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.[5]
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.[6]
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.[7] There were 959 people taken on the first day. Two days later, Public Safety Commissioner
Eugene "Bull" Connor would order the use of dogs and fire hoses to repel new demonstrators, images of which were picked up by news media around the world.[8]
In
Brazil, 37 of the 50 people on a
Cruzeiro do Sul airliner were killed as the
Convair CV-340 was attempting to return to
São Paulo shortly after its takeoff from the
Congonhas Airport. The plane had been bound for
Rio de Janeiro but its right engine caught fire. In its final approach to the runway, the aircraft nosed up to a 45-degree angle, stalled and struck a house on the Avenida Piassang.[10][11]
Development testing of the Gemini Agena Model 8247 main engine at
Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) began, with an objective of verifying the engine's ability to start at least five times. Two major problems, turbine overspeed and
gas generator valve failure in high temperature operations, were found.[3]
All 55 people on an
Air Afrique airliner died when the
Douglas DC-6 crashed into
Mount Cameroon less than half an hour after takeoff from
Douala in
Cameroon, bound for
Lagos in
Nigeria. Blame for the accident was placed on the pilot's decision to descend from 16,500 feet (5,000 m) to 6,500 feet (2,000 m) while flying toward the 13,250-foot (4,040 m) high mountain.[13] One passenger, a U.S. diplomatic courier, initially survived the crash,[14] but would die of his injuries on May 10.[15]
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.[16] 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".[17]
The sinking of a motor launch on the
Nile River drowned more than 185 people in Egypt, nearly all of them Muslim 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.[18]
Police used high-pressure water hoses and police dogs to disperse a crowd of more than 1,000 African-American protesters in
Birmingham, Alabama.[19]
A fire at the Le Monde Theater in
Diourbel,
Senegal, killed 64 people.
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.
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.[20] Marshal
Vasily Sokolovsky, the Chief of Operations during the
Battle of Berlin, publicly disclosed the details to American researcher
Cornelius Ryan and allowed him 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 identified 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.
NASA awarded a $6,700,000 contract to
North American Aviation for the Paraglider Landing System Program, intended to allow NASA
spacecraft to come down on land rather than splashing down at sea. The final contract would be completed on September 25.[3]
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.[21] Her body would be discovered three days later.[22]
The
communications satelliteTelstar II was launched into Earth orbit to replace the first
Telstarsatellite, 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.[24]
Testing of the Gemini parachute recovery system began at
El Centro, California, as a welded steel mock-up of the
Gemini reentry section was dropped from a
C-130 aircraft at 20,000 feet (6,100 m) to duplicate dynamic pressure and altitude at which actual spacecraft recovery would be initiated. The main problem, parachute tucking (which had appeared to be resolved earlier) recurred in two drops and the Gemini Project Office would suspend testing until the condition could be corrected. Qualification testing resumed August 8.[3]
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 satellites failed to reach orbit, while the other three suffered power failures. MIDAS 7 would operate for 47 days and would detect nine Soviet missile launches.[29]
A settlement was reached between the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 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.[30]
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.[31]
Dr.
Charles A. Berry, chief medical officer of the
Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), cleared
Gordon Cooper as being in excellent mental and physical condition for the upcoming Mercury 9 mission.[33] The first of 1,020 members of the news media from the U.S. and other nations began arriving at
Cape Canaveral the same day to cover Cooper's mission.[33]
The U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Brady v. Maryland, setting the principle that in before trial in a criminal case, the prosecution disclose any
exculpatory evidence (which might exonerate the defendant) to the defense team. Named for accused killer John Leo Brady, the "
Brady disclosure" is now a requirement for prosecutors. Brady, who had been sentenced to death in the original 1958 case, would be afforded a new trial, resulting in a sentence of life imprisonment, from which he would eventually be paroled.[37]
A
smallpox outbreak was first detected in
Stockholm in
Sweden and would not be under control until July.
The comic strip Modesty Blaise made its debut in England as part of the Evening Standard of London.[38]
The scheduled launch of Mercury 9 was halted after the countdown had reached T-60 minutes, because of difficulty in the fuel pump of the diesel engine that would pull the gantry away during liftoff. After a delay of more than two hours for repairs, countdown resumed but was halted again at T-13 minutes, when the
Bermuda tracking station reported a failure of a computer converter important in the orbital insertion decision, forcing the launch to be scrubbed. At 6:00 p.m. local time, MSC's
Walter C. Williams reported that the Bermuda equipment had been repaired, and the launch was rescheduled for the next day.[33]
In Denmark, the
Frederick IX Bridge was officially opened, spanning the Guldborgsund strait between the islands of Falster and Lolland.
