Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

July 1961

Month of 1961 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

July 1961
Remove ads

The following events occurred in July 1961:

More information Su, Mo ...
Thumb
July 21, 1961: U.S. astronaut Gus Grissom escapes sinking space capsule on return to Earth
Thumb
July 2, 1961: Author Ernest Hemingway commits suicide
Thumb
July 4, 1961: Soviet nuclear sub K-19 has reactor accident
Remove ads

July 1, 1961 (Saturday)

Remove ads

July 2, 1961 (Sunday)

  • In a meeting at the Kremlin, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev warned Sir Frank Roberts, the British Ambassador, that Britain and France should avoid joining the United States in going to war over West Berlin, telling him, "Six hydrogen bombs would be quite enough to annihilate the British Isles, and nine would take care of France."[9]
  • In elections for the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico, voters went to the polls to elect 178 members to serve for three-year terms.[10] The ruling PRI party won a majority of the seats.[11]
  • Died: American novelist Ernest Hemingway, 61, committed suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho,[12] two days after returning home to Idaho from a course of treatment for depression at the Mayo Clinic.[13] After shooting himself, Hemingway reportedly died shortly after 7:30 in the morning. His wife, Mary, told reporters initially that the renowned author had accidentally died while cleaning a double-barrelled shotgun.[14]
Remove ads

July 3, 1961 (Monday)

  • General Douglas MacArthur, 81, returned to the Philippines for the first time since the end of World War II, and received a tumultuous welcome. MacArthur, who had led the liberation of the islands from the Japanese, had been given honorary citizenship, and declared, "You have no more loyal and devoted a Filipino."[15]
  • Major General Park Chung Hee forced the resignation of Korean leader Chang Do-Young and became chief of the military junta that had taken over in May. Chang's job of Prime Minister of South Korea was assigned to Lt. Gen. Song Yo-chan.[16]
  • Dan Ingram, considered by many in broadcasting to be the greatest Top 40 disc jockey of all time, joined 77 WABC in New York. Ingram remained with WABC for 21 years until the station switched to a talk format in 1982.
  • The stage première of the opera Krapp, ou, La dernière bande (Krapp's Last Tape) by Marcel Mihalovici with libretto by Samuel Beckett, took place at the Théâtre des Nations in Paris.
  • Invoking the Taft–Hartley Act, a U.S. federal court ordered a temporary halt to the 19-day-old, nationwide maritime strike that had held up freight shipping.[17]
  • As a result of the lobbying of Dr. Harold Griffith, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital of Montreal opened the first intensive care unit in Canada.[18]
  • Malcolm Arnold conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 5 at the Cheltenham Music Festival.
  • Died: Edwin Perkins, 72, American inventor of Kool-Aid

July 4, 1961 (Tuesday)

Remove ads

July 5, 1961 (Wednesday)

Thumb
July 5, 1961: Launch of Shavit 2
  • The first Israeli rocket, Shavit 2, was launched.[20][21] At 4:41 a.m., the missile, ostensibly for "meteorological research" rather than for carrying warheads, was sent up "from a secret installation on the Mediterranean".[22]
  • Tunisia announced that it was claiming the French military base located at Bizerte, which had been the only base remaining after France had withdrawn all of its forces in 1958.[23]
Remove ads

July 6, 1961 (Thursday)

Remove ads

July 7, 1961 (Friday)

Remove ads

July 8, 1961 (Saturday)

Remove ads

July 9, 1961 (Sunday)

July 10, 1961 (Monday)

  • In a secret meeting with Soviet nuclear scientists, Nikita Khrushchev announced his decision to resume nuclear testing and to end the moratorium that the U.S. and the USSR had observed since 1958. Khrushchev gave the go-ahead for physicists Andrei Sakharov and Yakov Zeldovich to test a 100 megaton hydrogen bomb, the largest up to that time, which, Sakharov would say later, Khrushchev would call a device that would "hang over capitalists like the sword of Damocles".[38]
  • Mildred Gillars, nicknamed "Axis Sally", was released from the women's federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, after serving 12 years of a sentence for treason. An American citizen, she moved to Berlin in 1934; during World War II, she was "the starring voice of Nazi propaganda" in English-language radio broadcasts aimed at American troops in Europe.[39]
  • The German Banking Act was passed, creating a federal bank regulating agency, the Bundesaufsichtsamt für das Kreditwesen (Federal Bank Supervisory Office).[40]
  • Born: Liyel Imoke, Nigerian politician and state governor; in Ibadan
Remove ads

