But since we were still a good 25 years away from the time when the stock market would be among the daily concerns of the middle class, nobody paid much attention to it. The Dow Jones Industrial Average began the day at 524, in the midst of a decade-long bull market. The headlines that day centered around Communist shelling of Nationalist Chinese forces on the island of Quemoy the lead local story was about a proposed reorganization of Fresno's police and fire departments. The Fresno Bee managed to sandwich six paragraphs on the bank's new credit card program on an inside page between the business briefs and the livestock report. Because this was the first test of its BankAmericard program (as it was called), Bank of America purposely kept things low-key. Not that anybody made much of the drop back in 1958. It would always seem as though those first 100 million credit cards had simply fallen from the sky. Over the course of the next 12 years, before the practice of mass card mailings was outlawed, banks would blanket the country with 100 million credit cards of one sort or another, and it would always have that same feeling. It simply arrived one day, with no advance warning, as if dropped from the sky. There had been no outward yearning among the residents of Fresno for such a device, nor even the dimmest awareness that such a thing was in the works. That's a word they liked to use in the credit card business to characterize a mass mailing of cards - a "drop" - and it is an unwittingly apt description. America began to change on a mid-September day in 1958, when Bank of America dropped its first 60,000 credit cards on the unassuming city of Fresno, California.
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