At 8:04 a.m. at (1304 UTC),
NASA launched
Mercury 9 from Cape Canaveral, with
astronautL. Gordon Cooper in the capsule designated
Faith 7. Cooper's 22-orbit mission was the last for the
Mercury program. Cooper entered the spacecraft at 5:33 a.m. (1033 UTC) for an 8:00 launch, and took a brief nap while awaiting liftoff. At T-minus 11 minutes and 30 seconds the countdown was halted for a problem in the guidance equipment, and another hold was called at T-0:19 to determine whether automatic sequencing was working. Liftoff happened four minutes after the original time, and visual tracking was possible for two minutes.[33][41] Five minutes after liftoff at 8:09 a.m., Faith 7 was inserted into an orbit that ranged from 100.2 miles (161.3 km) to 165.9 miles (267.0 km) above the Earth and reached a maximum orbital speed of 17,546.6 miles per hour (28,238.5 km/h). Temperatures inside the capsule ranged from 92 °F (33 °C) to 109 °F (43 °C), uncomfortable but tolerable, before cooling down. During his third orbit, Cooper became the first human to launch an object (the beacon) from an orbiting spacecraft. Cooper was able to see the flashing beacon on the night side of the fourth orbit.[33][41]
Housewife
Jean Nidetch founded the
Weight Watchers company, with the first meeting held at a loft above a movie theater in
Little Neck, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of
Queens.[42]
Astronaut Gordon Cooper returned to Earth safely after making 22 orbits and traveling 546,167 miles (878,971 km) in the
Faith 7 capsule. During reentry operation, Cooper fired the
retrorockets manually and attained the proper re-entry attitude by using his observation window scribe marks to give proper reference with the horizon and to determine if he were rolling. From the command ship in the Pacific Ocean off the Japanese coast,
John Glenn advised Cooper when to jettison the retropack. The main chute deployed at 11,000 feet (3,400 m). Faith 7 splashed down 7,000 yards (6,400 m) from the prime recovery ship,
USS Kearsarge (CV-33), at 2323 UTC after 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds in
space flight.[33][43][44]
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.[45]
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.[46] The two men would be freed, after 365 days of imprisonment, on May 16, 1964, following the United Nations Command agreeing to sign a statement that Stutts and Voltz had committed espionage. North Korea declined to return the helicopter.[47][48]
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.[49]
An accident killed 27 people, 12 of them children, who all drowned when their bus they were on was sideswiped by a passing pickup truck, and plunged into the 16-foot (4.9 m) deep
Hillsboro Canal near
Belle Glade, Florida.[50] Only the driver and 14 people survived. The victims were African-American farm laborers and their families, on their way home from a day of work of harvesting beans at the Kirchman Brothers Farm.[51]
Rocketdyne successfully tested a 25-pound-force (110 N) thrust chamber assembly (TCA) for the Gemini reentry control system. The development of a suitable ablative thrust chamber, however, remained a major problem, and testing was incomplete. Rocketdyne was already three months late in delivering TCA hardware to McDonnell, and completion of testing took three months longer than predicted.[3]
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.[52]
Died:Ernie Davis, 23, African-American football star who won the
1961 Heisman Trophy at Syracuse University; of
leukemia. He had been diagnosed after signing with the NFL's Cleveland Browns.
Astronaut Gordon Cooper appeared at a national televised
press conference to answer questions about the Mercury 9 mission. During the flight, he had seen the haze layer previously reported by
Wally Schirra of
Mercury 8 and John Glenn's "fireflies" seen on
Mercury 6. Cooper's most astonishing revelation was his ability visually to distinguish objects on the earth, including an African town where the flashing light experiment was conducted; several Australian cities including large oil refineries at
Perth; and wisps of smoke from rural houses in Asia. At the same conference, Dr.
