Two small groups of
Nicaraguan exiles invaded from
Costa Rica, landing airplanes at two locations, in an attempt to overthrow President
Luis Somoza. The invasion, which Somoza believed to have been instigated by Cuba's Fidel Castro, was crushed on June 11.[3]
Twelve people were killed and 15 injured in
Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, in the explosion of a propane truck. The truck had caught fire 30 minutes earlier after being rammed from behind, and many of the victims had been watching from a distance.[6]
June 3, 1959 (Wednesday)
The army of
Ecuador brutally suppressed rioting in
Guayaquil, killing more than 500 people.[7]
The United States attempted to launch four mice into orbit aboard the satellite Discoverer III, but the mission failed when the rockets fired the vehicle downward rather than horizontally; the satellite burned up on re-entry.[9]
June 4, 1959 (Thursday)
At a staff meeting, Space Task Group Director
Robert R. Gilruth suggested studying a Mercury follow-on program using maneuverable
Mercury capsules for land landings in predetermined areas.[10]
Singapore was made a self-governing state within the British Empire, with
Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister, and Sir William Goode serving as Governor-General for the first six months. Singapore achieved full independence in 1965.[13]
Nikolay Artamonov, commander of a Soviet Navy destroyer, defected to the United States, with his fiancée Eva, after escaping in a motorboat to Oland Island in Sweden. As Nicholas Shadrin, Artamonov, worked for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency until the Soviets recaptured him in 1975.[14]
The
Army Ballistic Missile Agency submitted a proposal for a
Mercury-Redstone inflight abort sensing system. This system would monitor performance of the control system (attitude and angular velocity), electrical power supply, and launch vehicle propulsion. If operational limits were exceeded, the
spacecraft would be ejected from the launch vehicle and recovered by parachute.[2]
Born:Marwan Barghouti, Jordanian-born Palestinian leader instrumental in launching the 1988 intifada; in
Kobar on the
West Bank
June 7, 1959 (Sunday)
The
United NationsConvention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, also known as the New York Convention, entered into force, under terms adopted by the U.N. on June 10, 1958. The agreement encourages
international arbitration of disputes, in that all nations that have accepted the 1959 agreement recognize the results of the arbitration as legally binding. The USSR ratified the treaty in 1960, the US in 1970 and Britain in 1975.[16]
A.C. Milan won the championship of Italy's top professional soccer football league, finishing in first place on the last day of competition for
Serie A with 20 wins, 12 draws and 2 losses (20-12-2) for 52 points, ahead of two other teams with 20 wins,
ACF Fiorentina (20-9-5) and
Inter Milan (20-7-8).
Antonio Angelillo was the top scorer with 33 goals [17]
In
Marigliano a protest by the farmers of the
province of Naples degenerated into a riot: the city Hall was devastated; a tax and mail office and the carabineers' station were set on fire.[17]
An experiment with "
missile mail" proved successful, if not practical. At 10:10 am, the
USS Barbero launched a Regulus I rocket, containing 3,000 letters, from a point 100 miles (160 km) offshore from
Norfolk, Virginia. The "wheeled missile" was guided to the naval air station at
Mayport, Florida, a parachute deployed, and it landed 22 minutes after firing.[19] Postmaster General
Arthur E. Summerfield predicted that deliveries of mail by missile would become a regular practice.[20]
The Space Task Group advised the
U.S. Navy's
Bureau of Aeronautics of Government-furnished survival items that
McDonnell would package in containers. These included desalter kits, dye marker, distress signal, signal mirrors, signal whistle,
first aid kits,
shark chaser, PK-2 raft, survival rations, matches, and a radio
transceiver. Navy assistance was requested in the procurement of these items.[2]
Space Task Group officials met with representatives of the
School of Aviation Medicine to discuss detailed aspects of the bio-packs to be used in the
NASALittle Joe flight program. The packs were to be furnished by the school. The purpose was to gather life support data that would be applicable to the crewed flights of Project Mercury.[2]
American spy planes intercepted telemetry from a Soviet missile in flight for the first time. Flying near the Iran-USSR border, a
U-2 aircraft and an
RB-57 Canberra picked up 80 seconds of transmissions from the ICBM to the
Tyuratam ground station.[23]
The first ballistic missile submarine,
USS George Washington, was launched at 12:40 pm from
Groton, Connecticut.[25] On June 28, 1960, the sub was fitted with two Polaris nuclear missiles.[26]
In Italy, the broadcast of a TV movie, I figli di Medea (The Sons of Medea), caused a mass hysteria, similar to the 1938 panic caused by
Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. Vladimiro Cajoli's script was in the form of a fictitious news program that started with a bulletin that a sick child of an actress was being held hostage by his father, portrayed by actor
Enrico Maria Salerno. The mother, "Medea", was portrayed by well-known actress
Alida Valli, whose plea to viewers was so realistic that thousands of people thought that the celebrity was the victim of a crime. One of the viewers came with a gun, into the RAI broadcast studios, preparing to shoot actor Salerno. To make matters worse, the fictional news program gave out a phone number that belonged to a major hospital, whose switchboard was jammed by callers offering tips for finding the "missing child".[27][28]
A month after withdrawing a six-month ultimatum for the Western powers to withdraw from Berlin, Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev issued a new deadline when talks broke down in Geneva. Khrushchev demanded that the U.S., Britain, and France withdraw their armies from West Berlin by June 10, 1960. The ultimatum was withdrawn on September 27 when Khrushchev met with President Eisenhower at Camp David.[29]
Harold Geneen became President of
International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT). Over a 28-year period, Geneen built the company into a gigantic conglomerate, increasing revenues from $765 million in 1959 to $22 billion at the time of his retirement on January 1, 1978.[30]