July 11, 1961 (Tuesday)

  • Following a contest to come up with a name for an artificial lake, near Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, created in 1958 by a dam on the Leichhardt River, the winning entry was selected from 471 suggested names. Lake Moondarra, the entry suggested by 9-year-old Danny Driscoll, is said to have been an Australian aboriginal (Murri-language) name that means 'plenty of rain, also thunder'.[41]
  • Five days after signing a friendship and military assistance treaty with the Soviet Union, North Korea signed a similar agreement with the People's Republic of China. Together, the two treaties established a balance of power at the 38th parallel, between the northern allies (North Korea, the USSR and China) and the southern allies (South Korea and the U.S.).[24]
  • United Airlines Flight 859, a DC-8 jet, crashed while landing in Denver, killing 17 of the 115 people on board and one person on the ground.[42][43]
  • Born: Ophir Pines-Paz, Israeli Minister of Internal Affairs; in Rishon LeZion
Remove ads

July 12, 1961 (Wednesday)

Thumb
July 12, 1961: Launch of the TIROS-3 weather satellite
  • The TIROS-3 satellite was launched from Florida, and the MIDAS-3 satellite was fired into orbit from California.[44] TIROS-3 would become the first satellite to photograph storms during the 1961 Atlantic hurricane season.[45] The MIDAS-3 spy satellite reached orbit, but ran out of power after only five orbits when its solar power arrays failed to completely deploy.[46]
  • A Czechoslovakian Airlines Ilyushin-18 turboprop airplane crashed while attempting to make a landing in Casablanca, Morocco, killing all 72 people on board. The flight had originated in Prague and stopped at Zürich before continuing to Africa.
  • An alleged "unexplained incident" is said to have occurred in Shreveport, Louisiana, when peaches "fell from the sky" on a group of carpenters roofing a house. Though oft-repeated,[47] there were no contemporary accounts of such an occurrence[48] and the earliest mention appears to have been in a 1978 book.[49]
  • The Voynich manuscript was sold for the last time, to bookdealer Hans Kraus for $24,500. Although the undeciphered medieval book had been the subject of much study, and Kraus asked as much as $160,000 for it, he had no takers, and finally donated it to Yale University in 1969.[50]
  • Eight people were killed when lightning struck a tobacco curing barn in Clinton, North Carolina, where they had taken shelter from a storm. Although they were inside, the victims had been sitting on metal surfaces when the bolt hit.[51]
  • Lech Wałęsa, 17, began working at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. In 1980, he would lead a strike there and help form the Solidarność (Solidarity) trade union, a key moment in the downfall of Communism.[52]
  • Mario Jascalevich was granted his medical license by the state of New Jersey. He later would be indicted for homicide in the multiple deaths of patients at the Riverdell Hospital in Oradell, New Jersey.[53]
  • A dam at Panshet in India burst, causing massive flooding in the city of Pune. Although there was significant damage to property, there was little to no loss of human life.
  • The first Ohrid Summer Festival opened in Macedonia.
  • Born: Robert Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, subjects of the 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangers, were born at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and put up for adoption to three separate families, each unaware of the multiple birth. By chance, the identical triplets would discover each other in 1980,[54] and would find out that the Louise Wise Agency had secretly studied them to gather data on separation of twins and triplets.[55]
  • Died:

July 13, 1961 (Thursday)

  • In "the last of the early Cold War spy cases",[57] Robert Soblen was convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union against the United States. Sentenced to life imprisonment, but allowed to post bail while the conviction was on appeal, Soblen fled to Israel. He would take an overdose of barbiturates while awaiting deportation back to the U.S. and die on September 11, 1962.
  • Born: Anders Järryd, Swedish tennis player and winner of eight Grand Slam men's doubles titles (3 French Open, 2 Wimbledon and U.S. Open, one Australian Open); in Lidköping

