"Celebrating in style the Mustang Club of America is organizing five-day celebrations at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina and the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Nevada, where thousands of Mustangs from each decade will meet.

The following account of the Mustang's hyperbolic debut is excerpted from "Engines of Change", a 2012 book by the managing editor of Reuters, Paul Ingrassia.

On the night of April 16, 1964, Ford blitzed the airwaves by buying the 9:30 to 10 p.m. slot (Eastern time) on all three American television networks to tout the Mustang. The company also bought ads in 2,600 newspapers, including special ads for the "women's pages," as they were then known, to celebrate the Mustang's Tiffany Design Award, the first ever given to a commercial product. The official introduction came the next day, April 17, at the New York World's Fair..."

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/11/us-mustang-anniversary-idUSBREA3A0UW20140411