Turkey's President
Celâl Bayar became the first leader of the Islamic nation to be received as a guest by a Roman Catholic Church, as
Pope John XXIII welcomed Bayar to the Vatican. The two men had met during World War II when the future pontiff, Bishop
Angelo Roncalli, had been the Vatican's apostolic delegate to
Istanbul.[32]
The first large hovercraft, the Saunders-Roe Nautical One
SR-N1, made its maiden voyage on the
English Channel.[33]
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by
D.H. Lawrence, was barred from distribution in the United States by order of the
Postmaster General. Grove Press had announced, in April, publication of the "unexpurgated edition" of Lawrence's novel, and the Postmaster barred it under section 1461 of Title 18 of the United States Code as "obscene and un-mailable".[34]
Singer
Billie Holiday was arrested for heroin possession while in her room at New York's Metropolitan Hospital, where she had been since collapsing on May 31. Because she could not be moved, NYPD detectives fingerprinted her and took mug shots while she lay in bed, to face charges upon release. She would die, without regaining consciousness, on July 17.[36]
Police in
Angamaly, a city in India's
Kerala state, fired into a crowd that was protesting against the elected Communist government of
E. M. S. Namboodiripad, killing seven people. The incident led to the replacement of the state government, on July 31, by
President's rule, under Article 356 of the Indian Constitution.[37]
Dominican exiles, aided by
Fidel Castro, invaded the
Dominican Republic on three fronts, with the objective of overthrowing
dictatorRafael Leónidas Trujillo. At
Estero Hondo and at
Maimon, the rebels rowed in from ships stationed offshore, while a smaller group landed a C-46 transport at
Constanza. Alerted to the invasion by its own spies, the Dominican armed forces stopped the invasion by sea. In Constanza, where inaccurate bombing ended up killing more civilians than guerillas, most of the rebels were captured or killed by Dominican peasants in return for a cash bounty.[38]
At
Disneyland, the first passenger-carrying
monorail was dedicated by U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon. When Walt Disney took the Nixon family along for a test ride before the ceremony, the Secret Service detail was inadvertently left behind and the Vice President accidentally "kidnapped".[39]
As beachgoers in
La Jolla, California, watched, 33-year-old Robert Pamperin was attacked and devoured by a 20-foot (6.1 m) great white shark, while skindiving 50 yards (46 m) from shore. No trace of Pamperin was found, and it was speculated that the shark had swallowed him whole.[40]
June 15, 1959 (Monday)
A U.S. Navy
P4M Mercator patrol plane was attacked by a pair of
MiG-15 fighters over the
Sea of Japan, 80 miles (130 km) east of
Wonsan,
North Korea. Tailgunner Donald E. Corder was severely wounded, and the plane landed at a U.S. base in
Hiroshima, Japan.[41][42]
June 16, 1959 (Tuesday)
The essay "
Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor" appeared in the Chinese Communist paper People's Daily (Renmin Ribao), written by historian and Beijing vice-mayor
Wu Han. Ostensibly about the criticism (in 1566) of a Ming dynasty Emperor, the article, and other Hai Rui essays that followed, was viewed as a veiled criticism of Chinese leader
Mao Zedong and considered a factor in the backlash from the 1966
Cultural Revolution.[43]
In a White House meeting, President Eisenhower expressed his reservations about the placement of American medium range nuclear missiles in Turkey, noting that "if Mexico or Cuba had been penetrated by the Communists, and then began getting arms and missiles from them ... it would be imperative for us to take positive action, even offensive military action." The presence of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey was later believed to be one of the factors in the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, which precipitated the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.[45]
Died: Actor
George Reeves, who played the title role on the television program The Adventures of Superman, was found dead, in his Beverly Hills home, from a single gunshot to his head.[46] Because the gun was wiped clean of fingerprints, and there were no powder burns on his hand, the conclusion that he had killed himself has been disputed.[47]
June 17, 1959 (Wednesday)
A jury in London awarded
Liberace $22,400 in his libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The Mirror's columnist, William Connor, had described the flamboyant pianist as homosexual.[48]
Queen Elizabeth II arrived in
Newfoundland to begin a 45-day tour of
Canada. In the longest stay ever by a Canadian monarch, she traveled 15,000 miles and was seen by more than a million people.[53]
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an Arkansas law that had closed public schools at the beginning of the 1958–59 academic year was unconstitutional. Following the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, the Arkansas Legislature had closed the schools.[54]
A
centrifuge program was conducted at
Johnsville, Pennsylvania, to investigate the role of a pilot in the launch of a multi-stage vehicle. Test subjects were required to perform boost-control tasks, while being subjected to the proper boost-control accelerations. The highest g-force experienced was 15, and none of the test subjects felt they reached the limit of their control capability. One of the test subjects,
Neil Armstrong, was later selected as a NASA
astronaut for the
Gemini program in September 1962.[2]
William Shea and
Branch Rickey announced plans for a third major baseball league that was tentatively named the
Continental League, to be made up of eight cities not represented in either the American or National Leagues.[55]
U.S. Defense SecretaryNeil H. McElroy approved the DOD's air defense master plan, providing for procurement of KC-135 tankers, and B-52G, B-58, and B-70 bombers, and increased deployment of Atlas, Tian and Minuteman missiles.[56]
The Mercury Capsule (spacecraft) Coordination Office was organized within the Space Task Group, with
J. A. Chamberlin appointed head of the office.[2] A Capsule Review Board was established to review, at regular intervals, action taken by the Capsule Coordination Office.
