “Rio Bravo” by B. H. McCampbell, the film is about the sheriff of the town of Rio Bravo, Texas, who arrests the brother of a powerful local rancher to help his drunken deputy/friend.
With the help of a cripple and a young gunfighter, they hold off the rancher’s gang. Rio Bravo was filmed on location at Old Tucson Studios outside Tucson, Arizona, in Technicolor.
Grammy
November 29, 1959, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Science holds the first Grammy Awards ceremony in New York City, honoring the music in 1958.
Quiz Show Scandal
Charles Van Doren, testifies that the producers of the hit quiz show Twenty-One fed him the correct answers.
The Untouchables
is an American crime drama that ran from 1959 to 1963 on the ABC Television Network, produced by Desilu Productions. Based on the memoir of the same name by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, it fictionalized Ness’ experiences as a Prohibition agent, fighting crime in Chicago in the 1930s with the help of a special team of agents handpicked for their courage, moral character, and incorruptibility, nicknamed the Untouchables. The book was later made into a film in 1987 (also called The Untouchables) by Brian De Palma, with a script by David Mamet, and a second, less-successful TV series in 1993.
The Untouchables won series star Robert Stack an Emmy Award for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series in 1960.
A topologist Louis Leakey found a 1.75-million-year-old hominid skull, the oldest to date in Olevia Gorge, Tanzania.
Kitchen Debate
was a series of impromptu exchanges (through interpreters) between then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959. For the exhibition, an entire house was built that the American exhibitors claimed anyone in America could afford. It was filled with labor-saving and recreational devices meant to represent the fruits of the capitalist American consumer market. The debate was recorded on color videotape and Nixon made reference to this fact; it was subsequently rebroadcast in both countries.