1955 was a year that saw a daring Lake Erie rescue and a breakthrough in the fight against polio. It was also the year that London celebrated its centennial. The CFPL year-end program described the year this way….”1955 was a history-making year in Western Ontario…. It was a year, too, for celebrating; the one hundredth birthday of a city… and a year in which public spirit showed itself strong and clear. This was 1955….”

• Leslie Frost's Progressive Conservatives win a fourth consecutive majority in Ontario while Ernest Manning's Social Credit Party wins a sixth consecutive majority in Alberta.

• Author Robertson Davies receives the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for Leaven of Malice, the second book in Davies’ Salterton Trilogy.

• Disneyland opens in Anaheim, California. There are 28,154 in attendance and an estimated 90 million people watch it on television.

• Film actor James Dean is killed at 24 in an accident on his way to a sports car meet. At the time, he had completed 3 movies, only one of which had been released.

• The Warsaw Pact is signed in Poland, largely as a response to the induction of West Germany into NATO. The pact, which included the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and East Germany, defined the eastern bloc countries throughout the Cold War. It would be dissolved in 1991.

• Rosa Parks refuses to surrender her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery Alabama. She is arrested and tried for social disobedience. The incident triggers a mass movement against racial segregation. She would come to be known by the U.S. Congress as the “Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.”