Paul E. Purser was appointed chairman, with division heads, Coordination Office head, and Project and Assistant Project Directors serving as members.[2]
June 20, 1959 (Saturday)
The Soviet Union reversed plans to provide China with a prototype
atomic bomb, and secretly informed the
Beijing government that it would not supply technical data for constructing more nuclear weapons, unilaterally cancelling an accord reached on October 15, 1957.[57]Nikita Khrushchev noted later in his memoirs that the working bomb and its blueprints had been packed and ready for shipment, but that the Soviets then decided against sharing their secrets.[58] The Chinese would initiate
Project 596 and detonate their first bomb in 1964.
The collision of an express train with a bus
killed 45 bus passengers at the town of
Lauffen am Neckar in West Germany's
Baden-Württemberg state. The bus had been running late in its transport of people from the
Leonbronn station who were trying to reach the Lauffen train station for a connection to
Würzburg. The keeper who had put the safety barrier across the road lifted it and waved the bus through, without checking first with the German Railways to make sure nothing was coming. The E 867 express train from
Stuttgart— ironically, the train to Würzburg which the passengers were planning to board— raced into the station just as it was coming into the Lauffen station.[59]
June 21, 1959 (Sunday)
Winnipeg,
Manitoba, became the first city in North America to adopt the
999 number for emergency services. The first
9-1-1 service in the United States did not occur until February 16, 1968, when inaugurated in
Haleyville, Alabama.[60]
Minnesota's
Lake of the Woods, which bills itself as the "Walleye Capital of the World", erected its 40-foot-long (12 m) statue of "Willie Walleye".[61]
Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs in his major league baseball career but had only one game with more than two home runs. He hit three home runs, for six RBIs, in the Braves' win over the Giants in San Francisco.[62]
The first multinational treaty on nuclear security came into force. The
OECD Convention on the Establishment of a Security Control in the Field of Nuclear Energy had been signed by the nations of Western Europe, along with the United States and Canada, on December 20, 1957.[63]
H. Kurt Strass of Space Task Group's Flight Systems Division (FSD) recommended the establishment of a committee to consider the preliminary design of a two-man space laboratory. Representatives from each of the specialist groups within FSD would work with a special projects group, the work to culminate in a set of design specifications for the
two-man Mercury.[10]
Died:Bruce Harlan, 33, U.S. gold medalist in diving at the 1948 Olympics, died one day after falling 27 feet (8.2 m) while dismantling scaffolding at the close of a diving exhibition in
Norwalk, Connecticut.[64][65]
June 23, 1959 (Tuesday)
The
Central African Republic,
Chad,
Congo (Brazzaville) and
Gabon signed a treaty in Brazzaville to create the Union Douaniere Equatorial (UDE) to establish a customs union.[66]
Klaus Fuchs, who had given America's atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, was quietly released from a British prison after serving nine years of a 14-year sentence for espionage. He traveled as "Mr. Strauss" on a LOT Airlines flight from London to East Berlin, where he lived until his death in 1988.[69]
Against an original estimated cost of $15.5 million for eight
Redstone launch vehicles in support of Project Mercury, the final negotiated figure was $20.1 million.[2]
Porgy and Bess, the widescreen Technicolor film of the
classic Gershwin opera, was released to mixed reviews and poor box office. Its two leads,
Sidney Poitier and
Dorothy Dandridge, as well as
Diahann Carroll, had their singing voices dubbed by others, while
Sammy Davis, Jr.,
Pearl Bailey, and
Brock Peters did their own singing. The work was changed from being a full-fledged opera to an operetta simply by removing about a third of the music and having the words to many of the operatic portions spoken instead of sung. A more critically acclaimed, more faithful, and more complete version of Porgy and Bess was telecast by PBS in 1993.
