By Robert Anderson
As I’m reaching in few month my 50th birthday, I was wondering want else is turning 50 this year.
- AstroTurf hit it big in 1966 when the company was tapped to turf the newly opened Houson Astrodome. After that, the low-maintenance artificial turf quickly expanded. It was so popular, even the Brady’s used it in their backyard. 50 years after its big reveal, AstroTurf coats countless sports fields and parks across the country.
- Consumer electronics store Best Buy certainly looked a lot different when it launched 50 years ago. In 1966, Richard Shulze and a business partner opened Sound of Music in St. Paul, Minnesota. The store started out as an electronics store specializing in stereos. By the late ’70s, Sound of Music opened eight additional stores. The transition from Sound of Music started in the late ’80s when the company rebranded to Best Buy Company, Inc. The increased demand for electronics lead the store to become what it is today.
- Doritos, the cheesy guilty-pleasure first made its way onto grocery shelves nationwide in 1966. Resembling Mexican chilaquiles, Doritos were popular from the get-go, becoming the first nationally distributed tortilla chip. In 1994, Frito-Lay spent nearly $50 million in redesigning the chip. It must have worked, as Doritos is Frito-Lay’s second biggest brand.
- Shortly after Twister’s introduction in 1966, the game became a huge sensation when Johnny Carson played it with Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show. The intimate nature of the game caused some controversy, with parents and competitors claiming it was “sex in a box.” Despite the uproar, Twister proved to be huge and would remain in people’s homes for decades to come.
- For 50 years now, Wite-Out has come to rescue, fixing little mistakes and typos that an eraser can’t handle. Like all good inventions, Wite-Out stemmed from a problem — correction fluid would smudge ink. To fix the problem, businessman George Kloosterhouse and Edwin Johanknecht, a basement waterproofer, teamed up to create the modern day Wite-Out. The product was reinvented and bought out a couple times until 1992, when BIC purchased it.