8 Not-So-Famous Firsts

Ever wondered who received the first Social Security Card? Who was involved in the first wet T-shirt contest? Today's your lucky day.

1. The First Hamburger Chain

McDonald's, Burger King and that girl with the braids are better known, but they were all latecomers to the game. Walter Anderson and Billy Ingram partnered up to employ Henry Ford's assembly line model in a restaurant setting. They opened their first White Castle in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921, a time when Americans were skeptical about the wholesomeness of ground beef. Anderson put the complete "making of" story in full view of the customer; they watched as a cook formed the ground beef into a patty and placed it on the grill. The stark white and shiny chrome theme in the building's décor was also a subliminal hint as to the purity of the food. Sales at that first restaurant were so overwhelming that they soon opened more White Castles (each with the same interior and exterior architecture), first in Kansas and then in Nebraska and Minnesota.

2. The First Social Security Card

John David Sweeney, Jr., of Westchester County, New York, was the person who was issued Social Security Number 055-09-0001 in November 1936. When the Social Security Board first started their plan to issue numbers, they worked in conjunction with the Postal Service. SS-5 forms were sent out to employers across the country for their employees to fill out. The completed forms were either mailed or returned to the local post office in person, and then a Social Security Number would be assigned and a card typed up. The first 1,000 cards were mailed out simultaneously, so there is no way to accurately determine who actually physically received the first Social Security Card. The records for those 1,000 cards were sent to the main processing center in Baltimore, where they began the process of becoming a permanent file in which the number holder's earnings could be recorded. The head of the Division of Accounting Operations pulled the top form off of the pile (which was John Sweeney's) and declared it to be the official first Social Security Record. Sweeney died at the age of 61 and never collected any Social Security benefits, but his widow did until she passed away in 1982.

3. Automobile Insurance

4. Class Name 101

The first recorded use of an introductory class being designated as "101" was in a University of Buffalo course catalog dated 1929. However, it wasn't until the early 1930s—when students started regarding a university degree as a means to a better job and schools added more specialized classes to their curriculum—that universities in the U.S. started using digits to identify their courses. Students were also traveling further afield after graduation in search of work, so it became important for a potential employer to be able to compare candidates: Was a passing grade in Cost Accounting 203 at Kent State the same as one in Business Accounting 4 at the University of Michigan?

Eventually, colleges started using a more uniform three-digit designation, in which the first digit indicated the academic level (1=Freshman, 2=Sophomore, etc.). The second digit usually represented a department (English, Science, etc.) and the third the level of the class within the department. These were not hard and fast rules, and still vary from school to school. However, as the three-digit system became more commonplace, it seemed that "101" always represented a basic beginning course, no matter what the discipline. By the late 1960s, the phrase was starting to enter the vernacular at large, outside of the collegiate realm.

5. Real Person in a Feminine Hygiene Ad

6. Telephone Entertainment

Which came first, 1-800-PARTYON or 976-BABE? Actually, when telephone entertainment started out, it was geared toward lonely people seeking spiritual fulfillment rather than frisky young singles. On Thanksgiving Eve 1955, Rev. R.R. Schwambach, the pastor of Bethel Tabernacle Church in Evansville, Indiana, rented a grey, typewriter-sized machine from Indiana Bell. He recorded a 43-second non-denominational prayer and hooked the gadget up to the church's telephone. An article in the November 23, 1955, edition of the Evansville Courier printed the phone number for "Dial-a-Prayer" and explained that folks feeling the need of comfort and inspiration could call at any hour, day or night. Rev. Schwambach thought he'd leave the machine up for the duration of the holiday weekend, but the service proved to be so popular (the phone company reported a backlog of some 5,000 calls and ordered the church to install additional lines) that he continued to record a new message every day. Similar services started popping up first at other churches in Indiana, then across the country.

7. Mainstream Use of "Gay" to Mean Homosexual

8. Wet T-Shirt Contest

The first wet T-shirt contest wasn't held in some tropical sunny clime; it took place in January at a ski resort in Idaho. In 1969, a sales rep for a company called K2 hired a filmmaker to shoot some footage of professional skiers "hotdogging" on the slopes in Sun Valley. The 12-minute film was used as a promotional tool to sell K2's new line of skis, and the distributors loved it. They clamored for a new film the next year, and the next. In January 1971, production on the third film was wrapping up when a K2 rep informed the filmmaker that the following week was "airline week" at Sun Valley, and gave him 200 K2 T-shirts to give away to the stewardesses (as they were still called at the time) who would be attending. Officials got together and decided to award a prize to whomever looked the "best" in a T-shirt.

After a few rounds of drinks, they decided to add a degree of "difficulty" to the contest—the ladies would have to dive into the resort's heated pool clad in the shirt, and extra points would be awarded if she did so sans brassiere. Not surprisingly, the event was a roaring success. K2 staged a similar event later that year at the Red Onion in Aspen, and that time Playboy had photographers on the sidelines. Many of the participants were later featured in a full-color spread.
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Have you ever wondered about the origin of some mundane or ordinary (or even unusual or disturbing) item or concept? My equally inquiring mind is at your service!