A year of poodle skirts, bobby sox, saddle shoes, and ponytails.

Cats keep their cigarettes in the sleeves of their t-shirts to be cooool. Not cool, but cool.

You want to live in hipsville, not squaresville. (Some folks around here are content to live in Piltzville.)

This is the year that:

Disneyland opens and the Mickey Mouse Club debuts on ABC

  • The first pocket transistor radio, Legos, and Velcro are invented
  • Scrabble is unveiled
  • You load Sixteen Tons, ask Mr. Sandman to bring you a dream and spin the Ballad of Davey Crockett on your 45
  • Ray Kroc starts the first McDonald’s in Illinois in 1955. Anybody guess when Burger King started? Four months before, in December of ’54.
  • President Eisenhower sends the first U.S. advisors to Viet Nam. Nine months later the first shots are fired between the North and South Vietnamese
  • Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, the McGuire Sisters, Patti Page
  • Bill Halley and the Comets “Rock Around the Clock” and Rock and roll is born
  • The FDA approves the polio vaccine
  • “Lady and the Tramp” premiers -- for the first time
  • So does The Guiness Book of Records, Gunsmoke, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents
  • Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat in Montgomery

The Hollywood stars who came to Missoula in February of ’55 had never heard of Denzel Washington. That’s because he was born 5 weeks before, on Dec. 28, 1954, in Mount Vernon, NY.

Bruce Willis was born in 1955. So were Kevin Costner, Billy Bob Thornton, Howie Mandel, Reba McIntire, Billy Idol, and Chris Berman

On June 2, 1955, Dana Carvey was born in a Missoula hospital to schoolteachers Billie Dahl and Bud Carvey. They lived here for three years before moving to California.

On Jan. 9, less than a month before Timberjack’s grand premiere in Missoula, a child was born to Don and Pat Simmons in Detroit. Jonathan Kimble – Kim as his friends and family called him – grew up in Columbus, Ohio, before following his parents to Missoula to become the Oscar winning movie star, JK Simmons.

The Who’s Who of Timberjack

Herbert J. Yates, president of Republic Pictures.

Vera Ralston, his wife and a co-star as the love interest in the movie.

David Brian, the villainous Montana lumber baron Croft Brunner in the movie. A 40-year-old New Yorker and philanthropist in real life, Brian had been nominated for a Golden Globe five years earlier for his supporting role in “Intruder in the Dust,” and would win a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame five years later.

Brian was accompanied by his wife, former actress Adrian Booth, who as Lorna Gray played in Columbia Pictures shorts and serials alongside the likes of Buster Keaton, John Wayne, Roy Acuff and The Three Stooges in the 1930s and ‘40s. Booth didn’t appear in Timberjack, but at 98 she’s believed to be the lone survivor of the Hollywood entourage that came to Missoula 60 years ago. (3922 Glenridge Dr., Sherman Oaks, CA 91423).

Adolphe Menjou (Swiftwater “Swifty” Tilton) He was a captain in the U.S. Army ambulance service in World War I, but had already begun a silent-film career before the war. By 1955, when he played Swiftwater “Swifty” Tilton in Timberjack, the usually mustachioed Menjou was nearing the end of a career that included more than 100 films. His legacies were established as both the best-dressed man in America and an outspoken supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee that hunted down and persecuted Communist sympathizers, many of them in the film industry.

Chill Wills, who played good-guy lumberman Steve Riika in the movie, and Rex Allen rounded out the star-studded entourage. Allen, near the height of his career as the famed Arizona Cowboy singer and actor, was apparently there for publicity purposes. He had no part in Timberjack.

They were greeted with flashing camera bulbs, autograph seekers and bouquets at the Hotel Florence. Dan Cushman, who wrote the book the movie was based on, drove over from his home in Great Falls earlier in the day.