June 25, 1959 (Thursday)
Taking advantage of a clause in the new U.S. copyright law, cartoonist
Max Fleischer exercised an exclusive right to renew the soon-to-expire copyright on
Betty Boop. Max's son
Richard would later recount that attorney Stanley Handman had happened to read, in The Wall Street Journal, "the article that would change our lives forever", with merchandising rights to the popular 1940s cartoon.[70]
On June 25 and 26,
Laurence K. Loftin, Jr., of Langley Research Center, presented to the Research Steering Committee on Manned Space Flight a report on a projected crewed space station. During subsequent discussion, Committee Chairman
Harry J. Goett stated that considerations of space stations and orbiting laboratories should be an integral part of coordinated planning for a
lunar landing mission.
George M. Low of
NASA Headquarters warned that care must be exercised that each successive step in space be taken with an eye toward the principal objective (i.e., lunar landing) because the number of steps that realistically could be funded and attempted was extremely limited. (Subsequently, Low's thinking and the recommendations of the Research Steering Committee would be influential in shifting the planning focus of NASA's
human spaceflight program away from ideas of large space stations and laboratories and toward lunar flight and the
Apollo program.)[21]
June 26, 1959 (Friday)
Japan's Emperor
Hirohito became the first Japanese monarch to attend a baseball game.
Nagashima Shigeo, the most popular player at that time, led the
Yomiuri Giants to a win over the
Hanshin Tigers with a dramatic ninth-inning home run.[71]
TWA Flight 891, a Lockheed Starliner, exploded in midair and then crashed near the Italian town of
Marnate, 15 minutes after taking off from
Milan toward
Paris. All 68 people on board died.[72] Subsequent investigation concluded that the plane had been struck by lightning, which then ignited vapors in a fuel tank.[73]
Ingemar Johansson of Sweden became the world heavyweight boxing champion when he knocked out champ
Floyd Patterson in a bout at
Yankee Stadium. The two would meet for a rematch on June 20, 1960, with Patterson reclaiming his crown in the fifth round.[74]
Born:Mark McKinney, Canadian-born comedian (The Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live), in
Ottawa
June 27, 1959 (Saturday)
Voters in
Hawaii went to the polls on the question of whether to become the 50th state of the United States of America. The result was 132,938 in favor, and 7,854 not. Only one of the 240 precincts went against statehood, with voters on the island of
Niihau 70–18 against.[75]
June 28, 1959 (Sunday)
The
Ethiopian Orthodox Church was created as a separate entity from Egypt's Coptic Christian church. Egypt's Pope Cyril VI appointed Bishop
Abuna Basilios as the patriarch of the church, with authority to consecrate his bishops within the Ethiopian church.[76]
At
Meldrim, Georgia,
seventeen people were burned to death while swimming in the
Ogeechee River. The beach area was beneath a 30-foot (9.1 m) railroad trestle, and as the train moved over the bridge, two tanker cars exploded, sending a blanket of flames onto a crowd of 175 people below.[77]
June 29, 1959 (Monday)
Pope John XXIII issued his first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram, prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The papal letter emphasized that a renewal of the Roman Catholic Church would precede a reunion with other Christian denominations.[78]
June 30, 1959 (Tuesday)
Twenty-one students were killed and more than 100 were injured when an American F-100 plane crashed into Miamori Elementary School at
Ishikawa, Japan, on the island of Okinawa. The pilot had ejected after the plane malfunctioned and struck the school.[79]
One of the oddest incidents in MLB history happened when two baseballs were in play at the same time during the Cardinals-Cubs game. Umpire
Vic Delmore had handed a new baseball to Cubs' pitcher
Bob Anderson while Cubs' third baseman
Alvin Dark had retrieved a ball that was still in play. As the Cards'
Stan Musial reached second base, both Anderson and Dark threw a baseball his way. Musial ran for third when he saw Anderson's throw sail past him, and was tagged out by Ernie Banks, who had caught the ball thrown by Dark. After ten minutes, the umpires ruled that Musial was out. The Cardinals won anyway, 4–1, so no protest was lodged.[80]
^Azevedo, Mario Joaquim (1998). Roots of Violence: A History of War in Chad. Taylor & Francis. p. 90.
^Nathan, James A. (1992). The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited.
Palgrave Macmillan. p. 140.
^"'Superman' Uses Pistol To Kill Self". Oakland Tribune. June 16, 1959. p. 1.
^Rossen, Jake (2008). Superman Vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors, and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon.
Chicago Review Press. pp. 37–38.
^"Jury Awards $22,400 to Liberace". Oakland Tribune. June 17, 1959. p. 1.
^Lee, Joseph (1989). Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge University Press. pp. 330–331.
ISBN0-521-37741-2.
^Surdam, David G. (2008). The Postwar Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited.
University of Nebraska Press. p. 226.
^Futrell, Robert Frank (1989). Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force 1907–1960.
DIANE Publishing. p. 537.
^Kuo, Mercy (2001). Contending with Contradictions: China's Policy Toward Soviet Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1953–1960.
