May 1963

May 15, 1963: L. Gordon Cooper becomes last Mercury astronaut to go into space

May 4, 1963: Civil rights protesters dispersed in Birmingham, Alabama

May 18, 1963: Sukarno named "President for Life" of Indonesia

The following events occurred in May 1963:

May 1, 1963 (Wednesday)

• West New Guinea, the last remaining Netherlands possession in what had been the Dutch East Indies, was formally transferred to Indonesian control by the United Nations in ceremonies at Hollandia. The Indonesians renamed the territory West Irian, and Hollandia was renamed Kotabaru.^[1]
• Sir Winston Churchill announced his retirement from politics at the age of 88, for reasons of health. He pledged that he would remain an M.P. until Parliament was dissolved, but would not stand for re-election.^[2]
• American mountaineer Jim Whittaker and Sherpa guide Nawang Gombu became the fifth and sixth persons to successfully reach the top of Mount Everest, following Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (May 29, 1953), and Ernst Reiss and Fritz Luchsinger (May 18, 1957). Whittaker, a 32-year-old resident of Redmond, Washington, became the first American to accomplish the feat.^[3]
• Former U.S. Vice-President (and future President) Richard M. Nixon continued his retirement from politics with the announcement that he would join the New York City law firm of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd on June 1.^[4]
• Died: Lope K. Santos, 83, Filipino writer and politician

May 2, 1963 (Thursday)

• Hundreds of African Americans, including children, were arrested during the Birmingham campaign as they set out from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama to protest segregation.^[5] There were 959 people taken on the first day, and two days later, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor ordered the use of dogs and fire hoses to repel new demonstrators, images of which were picked up by news media around the world. ^[6]
• Near Cuxhaven, Berthold Seliger launched a three-stage rocket with a maximum flight altitude of more than 62 miles. This was the only sounding rocket developed in Germany.

May 3, 1963 (Friday)

• A Cruzeiro do Sul Convair 340-59 registration PP-CDW plane, flying from São Paulo-Congonhas to Rio de Janeiro-Santos Dumont with 50 people on board, was forced to return to São Paulo after its no. 2 engine caught fire. On its final approach to touchdown, the aircraft nosed up 45°, stalled and struck a house, killing 37 people.^[7]
• On the same day, an Air Afrique Douglas DC-6B crashed into Mount Cameroon less than half an hour after takeoff from Douala, bound for Lagos, killing all 55 people on board. Blame for the accident was placed on the pilot's decision to descend from 16,500 feet to 6,500 feet while flying toward the 13,000 foot high mountain.^[8]
• Condingup, in Western Australia, was declared a townsite.^[9]

May 4, 1963 (Saturday)

• The sinking of a motor launch on the Nile River drowned more than 185 people in Egypt, nearly all of them Moslem pilgrims who were beginning the journey to Mecca from the city of Maghagha. The boat's capacity was only 80 people, but more than 200 people crowded on board to make the trip. Among the 15 people who survived were the boat's captain, its owner and its conductor, who were all jailed while the matter was investigated.^[10]
• The Le Monde Theater fire in Diourbel, Senegal, killed 64 people.
• New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller secretly married his girlfriend, Margaretta "Happy" Murphy, despite being advised that his remarriage, after divorcing the year before, would hurt his chances for the Republican Party nomination for the U.S. presidency.^[11] Television comedian Carol Burnett, 28, married television producer Joe Hamilton in a ceremony in Juarez, Mexico, on the same day, after Hamilton had obtained "a quickie Mexican divorce".^[12]
• High pressure water hoses and police dogs were used by police to disperse a crowd of more than 1,000 African-American protesters in Birmingham, Alabama.^[13]
• Died: Dickey Kerr, 69, American baseball pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, praised later for remaining honest during the corrupt Black Sox Scandal in 1919.

May 5, 1963 (Sunday)

• After 18 years of denial, the Soviet Union confirmed that it had recovered and identified the burned remains of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945.^[14] Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, the Chief of Operations during the Battle of Berlin, publicly disclosed the details to American researcher Cornelius Ryan and allowed him and unprecedented access to classified documents, and allowed him and English historian John Erickson to interview fifty top-ranking officials. Sokolovsky told Ryan, "You should be informed that the Soviet Union officially regards Hitler as dead." Previously, the official Soviet position had been that of the Soviet commander, Georgy Zhukov, who had said, "We have found no body definitely identifed as Hitler's. For all we know, he may be in Spain or Argentina."
• Celebrations were held in the city of Huế in South Vietnam, to honor the ordination of Ngo Dinh Thuc, elder brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem, as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Huế. In advance of the event, the President decreed that religious banners could not be displayed above the national flag, a rule that would lead to tragedy at a Buddhist celebration three days later.
• Graduate student Beverly Samans, 23, became the tenth murder victim of Albert DeSalvo. Unlike the first nine Boston Strangler victims, Samans was stabbed repeatedly, although he repeated his modus operandi of strangling a woman with her own stocking.^[15] Her body was discovered three days later.^[16]
• The 4th Pan American Games drew to a close in São Paulo, Brazil.

