June 29, 1959

The federal minimum wage stood at $1.00/hr that summer of 1959, and the Dow Jones sat at 679 — while the Soviet Union's First Deputy Premier Frol Kozlov warned Western nations that Moscow would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany if no agreement was reached on Berlin, signaling that Cold War tensions remained a steady backdrop to daily American life. On screen and on the radio, audiences were turning out for "The Nun's Story" starring Audrey Hepburn, which led the box office that summer, while Frank Sinatra's Grammy Album of the Year "Come Dance with Me" kept the mood light on living room hi-fi sets across the country. On July 17, anthropologist Louis Leakey and his wife Mary made a landmark discovery at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, unearthing the first skull of Australopithecus, a find that pushed the known record of human ancestors back nearly two million years and reshaped scientific understanding of human origins.