Lexington Books. p. 137.
^Kennedy, Michael (2000). Division and Consensus: The Politics of Cross-border Relations in Ireland, 1925–1969. Institute of Public Administration. pp. 175–176.
^Esslin, Martin (1980). The Theatre of the Absurd. Taylor & Francis. p. 241.
^Bernstein, Jeremy (2007). Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know. Cambridge University Press. p. 251.
^Heller, Peter (1994). "In this corner-- !": Forty-two World Champions Tell Their Stories.
Da Capo Press. pp. 337–38.
^Nee-Benham, Maenette Kapeʻahiokalani Padeken Ah; Heck, Ronald H. (1998). Culture and Educational Policy in Hawai'i: The Silencing of Native Voices.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. p. 143.
Two small groups of
Nicaraguan exiles invaded from
Costa Rica, landing airplanes at two locations, in an attempt to overthrow President
Luis Somoza. The invasion, which Somoza believed to have been instigated by Cuba's Fidel Castro, was crushed on June 11.[3]
Twelve people were killed and 15 injured in
Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, in the explosion of a propane truck. The truck had caught fire 30 minutes earlier after being rammed from behind, and many of the victims had been watching from a distance.[6]
June 3, 1959 (Wednesday)
The army of
Ecuador brutally suppressed rioting in
Guayaquil, killing more than 500 people.[7]
The United States attempted to launch four mice into orbit aboard the satellite Discoverer III, but the mission failed when the rockets fired the vehicle downward rather than horizontally; the satellite burned up on re-entry.[9]
June 4, 1959 (Thursday)
At a staff meeting, Space Task Group Director
Robert R. Gilruth suggested studying a Mercury follow-on program using maneuverable
Mercury capsules for land landings in predetermined areas.[10]
Singapore was made a self-governing state within the British Empire, with
Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister, and Sir William Goode serving as Governor-General for the first six months. Singapore achieved full independence in 1965.[13]
Nikolay Artamonov, commander of a Soviet Navy destroyer, defected to the United States, with his fiancée Eva, after escaping in a motorboat to Oland Island in Sweden. As Nicholas Shadrin, Artamonov, worked for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency until the Soviets recaptured him in 1975.[14]
The
Army Ballistic Missile Agency submitted a proposal for a
Mercury-Redstone inflight abort sensing system. This system would monitor performance of the control system (attitude and angular velocity), electrical power supply, and launch vehicle propulsion. If operational limits were exceeded, the
spacecraft would be ejected from the launch vehicle and recovered by parachute.[2]
Born:Marwan Barghouti, Jordanian-born Palestinian leader instrumental in launching the 1988 intifada; in
Kobar on the
West Bank
June 7, 1959 (Sunday)
The
United NationsConvention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, also known as the New York Convention, entered into force, under terms adopted by the U.N. on June 10, 1958. The agreement encourages
international arbitration of disputes, in that all nations that have accepted the 1959 agreement recognize the results of the arbitration as legally binding. The USSR ratified the treaty in 1960, the US in 1970 and Britain in 1975.[16]
A.C. Milan won the championship of Italy's top professional soccer football league, finishing in first place on the last day of competition for
Serie A with 20 wins, 12 draws and 2 losses (20-12-2) for 52 points, ahead of two other teams with 20 wins,
ACF Fiorentina (20-9-5) and
Inter Milan (20-7-8).
Antonio Angelillo was the top scorer with 33 goals [17]
In
Marigliano a protest by the farmers of the
province of Naples degenerated into a riot: the city Hall was devastated; a tax and mail office and the carabineers' station were set on fire.[17]
An experiment with "
missile mail" proved successful, if not practical. At 10:10 am, the
USS Barbero launched a Regulus I rocket, containing 3,000 letters, from a point 100 miles (160 km) offshore from
Norfolk, Virginia. The "wheeled missile" was guided to the naval air station at
Mayport, Florida, a parachute deployed, and it landed 22 minutes after firing.[19] Postmaster General
Arthur E. Summerfield predicted that deliveries of mail by missile would become a regular practice.[20]
The Space Task Group advised the
U.S. Navy's
Bureau of Aeronautics of Government-furnished survival items that
McDonnell would package in containers. These included desalter kits, dye marker, distress signal, signal mirrors, signal whistle,
first aid kits,
shark chaser, PK-2 raft, survival rations, matches, and a radio
transceiver. Navy assistance was requested in the procurement of these items.[2]
Space Task Group officials met with representatives of the
School of Aviation Medicine to discuss detailed aspects of the bio-packs to be used in the
NASALittle Joe flight program. The packs were to be furnished by the school. The purpose was to gather life support data that would be applicable to the crewed flights of Project Mercury.[2]
American spy planes intercepted telemetry from a Soviet missile in flight for the first time. Flying near the Iran-USSR border, a
U-2 aircraft and an
RB-57 Canberra picked up 80 seconds of transmissions from the ICBM to the
Tyuratam ground station.[23]
The first ballistic missile submarine,
USS George Washington, was launched at 12:40 pm from
Groton, Connecticut.[25] On June 28, 1960, the sub was fitted with two Polaris nuclear missiles.[26]
In Italy, the broadcast of a TV movie, I figli di Medea (The Sons of Medea), caused a mass hysteria, similar to the 1938 panic caused by
Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. Vladimiro Cajoli's script was in the form of a fictitious news program that started with a bulletin that a sick child of an actress was being held hostage by his father, portrayed by actor
