Fresno mailboxes fill with 65,000 working credit cards nobody asked for

By the mid-1950s, the average middle-class American juggled revolving accounts at several different stores, a separate bill from each one. On September 18, 1958, Bank of America launched BankAmericard in Fresno, California, the culmination of a mailing that had already dropped 65,000 unsolicited, fully working credit cards into local mailboxes. Florsheim Shoes signed on as the first major retail chain to accept it. Within a year the trial had become a crisis of fraud and delinquent accounts…