The first Ford Mustang come out.

Ford’s Mustang was conceived in full knowledge that in the mid-’60s the biggest population bubble in history was coming of age in America. Baby boomers would rule the ’60s and there was little reason to think they wanted cars that were anything like their parents’ cars. The production Mustang was shown to the public for the first time inside the Ford Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair on April 17, 1964 — two months and nine days after the Beatles first came to New York to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. It went on sale at Ford dealers that same day.

The 1964 1/2 production Mustang followed two Mustang concept cars. The Mustang I shown in 1962 was a midengine two-seater powered by a V4. The Mustang II show car first displayed at the United States Grand Prix in Watkins Glen, N.Y., during October 1963, was a front-engine, four-seater foreshadowing the production machine that went on sale six months later. Compared to those two, the production machine was dowdy. Compared to every other American car then in production, except the Corvette, the Mustang was gorgeously sleek.

To make the Mustang affordable it needed to share much of its engineering with an existing Ford product. That product was the smallest Ford of the time, the compact Falcon. In fact, the first Mustangs were built in the same Dearborn, Mich., plant as the Falcon.