Enrico Maria Salerno. The mother, "Medea", was portrayed by well-known actress
Alida Valli, whose plea to viewers was so realistic that thousands of people thought that the celebrity was the victim of a crime. One of the viewers came with a gun, into the RAI broadcast studios, preparing to shoot actor Salerno. To make matters worse, the fictional news program gave out a phone number that belonged to a major hospital, whose switchboard was jammed by callers offering tips for finding the "missing child".[27][28]
A month after withdrawing a six-month ultimatum for the Western powers to withdraw from Berlin, Soviet Premier
Nikita Khrushchev issued a new deadline when talks broke down in Geneva. Khrushchev demanded that the U.S., Britain, and France withdraw their armies from West Berlin by June 10, 1960. The ultimatum was withdrawn on September 27 when Khrushchev met with President Eisenhower at Camp David.[29]
Harold Geneen became President of
International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT). Over a 28-year period, Geneen built the company into a gigantic conglomerate, increasing revenues from $765 million in 1959 to $22 billion at the time of his retirement on January 1, 1978.[30]
Turkey's President
Celâl Bayar became the first leader of the Islamic nation to be received as a guest by a Roman Catholic Church, as
Pope John XXIII welcomed Bayar to the Vatican. The two men had met during World War II when the future pontiff, Bishop
Angelo Roncalli, had been the Vatican's apostolic delegate to
Istanbul.[32]
The first large hovercraft, the Saunders-Roe Nautical One
SR-N1, made its maiden voyage on the
English Channel.[33]
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by
D.H. Lawrence, was barred from distribution in the United States by order of the
Postmaster General. Grove Press had announced, in April, publication of the "unexpurgated edition" of Lawrence's novel, and the Postmaster barred it under section 1461 of Title 18 of the United States Code as "obscene and un-mailable".[34]
Singer
Billie Holiday was arrested for heroin possession while in her room at New York's Metropolitan Hospital, where she had been since collapsing on May 31. Because she could not be moved, NYPD detectives fingerprinted her and took mug shots while she lay in bed, to face charges upon release. She would die, without regaining consciousness, on July 17.[36]
Police in
Angamaly, a city in India's
Kerala state, fired into a crowd that was protesting against the elected Communist government of
E. M. S. Namboodiripad, killing seven people. The incident led to the replacement of the state government, on July 31, by
President's rule, under Article 356 of the Indian Constitution.[37]
Dominican exiles, aided by
Fidel Castro, invaded the
Dominican Republic on three fronts, with the objective of overthrowing
dictatorRafael Leónidas Trujillo. At
Estero Hondo and at
Maimon, the rebels rowed in from ships stationed offshore, while a smaller group landed a C-46 transport at
Constanza. Alerted to the invasion by its own spies, the Dominican armed forces stopped the invasion by sea. In Constanza, where inaccurate bombing ended up killing more civilians than guerillas, most of the rebels were captured or killed by Dominican peasants in return for a cash bounty.[38]
At
Disneyland, the first passenger-carrying
monorail was dedicated by U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon. When Walt Disney took the Nixon family along for a test ride before the ceremony, the Secret Service detail was inadvertently left behind and the Vice President accidentally "kidnapped".[39]
As beachgoers in
La Jolla, California, watched, 33-year-old Robert Pamperin was attacked and devoured by a 20-foot (6.1 m) great white shark, while skindiving 50 yards (46 m) from shore. No trace of Pamperin was found, and it was speculated that the shark had swallowed him whole.[40]
June 15, 1959 (Monday)
A U.S. Navy
P4M Mercator patrol plane was attacked by a pair of
MiG-15 fighters over the
Sea of Japan, 80 miles (130 km) east of
Wonsan,
North Korea. Tailgunner Donald E. Corder was severely wounded, and the plane landed at a U.S. base in
Hiroshima, Japan.[41][42]
June 16, 1959 (Tuesday)
The essay "
Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor" appeared in the Chinese Communist paper People's Daily (Renmin Ribao), written by historian and Beijing vice-mayor
Wu Han. Ostensibly about the criticism (in 1566) of a Ming dynasty Emperor, the article, and other Hai Rui essays that followed, was viewed as a veiled criticism of Chinese leader
Mao Zedong and considered a factor in the backlash from the 1966
Cultural Revolution.[43]
In a White House meeting, President Eisenhower expressed his reservations about the placement of American medium range nuclear missiles in Turkey, noting that "if Mexico or Cuba had been penetrated by the Communists, and then began getting arms and missiles from them ... it would be imperative for us to take positive action, even offensive military action." The presence of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey was later believed to be one of the factors in the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, which precipitated the
Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.[45]
Died: Actor
George Reeves, who played the title role on the television program The Adventures of Superman, was found dead, in his Beverly Hills home, from a single gunshot to his head.[46] Because the gun was wiped clean of fingerprints, and there were no powder burns on his hand, the conclusion that he had killed himself has been disputed.[47]
June 17, 1959 (Wednesday)
A jury in London awarded
Liberace $22,400 in his libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The Mirror's columnist, William Connor, had described the flamboyant pianist as homosexual.[48]
Queen Elizabeth II arrived in
