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January 1981

Month of 1981 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

January 1981
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The following events occurred in January 1981:

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January 20, 1981: Reagan inaugurated as 40th U.S. President
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January 21, 1981: First DeLorean manufactured
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January 20, 1981: American hostages leave Iran after 444 days
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January 1, 1981: Republic of Palau proclaimed
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January 1, 1981

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January 2, 1981 (Friday)

  • The "Yorkshire Ripper", serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, was arrested by police in Sheffield, England after the largest manhunt in British history.[5][6] Over a period of six years, Sutcliffe was believed to have murdered 13 women.[7]
  • The Federal Reserve Board of Governors brought down the U.S. prime rate – the minimum interest rate for an American bank to loan money – from what remains its highest level in history.[8] For 14 days, between December 19 and January 1, the rate had been at 21+1⁄2% and it was lowered to 20+1⁄2%; thirty-five years later, the prime rate would be 3.5%.[9] The "prime rate" is that which is reserved for borrowers with the highest credit, with higher interest rates than prime permitted for borrowers considered to be at risk for default.
  • Born: Maxi Rodríguez, Argentine footballer with 56 caps for the Argentina national team; in Rosario, Santa Fe
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January 3, 1981 (Saturday)

  • Salvadoran labor leader José Rodolfo Viera, and two American representatives from the AFL-CIO, Michael P. Hammer and Mark David Pearlman, were assassinated at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, by two members of the El Salvador National Guard.[10] The gunmen, José Dimas Valle Acevedo and Santiago Gómez González, testified later that they had been ordered to carry out the murders after the victims had been recognized by businessman Hans Christ at the hotel's restaurant, and were sentenced to 30 years in prison in 1986. They were released after less than two years.
  • Born: Eli Manning, American NFL quarterback for the New York Giants, MVP in Super Bowl XLII (2008); in New Orleans[11]
  • Died: Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, 97, the last survivor of the 42 grandchildren of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom

January 4, 1981 (Sunday)

  • The most expensive non-musical Broadway production to that date, The Monster Revived: Frankenstein, Victor Gialanella's adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel, was shown for the first time, and the last. Premiering at the Palace Theatre (Broadway) after the expense of two million dollars, the play was poorly reviewed and closed after one performance.[12]

January 5, 1981 (Monday)

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January 6, 1981 (Tuesday)

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January 7, 1981 (Wednesday)

  • After investment analyst Joseph Granville sent an overnight telegram to his customers with two words – "Sell everything!" – the New York Stock Exchange had its biggest trading day up to that time, with 92,890,000 shares changing hands.[22]
  • Earl Campbell of the Houston Oilers was named NFL Offensive Player of the Year by the Associated Press for the 3rd straight year.
  • Died: Clair L. Farrand, 85, American inventor with over 1,000 electronics patents, including the radio loudspeaker[23]
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January 8, 1981 (Thursday)

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January 9, 1981 (Friday)

  • U.S. Representative Raymond F. Lederer (D-Pa.), the only one of the six indicted Abscam Scandal defendants to have won re-election to Congress in spite of the scandal, was convicted on charges of bribery and conspiracy. A jury in New York returned the verdict after watching a videotape of Lederer accepting $50,000 in cash in an FBI sting.[25] Despite conviction on a felony, Lederer served for three more months until resigning on April 29, after the House Ethics Committee recommended his expulsion from the U.S. House of Representatives.[26]
  • A fire killed 31 elderly residents of the Beachview Rest Home in Keansburg, New Jersey. Another 78 patients and employees escaped the blaze.[27]
  • Born: Ebi Smolarek, Polish footballer with 47 caps for the Poland national team; in Łódź
  • Died: Cozy Cole (William Randolph Cole), 71, American jazz drummer

January 10, 1981 (Saturday)

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January 11, 1981 (Sunday)

