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19531776 Club

Chevrolet builds its first Corvette; every fiberglass panel placed by hand in Flint

The Polo White two-seater, one of 300 identical units planned for the year, carries a Blue Flame six making 150 horsepower and no body panel touched by a stamping press.

Five months after Harley Earl's fiberglass two-seater stopped traffic at the GM Motorama in New York's Waldorf-Astoria, Chevrolet had to decide whether to actually build the thing. On June 30, 1953, the first production Corvette rolled off an assembly line in Flint, Michigan — hand-built, Polo White, and equipped with a Blue Flame inline-six making 150 horsepower. All 300 units built for the model year were identical, and every panel of fiberglass bodywork was placed by hand, making the car the first mass-produced automobile with a fiberglass body…

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More from June 30
1864

Lincoln signs Yosemite Valley over to California; the federal government sets aside scenic land for the public for the first time

Senator Conness shepherded the bill through Congress; the valley the Ahwahnechee called Ah-wah-nee for 3,000 years is now a public trust.
2019

Trump steps across the DMZ line; no sitting president has stood on North Korean soil before today

Kim tells him "I never expected to meet you at this place," and the two go on to talk privately for 53 minutes inside Freedom House, South Korea's Moon kept out at Pyongyang's request.
1882

Guiteau hangs at the Washington jail; Garfield's killer takes nine months to follow him

The self-declared savior of the Republican Party had bought his ivory-gripped revolver with a museum in mind. The jury was not sympathetic.
19211776 Club
Taft, who once said he would not seek the presidency again even if guaranteed the office, takes the seat vacated by Edward Douglass White's death in May.
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Read the full June 30 edition →Everything that happened on June 30 →
More from Cold War America
1959

Eisenhower signs over the Army's rocket men; von Braun now works for NASA

The order strips most of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and hands its hardware and people to the year-old civilian space agency.
1959

Wright's spiral museum opens its doors on Fifth Avenue

The architect died in April; the building he fought sixteen years to see built opened without him in October.
1962

Kennedy goes on television: Soviet missiles sit in Cuba, and the Navy will stop every ship

The president calls it a quarantine, not a blockade, so Moscow cannot call it an act of war.
1946

A camera rides a captured Nazi rocket 65 miles up and photographs the curve of the Earth

The rocket smashed into the New Mexico desert, but the film survived.
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