May 6, 1963 (Monday)

• Timothy Leary was dismissed from his post at Harvard University for failing to carry out his duties.^[17]
• The Limitation Bill came before the UK parliament, an amendment to the statute of limitations. The resulting act would not be fully repealed until 1980.
• Born: Alessandra Ferri, Italian ballerina, in Milan
• Died: Ted Weems, 61, American bandleader, of emphysema; and Monty Woolley, 75, American actor

May 7, 1963 (Tuesday)

• The communications satellite Telstar II was launched into Earth orbit to replace the first Telstar satellite, which had stopped functioning on February 21 because of damage by the Van Allen radiation belts. As with the first Telstar, the satellite amplified the signals that it was receiving from ground station transmitters. ^[18]
• Kuwait was approved to become the 111th member of the United Nations by the UN Security Council, over the objections of Iraq.
• Died: Theodore von Kármán, 81, Hungarian mathematician, engineer and physicist

May 8, 1963 (Wednesday)

• Dr. No, the first James Bond film, premiered in the United States with Sean Connery as Agent 007. The film had been seen in Europe since its premiere in London on October 5, 1962.^[19]
• The Hue Vesak shootings took place when soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) opened fire on Buddhists who had defied a ban on the flying of the Buddhist flag on Vesak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha. Eight people were killed. Earlier, South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem allowed the flying of the Vatican flag, symbolic of Roman Catholicism, in honor of his brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc.^[20]

May 9, 1963 (Thursday)

• After the first six attempts at a successful launch of the MIDAS (Missile Defense Alarm System) satellite failed, MIDAS 7 was successfully placed into a polar orbit. During the first three years of attempts, three of the satellites failed to reach orbit, while the other three were plagued with power failures. MIDAS 7 would operate for 47 days, and would detecting nine Soviet missile launches.^[21]
• The 1963 Cannes Film Festival opened.

May 10, 1963 (Friday)

• A settlement was reached between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the leading business owners of Birmingham, Alabama, with the SCLC agreeing to call off its boycott of local retailers, who in return "agreed to desegregate lunch counters, rest rooms, fitting rooms and drinking fountains" and to hire more African-Americans for sales and clerical jobs.^[22]
• Author Maurice Sendak, working on his first book for children, made the decision to abandon his original title, Where the Wild Horses Are, after concluding that horses were too difficult to draw, and changed the characters in the book to friendly monsters. The book, Where the Wild Things Are, would become a Caldecott Medal winning bestseller and launch Sendak's career.^[23]
• Born: Sławomir Skrzypek, Polish financier, in Katowice (killed in the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash)
• Died:
  • Léonce Crenier, 74, French Catholic monk who promoted the theological/political concept of Precarity
  • Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, 31, American NFL player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, of a heroin overdose

May 11, 1963 (Saturday)

• Canada's new Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, agreed to allow American nuclear weapons to be placed in Canada, following a two-day meeting with U.S. President John F. Kennedy at the President's private estate in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.^[24]
• Born:
  • Natasha Richardson, English actress, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson (died 2009)
• Died: Herbert Spencer Gasser, 74, American neurophysiologist and 1944 Nobel Prize laureate

May 12, 1963 (Sunday)

• Scheduled to make his nationwide television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, folk singer Bob Dylan refused to perform after censors at the CBS network wouldn't clear him to sing "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues". Dylan would go on to greater fame, singing with Joan Baez in August during the "March on Washington".^[25]
• Kenji Kimihara of Japan won the Lake Biwa Marathon, Japan's oldest annual marathon race.^[26]

May 13, 1963 (Monday)

• The comic strip Modesty Blaise made its debut in England as part of the Evening Standard of London.^[27]
• A smallpox outbreak hit Stockholm, Sweden, lasting until July.

May 14, 1963 (Tuesday)

• The Rolling Stones signed their first recording contract, after being asked to audition for Decca Records by talent scout Dick Rowe.^[28]
• In Denmark, the Frederick IX Bridge was officially opened, spanning the Guldborgsund strait between the islands of Falster and Lolland.
• The new office of Parliamentary Secretary was created in the administration of Canada.

