The year was 1955

• Bill Haley and The Comets propel Rock and Roll as a musical genre
• West Germany becomes a sovereign state
• Ray Kroc opens McDonald’s fast food restaurants

Meanwhile . . .

Many Americans were glued to their television sets for the mega-hit show called The $64,000 Question that premiered in 1955 on CBS. The air was electric with excitement. It was claimed that even U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not want to be disturbed while the show was on and that the nation's crime rate and movie theater and restaurant patronage dropped dramatically then, too. The show was originally hosted by television pioneer Jack Paar of talk show fame.

The correct answer to a question could win the contestant $64,000, an amount unheard of in the early days of television. To add to the drama, the contestant would oftentimes be cloistered in an isolation booth where he or she could hear nothing but the announcer’s voice. The practice became a parody in American culture for decades thereafter.

And every now and again The $64,000 Question’s television cameras would zoom in on a locked vault in which the answers to the evening’s high-stakes questions were contained. Whose vault? Diebold’s. It was great national publicity, the kind you couldn’t pay for. Today, it is referred to as “product placement advantage.”

Sadly, however, The $64,000 Question became a victim of the infamous quiz show scandals of the mid 1950s when it was learned that many such shows were rigged. Some shows had been providing answers to contestants in advance. Not so with The $64,000 question. Its bending of the rules proved a bit more subtle.

A Congressional investigation determined that to keep the show appealing, associates of Revlon, the show’s sponsor, would switch the questions kept inside the Diebold vault. The switcheroo, made at the last minute, made sure that a contestant the sponsor liked would be asked suitable questions in line with his or her stated expertise.

By the end of 1959, all the first-generation, big-money quiz shows were gone. A federal law against fixing television game shows (an amendment to the 1960 Communications Act) was drafted.

Diebold’s reputation was never tarnished by the quiz show scandal. It had done nothing wrong. But the folks who determined the content of its vault faced charges presented by the federal grand jury that probed the scandal. And many of the show hosts and producers found themselves frozen out of television for many years.