Newfoundland to begin a 45-day tour of
Canada. In the longest stay ever by a Canadian monarch, she traveled 15,000 miles and was seen by more than a million people.[53]
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an Arkansas law that had closed public schools at the beginning of the 1958–59 academic year was unconstitutional. Following the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, the Arkansas Legislature had closed the schools.[54]
A
centrifuge program was conducted at
Johnsville, Pennsylvania, to investigate the role of a pilot in the launch of a multi-stage vehicle. Test subjects were required to perform boost-control tasks, while being subjected to the proper boost-control accelerations. The highest g-force experienced was 15, and none of the test subjects felt they reached the limit of their control capability. One of the test subjects,
Neil Armstrong, was later selected as a NASA
astronaut for the
Gemini program in September 1962.[2]
William Shea and
Branch Rickey announced plans for a third major baseball league that was tentatively named the
Continental League, to be made up of eight cities not represented in either the American or National Leagues.[55]
U.S. Defense SecretaryNeil H. McElroy approved the DOD's air defense master plan, providing for procurement of KC-135 tankers, and B-52G, B-58, and B-70 bombers, and increased deployment of Atlas, Tian and Minuteman missiles.[56]
The Mercury Capsule (spacecraft) Coordination Office was organized within the Space Task Group, with
J. A. Chamberlin appointed head of the office.[2] A Capsule Review Board was established to review, at regular intervals, action taken by the Capsule Coordination Office.
Paul E. Purser was appointed chairman, with division heads, Coordination Office head, and Project and Assistant Project Directors serving as members.[2]
June 20, 1959 (Saturday)
The Soviet Union reversed plans to provide China with a prototype
atomic bomb, and secretly informed the
Beijing government that it would not supply technical data for constructing more nuclear weapons, unilaterally cancelling an accord reached on October 15, 1957.[57]Nikita Khrushchev noted later in his memoirs that the working bomb and its blueprints had been packed and ready for shipment, but that the Soviets then decided against sharing their secrets.[58] The Chinese would initiate
Project 596 and detonate their first bomb in 1964.
The collision of an express train with a bus
killed 45 bus passengers at the town of
Lauffen am Neckar in West Germany's
Baden-Württemberg state. The bus had been running late in its transport of people from the
Leonbronn station who were trying to reach the Lauffen train station for a connection to
Würzburg. The keeper who had put the safety barrier across the road lifted it and waved the bus through, without checking first with the German Railways to make sure nothing was coming. The E 867 express train from
Stuttgart— ironically, the train to Würzburg which the passengers were planning to board— raced into the station just as it was coming into the Lauffen station.[59]
June 21, 1959 (Sunday)
Winnipeg,
Manitoba, became the first city in North America to adopt the
999 number for emergency services. The first
9-1-1 service in the United States did not occur until February 16, 1968, when inaugurated in
Haleyville, Alabama.[60]
Minnesota's
Lake of the Woods, which bills itself as the "Walleye Capital of the World", erected its 40-foot-long (12 m) statue of "Willie Walleye".[61]
Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs in his major league baseball career but had only one game with more than two home runs. He hit three home runs, for six RBIs, in the Braves' win over the Giants in San Francisco.[62]
The first multinational treaty on nuclear security came into force. The
OECD Convention on the Establishment of a Security Control in the Field of Nuclear Energy had been signed by the nations of Western Europe, along with the United States and Canada, on December 20, 1957.[63]
H. Kurt Strass of Space Task Group's Flight Systems Division (FSD) recommended the establishment of a committee to consider the preliminary design of a two-man space laboratory. Representatives from each of the specialist groups within FSD would work with a special projects group, the work to culminate in a set of design specifications for the
two-man Mercury.[10]
Died:Bruce Harlan, 33, U.S. gold medalist in diving at the 1948 Olympics, died one day after falling 27 feet (8.2 m) while dismantling scaffolding at the close of a diving exhibition in
Norwalk, Connecticut.[64][65]
June 23, 1959 (Tuesday)
The
Central African Republic,
Chad,
Congo (Brazzaville) and
Gabon signed a treaty in Brazzaville to create the Union Douaniere Equatorial (UDE) to establish a customs union.[66]
Klaus Fuchs, who had given America's atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, was quietly released from a British prison after serving nine years of a 14-year sentence for espionage. He traveled as "Mr. Strauss" on a LOT Airlines flight from London to East Berlin, where he lived until his death in 1988.[69]
Against an original estimated cost of $15.5 million for eight
Redstone launch vehicles in support of Project Mercury, the final negotiated figure was $20.1 million.[2]
Porgy and Bess, the widescreen Technicolor film of the
classic Gershwin opera, was released to mixed reviews and poor box office. Its two leads,
Sidney Poitier and
Dorothy Dandridge, as well as
Diahann Carroll, had their singing voices dubbed by others, while
Sammy Davis, Jr.,
Pearl Bailey, and
Brock Peters did their own singing. The work was changed from being a full-fledged opera to an operetta simply by removing about a third of the music and having the words to many of the operatic portions spoken instead of sung. A more critically acclaimed, more faithful, and more complete version of Porgy and Bess was telecast by PBS in 1993.