July 14, 1961 (Friday)

July 15, 1961 (Saturday)

  • In Pakistan, President Ayub Khan promulgated the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance of 1961 to supersede traditional Sunni and Shia Muslim law practices concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Under the unpopular MFLO, divorces, remarriages, and polygamous marriages had to be approved by a local Arbitration Council, and violations of the law were punishable by jail.[59]
  • Elections were held in the Australian state of Victoria to elect the 66 members of the state's Legislative Assembly and 17 members of the 34-member Legislative Council. The Liberal and Country Party (LCP) government of Premier Henry Bolte won a third term in office.
  • William A. Fitzgerald, alias Nathan Boya, became the fifth person known to have ridden over Niagara Falls and survived. Fitzgerald, an African-American, encased himself in a 6-foot (1.8 m) diameter "rubber-coated steel ball", and said, "I have integrated Niagara Falls."[60]
  • Atlas launch vehicle 88-D was delivered to Cape Canaveral for the Mercury-Atlas 4 (MA-4) mission.[4]
  • German driver Wolfgang von Trips won the 1961 British Grand Prix at Aintree.
  • Born: Forest Whitaker, American film actor, winner of 2006 Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland; in Longview, Texas

July 16, 1961 (Sunday)

July 17, 1961 (Monday)

  • Valery Brumel of the Soviet Union broke the world record for the high jump with a leap of 2.24 meters. On June 18, Brumel had reached 2.23 meters, appearing to have bested the record set in 1960 by American John Thomas, until Thomas's 1960 record of 7 feet, 3+3⁄4 inches, was recalculated from 2.22 to 2.23.[63] When Brumel and Thomas competed against each other at the U.S.-USSR dual track and field meet in Moscow, Brumel set a new mark of 2.24 m or 7'4". At the same meet, Ralph Boston broke his own record in the long jump, reaching 8.28 m or 27'2".[64]
  • Born:
  • Died: Ty Cobb, 74, American baseball player who was the American League batting champion 12 times during the 13 seasons between 1907 and 1919, and was one of the first players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.[65]

July 18, 1961 (Tuesday)

  • The Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) carried out its first act of terrorism on the 25th anniversary of the 1936 uprising that brought Francisco Franco to power in Spain, by sabotaging a train carrying hundreds of veterans to San Sebastián. Whether it was a plan "to derail the trains without harming any of the passengers",[66] or an action which, "had it not been discovered...might well have caused injuries or even deaths",[67] no trains were derailed, but the Franco government arrested more than 100 Basque activists and sentenced many of them to long prison terms. The ETA responded by stepping up its attacks.
  • At a council in Zagorsk of bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy I of Moscow pressured the assembled group to approve changes in the laws of the church. The new rules, demanded by Nikita Khrushchev in a meeting with Alexy, transferred control of affairs in the various parishes from the local priests to committees of three laymen who would follow the guidance of the Soviet Communist Party.[68]
  • Meeting at Bad Godesberg in West Germany, the leaders of the six European Economic Community nations (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany) agreed to a plan to hold regular summits, and to further the goals of "political unification" of the Common Market nations, a forerunner of the European Community.[69]
  • Born:
  • Died:

July 19, 1961 (Wednesday)

Thumb
Memorial for 670 killed in French attack on Tunisian protesters

July 20, 1961 (Thursday)

