By Mark Aumann, NASCAR.COM
January 10, 2005
08:27 AM EST (13:27 GMT)
Without a ride at the beginning of February, Tiny Lund ended up winning the fifth Daytona 500 on Feb. 24, 1963. Lund helped pull Marvin Panch out of his burning car during a sports car race two weeks before the 500. Panch then suggested Lund to the Wood Brothers as his replacement -- and the Cross, S.C., native beat Fred Lorenzen by 24 seconds.  |  | NASCAR ACCELERATION | |
| ALSO IN 1963 ... |
| • | The Whisky A Go-Go night club in Los Angeles, the first disco in the USA, is opened (Jan. 11) |
| • | Yoko Ono's marriage to Christian fundamentalist filmmaker Tony Cox is annulled (March 1) |
| • | Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is fatally shot in front of his home in Jackson, Miss. (June 12) |
| • | The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 in Abington School District v. Schempp against allowing the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord's Prayer in public schools (June 17) |
| • | The U.S., the U.K. and the Soviet Union sign a nuclear test ban treaty (Aug. 5) |
Courtesy: Wikipedia
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On Jan. 7, the price of a first-class stamp went from four to five cents. With his winning purse of $24,550, Lund could have purchased 491,000 stamps, or almost 13 apiece for each of the 38,196 residents of Berkeley County, S.C. The radio may have been playing 409 by the Beach Boys in 1963. That song only made it to No. 76 on the Billboard singles chart, but a 1963 Chevrolet Corvette split-window two-door coupe with a 409-cubic inch V8 engine in prime conditon would fetch as much as $54,000 today. At 6-foot-6 and 280 pounds, Lund was anything but a tiny driver. Future NBA stars Michael Jordan (born Feb. 17) and Charles Barkley (born Feb. 20) were tiny in 1963, although both would end up being listed as 6-6. Elton John's Tiny Dancer made it to No. 41 on the Billboard charts in 1972. On March 21, the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz closed and the last 27 prisoners were transferred. If Lund had wanted to drive his 1963 Ford from his hometown to view Alcatraz from San Francisco, the 2,807-mile trip would take a little over 56 hours at highway speeds -- or 18 hours and 31 minutes at the race-winning speed of 151.556 mph In 1963, many of the top television shows were named after their stars: Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Lucille Ball, Ed Sullivan, Danny Thomas, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Donna Reed and Patty Duke. Television analyst Benny Parsons would make his Daytona 500 debut six years later, finishing seventh. Russia's Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on June 16. The first woman to drive in the Daytona 500 was Janet Guthrie, who finished 12th in the 1977 Daytona 500. Zip codes were introduced on July 1. The zip code for Cross, S.C., is 29436. On Aug. 28, Martin Luther King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C. On Nov. 22, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Current drivers born in 1963:
• John Andretti (March 12)
• Michael Waltrip (April 30)
• Wally Dallenbach (May 23)
• Steve Grissom (June 26)
• Johnny Benson (June 27)
• Kenny Wallace (Aug. 23)
• Joe Nemechek (Sept. 26) → Click here for more Daytona Countdown. | 