  • Iran dropped a demand that the United States deposit 24 billion dollars in gold into an Algerian bank as a condition of the release of 52 U.S. Embassy workers being held hostage in Tehran, settling instead for the release of the nearly 8 billion dollars of Iranian assets that had been frozen in American banks.[30]
  • Born: Jamelia (Jamelia Niela Davis), British singer; in Smethwick, West Midlands
  • Died: Beulah Bondi, 92, American film actress known for portraying Ma Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life
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January 12, 1981 (Monday)

  • At 1:30 am, the Macheteros, a separatist group in Puerto Rico, raided the Air National Guard's Muñiz Air Base and set explosives that destroyed nine jet fighters (8 A-7 Corsair IIs and an F-104 Starfighter).[31]
  • The television series Dynasty began a nine-year run on the ABC network. The prime time soap opera, described by New York Times TV critic Tom Buckley as "An embarrassingly obvious knockoff of Dallas",[32] starred Joan Collins as Alexis Carrington, who briefly brought back the popularity of women's wear with padded shoulders. Dynasty was the #1 rated TV program in the United States during the 1983–84 television season.[33]

January 13, 1981 (Tuesday)

  • Donna Griffiths, a 12-year-old girl in Pershore, Worcestershire, in the United Kingdom, began sneezing, and continued to sneeze repeatedly, for 978 consecutive days. Initially sneezing twice every minute, her rate would eventually slow to once every five minutes. Donna would have her first day without sneezing on September 16, 1983.[34]
  • Died: Dr. Owen H. Wangensteen, 82, American surgeon and inventor who created the suction procedure used in gastrointestinal surgery.

January 14, 1981 (Wednesday)

January 15, 1981 (Thursday)

  • Hill Street Blues, described as "one of the most innovative and critically acclaimed television shows in recent television history"[36] and a program that "set an entirely new standard for television drama"[37] made its debut on NBC at 10:00 pm EST.
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January 16, 1981 (Friday)

  • Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who had served as a British MP and an advocate for the rights of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland, was shot multiple times, along with her husband, by Protestant gunmen of the paramilitary group Ulster Freedom Fighters who had invaded their home. Five days later, Protestant leader Norman Stronge, who had been the last leader of the Northern Ireland parliament, was shot and killed, along with his son, by an eleven-member Irish Republican Army unit, at their home, Tynan Abbey.[38]
  • Died: Bernard Lee, 73, English actor who portrayed "M" in multiple James Bond films

January 17, 1981 (Saturday)

January 18, 1981 (Sunday)

  • BASE jumping was founded by Phil Smith and Phil Mayfield as they jumped off of the 72nd floor of the Texas Commerce Tower in Houston and parachuted to the ground. The pair had previously leapt from an antenna, a bridge and a cliff.[42]
  • At Deptford, a mostly black neighborhood in London, thirteen young black British people died in the "New Cross Fire" during a 16th birthday party for one of the victims, Yvonne Ruddock.[43] The fire, believed by many in the black community to have been set by racists, was cited as a factor in the 1981 Brixton riot three months later.[44]
  • Serial killer Joseph G. Christopher, later implicated in the deaths of 12 African-American men over the previous four months, was arrested at Fort Benning in Georgia after trying to stab a black soldier in his training unit.[45] Private Christopher received a 60-year prison sentence in 1982 after being convicted of three of the September shootings. He would told The Buffalo News in 1983 that he killed 13 people, all black men, because "that was the directive" from "a collection of people".[46] Christopher would die of cancer in 1993 while in prison.[47]

January 19, 1981 (Monday)

January 20, 1981 (Tuesday)

  • The Iran hostage crisis ended after 444 days, only 25 minutes after Jimmy Carter's term as the 39th President of the United States had ended. Carter had hoped that the 52 American hostages in Iran would be allowed to leave while he was still in office,[49] and at 6:18 am Washington time, the escrow papers were completed to transfer $7,970,000,000 in Iranian assets from U.S. banks to the Bank of England. At 8:04 am EST, the Algerian intermediaries notified both the U.S. and Iran that the transfer was complete. The Boeing 727 carrying the hostages, Air Algérie Flight 133, was boarded at 8:20 pm Tehran time (11:50 am EST) but was not cleared for takeoff.
  • At noon, Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as the 40th president of the United States, and the Air Algérie jet departed at 12:25 pm; it left Iranian airspace within an hour, landing in Athens for refueling, then arriving at Algiers at 2:10 am local time the next day, where the former hostages were transferred to two Medevac planes and flown to Wiesbaden Army Airfield in West Germany.[50]
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January 21, 1981 (Wednesday)