Robert C. Seamans said that a
Mercury 10 flight was "quite unlikely."[33]
Tigran Petrosian won the
World Chess Championship, defeating fellow Soviet grandmaster and world champion
Mikhail Botvinnik, 12+1⁄2 to 9+1⁄2, to win the match after 22 games. 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.[53]
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.[54]
Representatives of NASA, the U.S. Air Force Space Systems Division, and
Lockheed established new rules for revising Agena development and delivery schedules, moving the
Agena target vehicle rendezvous to
April 1965, more than seven months after the original date. The first Atlas target launch vehicle was to be delivered in
December 1964, and the Agena was to be delivered in
January 1965.[3]
Born:Kevin Shields, American-born Irish musician, singer-songwriter, composer, and producer, best known as the vocalist and guitarist of the band
My Bloody Valentine; in
Queens[57]
Greek anti-Fascist politician
Grigoris Lambrakis was assassinated shortly after delivering the keynote speech at an anti-war meeting in
Thessaloniki. Lambrakis was run down by a trikyklo (a three-wheeled delivery truck) and then clubbed to death by hired killers. He 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 1969 film Z.[58][59]
The New York Journal-American reported 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 was "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.[61] 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 people 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.[62]
At the track and field competition for six universities in what is now the
Pac-12 Conference,
Phil Shinnick jumped 27 feet 4 inches (8.33 m) in the long jump, 0.75 inches (19 mm) 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",[65] so the mark was not submitted as a world record.
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".[71]
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.[72]
North American began testing the half-scale two test vehicle (HSTTV) for the Paraglider Landing System Program to investigate paraglider liftoff characteristics, helicopter tow techniques, and the effects of wind-bending during high-speed tows.[3]
Died:Grigoris Lambrakis, 50, Greek politician, physician and Olympic athlete, died five days after being attacked.[59] More than 500,000 people attended his funeral the next day and marched in protest against Greece's right-wing government.[59]
A
cyclone killed 22,000 people in and around the city of
Comilla in East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh).[73][74] Winds as high as 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) ripped the countryside, and "the many offshore islands were literally swept clean of people";[75]Chittagong and
Cox's Bazar lost 5,000 people each, and waves were powerful enough to send ships 0.5 miles (0.80 km) inland, including four ocean liners.
Titan II flight N-20, the 19th in the series of Air Force research and development flights, failed 55 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral and yielded no data. The U.S. Air Force announced that no further Titan II development flights would carry the POGO fix, but the decision was reversed and POGO fix was flown again on Titan II flight N-25 and two later flights.[3]
The vertical test facility (VTF) at Martin-Baltimore was activated with a 165-foot (50 m) tower and an adjacent three-story blockhouse with ground equipment similar to that used at NASA's
Complex 19. After systems tests concluded, the launch vehicle was presented to the U.S. Air Force for acceptance.[3]
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.
The
Coca-Cola Company publicly announced its first diet drink, "
TaB cola", with "one calorie per six-ounce serving" made with
saccharin instead of sugar.[77]
^Boyne, Walter J., ed. (2002). "Defense Support Program (DSP) and Missile Detection". Air Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. Vol. Two.
ABC-CLIO. pp. 170–171.
^James Waller, Prejudice Across America (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 187.
^Claudette Hegel, Newbery and Caldecott: Trivia and More for Every Day of the Year (Libraries Unlimited, 2000), p. 45.
^"U.S., Canada Agree on A-Weapons", Miami News, May 12, 1963, p. 1.
^Tucker, William; MacLeese, Alan (May 19, 1963). "Bus Plunges Into Canal And 27 Die". Miami News. p. 1.
^Jessup, John E., ed. (1998). "Sukarno, Achmed". An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Conflict and Conflict Resolution, 1945-1996. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 701–703.
^Daves, Jim; Porter, W. Thomas (2001). The Glory of Washington: The People and Events That Shaped Husky Athletic Tradition.
Sports Publishing LLC. p. 189.
^"The United States Of Africa — A Plan". Miami News. May 26, 1963. p. 1.
^du Plessis, Max (2006). "The African Union". International Law: A South African Perspective. Kluwer. p. 546.
^"Aldo Moro Next Chief Of Italy". Miami News. May 26, 1963. p. 1.
^"New Low Calorie Tab Goes on Market Soon", Thomasville (NC) Times Enterprise May 30, 1963, p. 8; Advertising began in the June 6 issues of some newspapers, including the Arlington Heights (IL) Herald, where the beverage was promoted as a substitute for cola in mixed drinks.
^"Parnelli Jones Stunned, Dazed And Lot Richer", Miami News, May 31, 1963, p. 1C.