  • Meeting in Cairo, the Council of the Arab League voted to admit Kuwait as its 11th member nation, and to send troops to replace the British in protecting the newly independent state from annexation by Iraq. Admission of new members required unanimous approval by the representatives present, but Iraq's Foreign Minister, Hashim Jawad, had made the mistake of boycotting the meeting in protest.[77]
  • Three years after Egypt and Syria had merged their governments to form the United Arab Republic, with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser as president, Nasser nationalized Syria's banks, insurance companies, and other private businesses. Nasser's moves to put Syria's economy under his control would prompt the breakup of the UAR two months later.[78]
  • Hurricane Anna formed in the Atlantic. The storm would strengthen into a Category 2 hurricane on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale before dissipating on July 24, causing one fatality and $300,000 (1961 USD) in damage, mostly in Central America.[79]
  • After two years of living and working in Minsk, American defector Lee Harvey Oswald applied to the Soviet Union for an exit visa so that he could return to the United States. He, his wife and daughter were finally granted permission to leave on May 30, 1962.[80]
  • What is now the Barzilai Medical Center opened at Ashkelon, Israel, and is named for Yisrael Barzilai.

July 21, 1961 (Friday)

Thumb
Grissom
  • Gus Grissom became the second American astronaut to go into space as he piloted the Mercury 4 capsule Liberty Bell 7 following his launch from Cape Canaveral at 7:20 a.m. From lift-off to reentry, operational sequences were similar to those of the first crewed suborbital flight, Mercury 3. Grissom reached a peak altitude of 118 miles (190 km) without attaining orbit, then descended in his capsule by parachute, with splashdown 303 statute miles downrange from Cape Canaveral at 7:36. Grissom's flight experience was similar to Alan Shepard's in that there was a 5-minute period of weightlessness, and neither reported any ill effects. He also found it easy to manually control his spacecraft attitude. Grissom narrowly escaped drowning when the explosive escape hatch opened prematurely while he was awaiting a helicopter to rescue him, but he escaped and swam to safety. The Liberty Bell 7 capsule sank after filling with water.[4][81][82] Although a helicopter managed to secure the capsule and attempted to lift it, the weight of the water added 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg) to the load. The $5,000,000 Mercury spacecraft was cut loose and sank to the bottom of the ocean, and would not be found until May 1999.[83][84] Grissom almost drowned when water filled his suit, and a 10-foot (3.0 m) long shark was observed in the water soon after his rescue. Grissom would die in 1967, unable to escape the capsule of Apollo 1 when it caught fire.[85] An unidentified NASA official commented, "We've got only one Gus, but we've got plenty of space capsules."[86] After this second successful suborbital flight, Space Task Group decided that there was no need to continue the initial phase of Project Mercury, and the remaining Mercury-Redstone flights were canceled.[4]
  • Alaska Airlines Flight 779, a Douglas DC-6 delivering 26,000 pounds (12,000 kg) of cargo to Japan, crashed 300 feet (91 m) short of the runway as it came in for a landing at the Shemya Air Force Base in Alaska, killing the crew of six.[87] An investigation found that the power cable for the runway approach lights, and to many of the pairs of threshold lights and runway lights, had been cut off two days before the accident to allow construction vehicles to pass, and that nobody had notified the crew of Flight 779.
  • Dominica adopted a new coat of arms, consisting of a shield with two guardian Sisserou Parrots bracing the shield atop of which is a raging lion.
  • Born:
  • Died: Sérvulo Gutiérrez, 47, Peruvian artist

July 22, 1961 (Saturday)

July 23, 1961 (Sunday)

Thumb
Princess Higashikuni Shigeko of Japan
  • Died: Shigeko Higashikuni, 35, formerly Princess Terunomiya of Japan and eldest child of the Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako, died of cancer. In 1943, she had married a commoner, Morihito Higashikuni, and renounced her royal status.[95]

July 24, 1961 (Monday)

  • Eastern Airlines Flight 202 was hijacked shortly after takeoff from Miami, en route to Tampa. Wilfred Roman Oquendo, a Cuban-born American citizen, who had boarded as "J. Marin" and carried a pistol on board, entered the cockpit and forced the pilot to fly to Cuba. The crew of 5 and the other 32 passengers were allowed to fly back to Miami the next day, while Fidel Castro did not allow the release of the Lockheed L-188 Electra until August 15. Oquendo was indicted for 37 counts of kidnapping by a federal grand jury on August 23, and never returned to the United States.[96]

July 25, 1961 (Tuesday)