May 15, 1963 (Wednesday)

• NASA launched astronaut Gordon Cooper into orbit on Mercury 9, the last mission of the Mercury program.^[29]

May 16, 1963 (Thursday)

• Astronaut Gordon Cooper returned to Earth safely after making 22 orbits and traveling 546,167 miles in Faith 7. During his 34 hours^[30]

Penkovsky

• Died: Oleg Penkovsky, 44, formerly a Soviet Army colonel and spy, was executed five days after being sentenced to death by a military tribunal for passing secrets to the United States and the United Kingdom.^[31]

May 17, 1963 (Friday)

• Challenger Bruno Sammartino faced champion Buddy Rogers of the World Wide Wrestling Federation (now WWE) in a professional wrestling match at New York's Madison Square Garden. Sammartino, using his signature move, "the Italian backbreaker", defeated Rogers in only 48 seconds, and would reign as the WWWF champion for the next eight years.^[32]
• A U.S. Army OH-23 helicopter with two men on board, Captains Ben W. Stutts and Charleton W. Voltz, was shot down by North Korean ground forces after straying north of the Demilitarized Zone.^[33] The two men would be freed, after 365 days imprisonment, on May 16, 1964, following the United Nations Command agreeing to sign a statement that the Stutts and Voltz had committed espionage, but declined to return the helicopter.^[34]
• In Germany, the Regensburg trolleybus system went out of service.

May 18, 1963 (Saturday)

• Sukarno (sometimes referred to as Ahmed Sukarno) was named as President for Life of Indonesia. Sukarno, who had ruled since 1945, would serve for another four years before being deposed, and would spend the rest of his life afterward under house arrest, dying on June 21, 1970.^[35]
• Died: Ernie Davis, 23, African-American football star who won the 1961 Heisman Trophy, but was diagnosed with leukemia after signing with the Cleveland Browns

May 19, 1963 (Sunday)

• The 1963 Rome Grand Prix was won by Bob Anderson.

May 20, 1963 (Monday)

Petrosian

Botvinnik

• The World Chess Championship was won by Tigran Petrosian, who defeated world champion Mikhail Botvinnik,  12 ¹⁄₂ to  9 ¹⁄₂, to win the match after 22 games. The two men, both Soviet citizens, had begun play on May 23 in Moscow. Under the rules, Petrosian's five wins (worth one point each) and 15 draws ( ¹⁄₂ point each) brought him to  12 ¹⁄₂ points first to win the series.^[36]
• African-American civil rights activist Medgar Evers went on the air on the WLBT-TV News in Jackson, Mississippi, to deliver an editorial in favor of integration and civil rights. WLBT allowed the unprecedented use of its airtime after pressure from the Federal Communications Commission to permit a response to segregationists. Evers would be murdered at his home three weeks later, on June 12.^[37]
• The South African Police Cross for Bravery was instituted.^[38]
• The Dutch Wonderland Family Amusement Park was opened near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by potato broker Earl Clark.^[39]

May 21, 1963 (Tuesday)

President Shazar

• Zalman Shazar was elected by the Knesset as the third President of Israel, winning 67-33 over Peretz Bernstein. As with the first two Presidents of Israel (Chaim Weizmann and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi), Shazar was a native of Russia. He had been born as Shneur Zalman Rubashov in Mir, now part of Belarus.^[40]

May 22, 1963 (Wednesday)

• Greek anti-Fascist politician Grigoris Lambrakis, shortly after delivering the keynote speech at an anti-war meeting in Thessaloniki, was run down by a trikyklo (a three-wheeled delivery truck) and then clubbed to death by hired killers. Lambrakis suffered brain injuries and died in the hospital five days later. The assassination would become the basis for a novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, which later was adapted to the film Z.^[41]
• American Football League team owner Lamar Hunt of the Dallas Texans agreed to move the AFL champion club to Kansas City, Missouri and rename them the Kansas City Chiefs. The AFL trustees would approve the move a week later.

May 23, 1963 (Thursday)

• The first successful interception of an orbiting satellite by a ground based missile took place as part of the American program, Project MUDFLAP. A Nike-Zeus missile, launched from Kwajalein Atoll, passed close enough to an orbiting Lockheed Agena-D satellite to have disabled it with an explosion. Seven other tests would be made, ending on January 13, 1966.^[42]
• Fidel Castro visited the Soviet Union.
• AS Monaco were victorious in the finals of the Coupe de France football competition, defeating Olympique Lyonnais 2-0 at Parc des Princes.

