When Don picks up his daughter's teacher while she is out jogging, there is a brief mention on the car radio of the discovery of bodies of two unnamed young Manhattan women - a reference to the "Career Girls Murders" case in which roommates Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert were stabbed to death in their apartment on August 28, 1963.
Talking to Don, Conrad Hilton says: "After all the things we threw at Khrushchev, you know what made him fall apart? He couldn't get into Disneyland." Conrad is referencing a trip the Soviet leader made to California in September 1959 en route to a visit with President Eisenhower, in which he got into a fight with anticommunist Twentieth Century Fox president Spyros Skouros, and was subsequently barred from visiting Disneyland by government officials worried about security.
When Sal calls his wife from a park, he is meant to be in the section of Manhattan's Central Park known as "The Ramble," which for most of the twentieth century was a well-known site for gay men to meet for public sex (see also the trivia section for Angels in America (2003)).
On Sunday, September, 15, 1963, Robert Chambliss, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, placed a bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls.
When Don is giving Miss Farrell a ride, a snippet of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech is being played on the radio. King delivered this speech on August 28, 1963.