Leon High School
Tallahassee, Florida
Class of 1959
What do you remember most about December 1955? Below are headlines for the month, followed by memories of the month, followed by links to other websites with December 1955 info.
To view other months/years of the countdown, click here to go back to the Countdown Page.
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December 1955 Headlines
(courtesy of http://dmarie.com/timecap/)
Dec 1 - Rosa Parks (black) arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus
Dec 5 - AFL & CIO merge, with George Meany as president
Dec 5 - Historic bus boycott begins in Montgomery AL by Rosa Parks
Dec 6 - NY psychologist Joyce Brothers won "$64,000 Question" on boxing
Dec 8 - Brooklyn catcher Roy Campanella wins his 3rd MVP Award
Dec 12 - 1st prototype of hovercraft patented by British engineer Christoper Cockerell
Dec 19 - Carl Perkins records "Blue Suede Shoes"
Dec 26 - RKO is 1st to announce sale of its film library to TV Dec 29 - Barbra Streisand's 1st recording, "You'll Never Know" at age 13
COUNTDOWN TO GRADUATION - DECEMBER 1955
LINKS TO WEBSITES WITH GOBS OF MORE DECEMBER 1955 INFO
Top 10 Hits of December 1955
(First week of the month)
(courtesy of
Oops! They don't show any for December. They start again in January 1956. Here's the ones for UK - all I can find.
1 Dickie Valentine Christmas Alphabet
2 Bill Haley & His Comets Rock Around The Clock
3 Four Aces Love Is A Many Splendored Thing
4 Max Bygraves Meet Me On The Corner
5 Winifred Atwell Let's Have A Ding-Dong
6 Stargazers Twenty Tiny Fingers
7 Frankie Laine Hawk-Eye
8 Mitch Miller Yellow Rose Of Texas
9 Petula Clark Suddenly There's A Valley
10 David Whitfield When You Lose The One You Love
Well, that's it for this month. Not much, I'm afraid. As usual, PLEASE - if you have any walks down memory lane that you'd like to share, particularly in the January 1956 time frame, by all means email them to me! I really enjoy having something in here written by someone other than me! But before quitting, let me say
SEASON'S GREETINGS TO ALL OF YOU !
and here are some spiffy holiday decorations! If you haven't yet seen the very popular jacquielawson "Snow Dog" Christmas show, click the tree below to see it. And, if you haven't yet seen the amazing "wizards of winter" musical light show and don't mind waiting for a 5MB download, click the Seasons Greetings banner. It's a Windows Media file and took about a minute to download on my DSL and start playing.
Rockin' Rollin' Diaries
July '55 - '62
The charts in UK and USA, the releases
and other important events
'Shivers down the backbone....'
Lastly, notice that Barbra Streisand recorded a song in December. And, how many of you ever heard that song or even know who she was back then? Not me.
Can't even do jukebox this month, since I couldn't find out what the US Top Ten were. Possibly, we sang along with Carl Perkins and Blue Suede Shoes. Maybe we had Christmas songs to sing then. Remember back when you could still mention Christmas and we had a Christmas Assembly, etc.?
Remember those assemblies? Wow! There was a madhouse of activity. Everybody trying to sit with people they knew and Mr. Riser trying to get us all to quiet down and Mr. Stevens, always with some kind of announcement to make, and the Cheerleaders, always ready to pep us up for the next football game ...
Personal Memories of December 1955
Well, here it is December and I've got nothing to say. Believe that? Seems like the biggest thing this month was Rosa Parks keeping her seat on December 1st and the Montgomery bus boycott that followed. When Rosa died a few months ago, I learned then that it was 12/01/1955 when that happened. Really started the whole movement, from what I've read. Don't know that Tallahassee was even aware of it at that time.
I checked through over 150 of the Yahoo Search returns on "December 1955" and Rosa Parks was the only thing I really recognized. Wild month, eh? So, on with the headlines.
And how about Dr. Joyce Brothers winning $64,000 Question (and later, $64,000 Challenge). Click here to read all about it. I checked it out, thinking maybe she was one of those that was fed the answers, but not so! In fact, the producers gave her really hard questions, but she turned out to be an expert on boxing ... and studied up on it enough to know all the answers.
Another biggie (maybe a matter of opinion) was Carl Perkins writing and recording Blue Suede Shoes. Seems like Presley didn't do it until about a year later. Click here to read all you'll ever need to know about Blue Suede Shoes.