May 24, 1963 (Friday)

• Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited James Baldwin and other Black leaders to discuss race relations at his apartment in Manhattan. The turbulent meeting gained wide publicity and had a significant impact on Kennedy.^[43]
• Project Emily came to an end in the United Kingdom when the last squadron of Thor nuclear missile stations, at RAF Hemswell, was disbanded.
• The New York Journal-American said in a copyrighted story that NASA had revealed in a closed session of a congressional subcommittee that there had been five fatalities in the Soviet cosmonaut program, all of which had been covered up. According to the source, Serenty Shiborin had been the first man in space, launched in February 1959 and "never heard of again after 28 minutes when the signals went dead". Other failed launches were said to have been Piotr Dolgov on October 11, 1960; Vassilievitch Zowodovsky in April 1961; and two persons, possibly a man and a woman, launched together on May 17, 1961.^[44] Alexei Adzhubei, the editor of the newspaper Izvestia and the son-in-law of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, denied the reports of four of the five deaths in the newspaper's May 27 edition, saying that the persons had been "technicians working on space equipment" and that two of them were still alive, although no denial was made about the alleged 1959 death of Siborin.^[45]
• Born: Michael Chabon, American novelist (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), in Washington DC
• Died: Elmore James, 45, American blues musician, of a heart attack

May 25, 1963 (Saturday)

• The Organization of African Unity (OAU) was established in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by representatives from 32 African nations.^[46] On July 9, 2002, the OAU, by then with 53 members, would be replaced by the African Union.^[47]
• At the track and field competition for six universities in what is now the Pac-12 Conference, Phil Shinnick jumped 27 feet, 4 inches in the long jump, 3/4 inch ahead of the world record set by Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, but "two officials, whose only duty was to place the wind gauge on the long jump runway and watch it to make sure the wind was blowing at less than the allowable limit, were not paying attention"^[48] so the mark was not submitted as a world record.
• Aldo Moro was asked to become the new Prime Minister of Italy by President Antonio Segni.^[49]
• Born: Mike Myers, Canadian actor and comedian, in Scarborough, Ontario

May 26, 1963 (Sunday)

• Less than two years after he had been released from years of imprisonment, Jomo Kenyatta was assured to become the first Prime Minister of Kenya when his Kenya African National Union won 83 of the 129 seats in the National Assembly in the Kenyan national election.^[50]
• A rare case of two independent tornadic thunderstorms, near Oklahoma City, yielded data that would lead to the recognition of "a new stage in the development of thunderstorms: the severe/right-moving, or SR, stage".^[51]
• Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed to resume diplomatic relations that had been severed on September 6, 1960, following a conference between officials in Tehran at the invitation of the Shah of Iran.^[52]
• The 1963 Monaco Grand Prix was won by Graham Hill.
• Born:
  • Simon Armitage, British poet, playwright and novelist, in Huddersfield.
  • Mary Nightingale, an English newsreader and television presenter, in Scarborough.

May 27, 1963 (Monday)

• The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's second and most influential studio album, opening with the song "Blowin' in the Wind", was released by Columbia Records.
• Died: Grigoris Lambrakis, 51, Greek politician, physician and athlete, five days after being attacked.

May 28, 1963 (Tuesday)

• A cyclone killed 22,000 people in and around the city of Comilla in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).^[53] Winds as high as 150 m.p.h. ripped the countryside, and "the many offshore islands were literally swept clean of people";^[54] both Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar lost 5,000 people each, and waves were powerful enough to send ships half a mile inland, including four ocean liners.
• In Greece, more than 500,000 people attended the funeral of Grigoris Lambrakis, protesting against the right-wing government.
• Born: Gavin Harrison, British drummer, in Harrow
• Died: Klaus Clusius, 60, German physical chemist

May 29, 1963 (Wednesday)

• On the 50th anniversary of its stormy première, The Rite of Spring was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by 88-year-old Pierre Monteux at the Royal Albert Hall. The composer, 81-year-old Igor Stravinsky, was in the audience as an honored guest.
• Jim Reeves was welcomed to Ireland by show band singers Maisie McDaniel and Dermot O'Brien, at the start of his tour of Ireland, and conducted a week-long tour of U.S. military bases in England.
• Born:
  • Lisa Whelchel, American TV actress and Contemporary Christian singer, best known as Blair Warner on The Facts of Life; in Littlefield, Texas
  • Tom Burnett, American businessman who was one of the passengers who fought with terrorists during the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001; in Bloomington, Minnesota (d. 2001)
• Died: Vissarion Shebalin, 61, Soviet classical composer

May 30, 1963 (Thursday)

• The initial announcements were made for the first diet drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company, with TaB cola, with "one calorie per six-ounce serving".^[55]
• Parnelli Jones of the United States won the 1963 Indianapolis 500, finishing 34 seconds ahead of Jim Clark of Scotland.^[56]
• More than 500 monks demonstrated in front of South Vietnam's National Assembly building in Saigon, evading a ban on public assembly by hiring four buses and pulling the blinds down. It was the first open protest against President Ngô Đình Diệm's regime since he came into power eight years earlier.

May 31, 1963 (Friday)

• The ABC Theatre in Blackpool, UK, opened, beginning with the Holiday Carnival summer season stage show, starring Cliff Richard and The Shadows.
• Winslow Air Force Station in Winslow, Arizona, ceased operations.
• Died: Edith Hamilton, 95, German-born American classical scholar best known for her authorship of Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes

References