June 25, 1959 (Thursday)
Taking advantage of a clause in the new U.S. copyright law, cartoonist
Max Fleischer exercised an exclusive right to renew the soon-to-expire copyright on
Betty Boop. Max's son
Richard would later recount that attorney Stanley Handman had happened to read, in The Wall Street Journal, "the article that would change our lives forever", with merchandising rights to the popular 1940s cartoon.[70]
On June 25 and 26,
Laurence K. Loftin, Jr., of Langley Research Center, presented to the Research Steering Committee on Manned Space Flight a report on a projected crewed space station. During subsequent discussion, Committee Chairman
Harry J. Goett stated that considerations of space stations and orbiting laboratories should be an integral part of coordinated planning for a
lunar landing mission.
George M. Low of
NASA Headquarters warned that care must be exercised that each successive step in space be taken with an eye toward the principal objective (i.e., lunar landing) because the number of steps that realistically could be funded and attempted was extremely limited. (Subsequently, Low's thinking and the recommendations of the Research Steering Committee would be influential in shifting the planning focus of NASA's
human spaceflight program away from ideas of large space stations and laboratories and toward lunar flight and the
Apollo program.)[21]
June 26, 1959 (Friday)
Japan's Emperor
Hirohito became the first Japanese monarch to attend a baseball game.
Nagashima Shigeo, the most popular player at that time, led the
Yomiuri Giants to a win over the
Hanshin Tigers with a dramatic ninth-inning home run.[71]
TWA Flight 891, a Lockheed Starliner, exploded in midair and then crashed near the Italian town of
Marnate, 15 minutes after taking off from
Milan toward
Paris. All 68 people on board died.[72] Subsequent investigation concluded that the plane had been struck by lightning, which then ignited vapors in a fuel tank.[73]
Ingemar Johansson of Sweden became the world heavyweight boxing champion when he knocked out champ
Floyd Patterson in a bout at
Yankee Stadium. The two would meet for a rematch on June 20, 1960, with Patterson reclaiming his crown in the fifth round.[74]
Born:Mark McKinney, Canadian-born comedian (The Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night Live), in
Ottawa
June 27, 1959 (Saturday)
Voters in
Hawaii went to the polls on the question of whether to become the 50th state of the United States of America. The result was 132,938 in favor, and 7,854 not. Only one of the 240 precincts went against statehood, with voters on the island of
Niihau 70–18 against.[75]
June 28, 1959 (Sunday)
The
Ethiopian Orthodox Church was created as a separate entity from Egypt's Coptic Christian church. Egypt's Pope Cyril VI appointed Bishop
Abuna Basilios as the patriarch of the church, with authority to consecrate his bishops within the Ethiopian church.[76]
At
Meldrim, Georgia,
seventeen people were burned to death while swimming in the
Ogeechee River. The beach area was beneath a 30-foot (9.1 m) railroad trestle, and as the train moved over the bridge, two tanker cars exploded, sending a blanket of flames onto a crowd of 175 people below.[77]
June 29, 1959 (Monday)
Pope John XXIII issued his first encyclical, Ad Petri Cathedram, prior to the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The papal letter emphasized that a renewal of the Roman Catholic Church would precede a reunion with other Christian denominations.[78]
June 30, 1959 (Tuesday)
Twenty-one students were killed and more than 100 were injured when an American F-100 plane crashed into Miamori Elementary School at
Ishikawa, Japan, on the island of Okinawa. The pilot had ejected after the plane malfunctioned and struck the school.[79]
One of the oddest incidents in MLB history happened when two baseballs were in play at the same time during the Cardinals-Cubs game. Umpire
Vic Delmore had handed a new baseball to Cubs' pitcher
Bob Anderson while Cubs' third baseman
Alvin Dark had retrieved a ball that was still in play. As the Cards'
Stan Musial reached second base, both Anderson and Dark threw a baseball his way. Musial ran for third when he saw Anderson's throw sail past him, and was tagged out by Ernie Banks, who had caught the ball thrown by Dark. After ten minutes, the umpires ruled that Musial was out. The Cardinals won anyway, 4–1, so no protest was lodged.[80]
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Chicago Review Press. pp. 37–38.
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