  • President Kennedy delivered a nationwide address on American television and radio, making clear that if the Soviet Union attempted to take control of West Berlin, then the United States would be prepared to go to war, even at the risk of nuclear annihilation. "We must have sea and air lift capable of moving our forces quickly and in large numbers to any part of the world," said Kennedy, and announced that he was "ordering that our draft calls be doubled and tripled" to expand the U.S. Army from 875,000 to one million men. Kennedy then announced, "We have another sober responsibility. To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age, without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility." To that end, he would ask Congress for funding to identify and stock "fallout shelters in case of attack" and upgrade an emergency warning system, adding that "In the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved--if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available."[97][98] "It was nearly a presidential proclamation of a national emergency," one author would note later, "with the unmistakable implication that nuclear war might be imminent."[99]
  • The very last Convair B-36 Peacemaker strategic bomber was dismantled at AMARC, the aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base at Tucson, Arizona.[100]
  • The Secular Institute of the Scalabrinian Missionary Women was founded by the Missionaries of St. Charles Borromeo.
  • Born:

July 26, 1961 (Wednesday)

July 27, 1961 (Thursday)

July 28, 1961 (Friday)

July 29, 1961 (Saturday)

  • KGB Director Alexander Shelepin presented to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev the outline for a plan to combat "The Main Adversary", the euphemism for the United States. The Shelepin recommendation, accepted by the Politburo three days later, was to finance popular uprisings in Central American nations and to spread disinformation in the NATO nations. After the end of the Cold War, when secret American and Russian documents were finally declassified, the Shelepin plan would be revealed by retired KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.[107]
  • Using an IBM 7090 computer, researchers Daniel Shanks and John W. Wrench, Jr., were able to calculate the value of pi to 100,000 digits for the first time. In 1949, prior to the use of computers, the first 1,120 digits had been found "by hand" using a desk calculator.[108] The same year, the ENIAC computer took 70 hours to reach 2,037 decimal places. The 10,000 mark had been broken in 1957 on an IBM 704 in 100 minutes. The IBM 7090 operation took 8 hours and 43 minutes.[109]
  • Country music singer Patsy Cline sang at a concert in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a recording was made of the live performance. Thirty years after Cline's death in 1963, the tape was purchased at a yard sale. MCA Records bought the rights, enhanced the sound quality, and on July 29, 1997, released it in CD form as Live at the Cimarron Ballroom.[110]
  • The islands of Wallis and Futuna, located in the South Pacific Ocean, were accepted as "an integral part of the French Republic" in the form of a single French overseas territory.[111]

July 30, 1961 (Sunday)

  • The flights of "El Avion Pirata" ("The Pirate Plane"), a four-engine Lockheed Constellation that had been making smuggling flights into Bolivia with landings at night at El Trompillo Airport in Santa Cruz, were brought to an end when Bolivian Air Force fighter jets intercepted the aircraft and forced it to land. During its escape, the rogue aircraft caused an air force P-51 Mustang to crash, killing its pilot. The crew of four Americans and one Brazilian were all arrested, and the "Constellation Trial" would later cause a political scandal in Bolivia.[112] All five would later escape the country; the vintage airplane is now a tourist attraction in Santa Cruz.[113]
  • The Communist Party of the Soviet Union unveiled First Secretary Khrushchev's 20-year program for reform, with 47,000 words printed in nine of the ten pages of the newspaper Pravda and broadcast in a six-hour program on Radio Moscow. Among the promises were that by 1970, the workday would be reduced to six hours, and the USSR would surpass the United States in industrial and agricultural production. By 1980, the plan promised, Soviet workers would enjoy free housing and public utilities, free public transportation, and free meals at schools and at the workplace.[114]
  • The first NASCAR race (referred to at the time as the Volunteer 500) at Bristol Motor Speedway, the shortest track on the circuit, was won by Jack Smith (who started the race) and Johnny Allen, who finished after Smith's foot was burned by his car.[115]
  • Born:
  • Died:

July 31, 1961 (Monday)

Thumb
IBM's revolutionary "typeball"

References

Literature

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads
Remove ads