August 15, 1956

The federal minimum wage stood at $1.00/hr that summer of 1956, and the Dow Jones sat at 499 — while the Suez Canal crisis was building overseas, with Britain, France, and Egypt locked in a standoff over control of the waterway that carried a third of the world's oil. On American screens and radio dials, "I Love Lucy" was finishing its run as the country's top-rated television show, while Gogi Grant's "Wayward Wind" held the number one spot on the pop charts for weeks that season. On July 8th, an Austrian mountaineering team made the first successful ascent of Gasherbrum II in the Karakoram range on the Pakistan-China border, one of the world's fourteen peaks above 8,000 meters, adding another entry to the short list of summits that had ever been reached by human climbers.