January 22, 1981 (Thursday)

January 23, 1981 (Friday)

  • South Korea's President Chun Doo-hwan commuted the 1980 death sentence that had been given to Kim Dae-jung, who had run for president in 1971, and then was kidnapped from Japan in 1973. The next day, President Chun announced the end of the state of martial law that had been in effect since 1979. Kim would be released in 1983, and in 1997 would be elected President of South Korea.[61][62]
  • Seven construction workers in Fresno County, California, were killed when an elevator platform at PG&E's Helms Creek plant collapsed at 10:25 pm, ninety minutes before their workweek was to end. The men fell 300 feet (91 m) to their deaths.[63]
  • The city of Huber Heights, Ohio, was incorporated.
  • Died: Samuel Barber, 70, American classical composer

January 24, 1981 (Saturday)

January 25, 1981 (Sunday)

January 26, 1981 (Monday)

  • In Chandler v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court ruled in an 8–0 decision that it was not a denial of due process to allow live television coverage of court proceedings, overruling its 1965 decision in Estes v. Texas.[72]

January 27, 1981 (Tuesday)

  • An estimated 471 passengers on a ferry drowned when the Indonesian ship KMP Tampomas II sank in the Java Sea during a storm. Of the 1,136 passengers and crew, 566 were rescued, including 152 who were found in lifeboats days afterward. Operated by the Pelni line, the ship was a roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) ferryboat that had caught fire midway through its voyage from Jakarta to Makassar. The fire was extinguished, but the engines failed and the ship was adrift and awaiting a rescue when a storm arose. Before the ship could be fully evacuated, it capsized, going completely beneath the waters at 1:42 in the afternoon Central Indonesian time (0542 GMT).[73]

January 28, 1981 (Wednesday)

  • President Reagan signed Executive Order 12287, immediately ending all United States federal price and allocation controls on gasoline and fuel oil. Price controls had been in effect since 1971.[74] Although the short-term effect was a rise in gas prices, American oil companies increased their production and created an oil glut by summer.[75]
  • The "Paquisha War" began as Ecuador and Peru clashed when Ecuadorian forces had established an outpost 40 miles (64 km) into territory that had been lost to Peru in 1942. Despite initial reports by Peru of hundreds of deaths on both sides, Ecuador acknowledged that two of its soldiers were killed, and Peru had one killed and three wounded.[76]
  • Born: Elijah Wood, American actor known for The Lord of the Rings film series; in Cedar Rapids, Iowa[77]

January 29, 1981 (Thursday)

January 30, 1981 (Friday)

January 31, 1981 (Saturday)

  • Thought by scientists to have been extinct since 1895, the golden-fronted bowerbird (Amblyornis flavifrons) was discovered to have survived. American ornithologist Jared Diamond of UCLA discovered the home ground of the golden-fronted bowerbird at the Foja Mountains. Diamond photographed several of the birds, then lost his film when his boat capsized and had to make a second expedition. The rediscovery was confirmed at a November 10, 1981, press conference at the National Geographic Society in Washington, which, with the World Wildlife Fund, had co-sponsored Diamond's research.[80]
  • The first parade to honor veterans of the Vietnam War was organized by the veterans themselves, in Indianapolis, eight years after the conflict ended. Hundreds of vets, wrote a New York Times reporter, "marched Saturday in counterpoint to the heroic reception of the former American hostages... offering themselves the parade they said nobody gave them when they came home from war."[81]
  • CCM Robert K. Jones, the last of the American "NAP"s, retired from the U.S. Navy. The "Naval Aviation Pilots" were enlisted men rather than Navy, Marine or Coast Guard officers.[82]
  • Born:

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