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1950
Marilyn Monroe soars in popularity with five new movies, including The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and attempts suicide after the death of friend Johnny Hyde who asked to marry her several times, but she refused respectfully. Monroe would later (1954) be married for a brief time to Joe DiMaggio (mentioned in the previous verse).
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/grahn/monroe.htm -
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1952
Santayana goodbye: George Santayana, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist, dies on September 26.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana/ -
1954
Juan Perón spends his last full year as President of Argentina before a September 1955 coup.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Per%C3%B3n -
1959
Hula hoops reach 100 million in sales as the latest toy fad
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hula-hoop-patented -
1965
Birth control: In the early 1960s, oral contraceptives, popularly known as "the pill", first go on the market and are extremely popular. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 challenged a Connecticut law prohibiting contraceptives. In 1968, Pope Paul VI released a papal encyclical entitled Humanae Vitae which declared artificial birth control a sin.1965
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut -
1976
Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States in 1980, but he first attempted to run for the position in 1976
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1976 -
1983
AIDS: A collection of symptoms and infections in humans resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). It is first detected and recognized in the 1980s, and was on its way to becoming a pandemic.
http://www.avert.org/history-aids-1986.htm
Crack cocaine use surged in the mid-to-late 1980s. -
1983
Sally Ride: In 1983 she becomes the first American woman in space. Ride's quip from space "Better than an E-ticket", harkens back to the opening of Disneyland mentioned earlier, with the E-ticket purchase needed for the best rides
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/dayintech_0618 -
1984
Bernie Goetz: On December 22, Goetz shot four young men who he said were threatening him on a New York City subway. Goetz was charged with attempted murder but was acquitted of the charges, though convicted of carrying an unlicensed gunhttp://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-bernhard-goetz-subway-shooting -
1988
Hypodermics on the shore: Medical waste was found washed up on beaches in New Jersey after being illegally dumped at sea. Before this event, waste dumped in the oceans was an "out of sight, out of mind" affair. This has been cited as one of the crucial turning points in popular opinion on environmentalishttp://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/industrial/medical/tracking.htm -
1989
Rock-and-roller cola wars: Soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi each run marketing campaigns using rock & roll and popular music stars to reach the teenage and young adult demographichttp://www2.mvusd.k12.ca.us/eett/syoung/WDSTF/co.htm