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.[5]
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.[6]
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.[7] There were 959 people taken on the first day. Two days later, Public Safety Commissioner
Eugene "Bull" Connor would order the use of dogs and fire hoses to repel new demonstrators, images of which were picked up by news media around the world.[8]
In
Brazil, 37 of the 50 people on a
Cruzeiro do Sul airliner were killed as the
Convair CV-340 was attempting to return to
São Paulo shortly after its takeoff from the
Congonhas Airport. The plane had been bound for
Rio de Janeiro but its right engine caught fire. In its final approach to the runway, the aircraft nosed up to a 45-degree angle, stalled and struck a house on the Avenida Piassang.[10][11]
Development testing of the Gemini Agena Model 8247 main engine at
Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) began, with an objective of verifying the engine's ability to start at least five times. Two major problems, turbine overspeed and
gas generator valve failure in high temperature operations, were found.[3]
All 55 people on an
Air Afrique airliner died when the
Douglas DC-6 crashed into
Mount Cameroon less than half an hour after takeoff from
Douala in
Cameroon, bound for
Lagos in
Nigeria. Blame for the accident was placed on the pilot's decision to descend from 16,500 feet (5,000 m) to 6,500 feet (2,000 m) while flying toward the 13,250-foot (4,040 m) high mountain.[13] One passenger, a U.S. diplomatic courier, initially survived the crash,[14] but would die of his injuries on May 10.[15]
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.[16] 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".[17]
The sinking of a motor launch on the
Nile River drowned more than 185 people in Egypt, nearly all of them Muslim 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.[18]
Police used high-pressure water hoses and police dogs to disperse a crowd of more than 1,000 African-American protesters in
Birmingham, Alabama.[19]
A fire at the Le Monde Theater in
Diourbel,
Senegal, killed 64 people.
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.
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.[20] Marshal
Vasily Sokolovsky, the Chief of Operations during the
Battle of Berlin, publicly disclosed the details to American researcher
Cornelius Ryan and allowed him 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 identified 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.
NASA awarded a $6,700,000 contract to
North American Aviation for the Paraglider Landing System Program, intended to allow NASA
spacecraft to come down on land rather than splashing down at sea. The final contract would be completed on September 25.[3]
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.[21] Her body would be discovered three days later.[22]
The
communications satelliteTelstar II was launched into Earth orbit to replace the first
Telstarsatellite, 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.[24]
Testing of the Gemini parachute recovery system began at
El Centro, California, as a welded steel mock-up of the
Gemini reentry section was dropped from a
C-130 aircraft at 20,000 feet (6,100 m) to duplicate dynamic pressure and altitude at which actual spacecraft recovery would be initiated. The main problem, parachute tucking (which had appeared to be resolved earlier) recurred in two drops and the Gemini Project Office would suspend testing until the condition could be corrected. Qualification testing resumed August 8.[3]
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 satellites failed to reach orbit, while the other three suffered power failures. MIDAS 7 would operate for 47 days and would detect nine Soviet missile launches.[29]
A settlement was reached between the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) 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.[30]
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.[31]
Dr.
Charles A. Berry, chief medical officer of the
Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), cleared
Gordon Cooper as being in excellent mental and physical condition for the upcoming Mercury 9 mission.[33] The first of 1,020 members of the news media from the U.S. and other nations began arriving at
Cape Canaveral the same day to cover Cooper's mission.[33]
The U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Brady v. Maryland, setting the principle that in before trial in a criminal case, the prosecution disclose any
exculpatory evidence (which might exonerate the defendant) to the defense team. Named for accused killer John Leo Brady, the "
Brady disclosure" is now a requirement for prosecutors. Brady, who had been sentenced to death in the original 1958 case, would be afforded a new trial, resulting in a sentence of life imprisonment, from which he would eventually be paroled.[37]
A
smallpox outbreak was first detected in
Stockholm in
Sweden and would not be under control until July.
The comic strip Modesty Blaise made its debut in England as part of the Evening Standard of London.[38]
The scheduled launch of Mercury 9 was halted after the countdown had reached T-60 minutes, because of difficulty in the fuel pump of the diesel engine that would pull the gantry away during liftoff. After a delay of more than two hours for repairs, countdown resumed but was halted again at T-13 minutes, when the
Bermuda tracking station reported a failure of a computer converter important in the orbital insertion decision, forcing the launch to be scrubbed. At 6:00 p.m. local time, MSC's
Walter C. Williams reported that the Bermuda equipment had been repaired, and the launch was rescheduled for the next day.[33]
In Denmark, the
Frederick IX Bridge was officially opened, spanning the Guldborgsund strait between the islands of Falster and Lolland.
At 8:04 a.m. at (1304 UTC),
NASA launched
Mercury 9 from Cape Canaveral, with
astronautL. Gordon Cooper in the capsule designated
Faith 7. Cooper's 22-orbit mission was the last for the
Mercury program. Cooper entered the spacecraft at 5:33 a.m. (1033 UTC) for an 8:00 launch, and took a brief nap while awaiting liftoff. At T-minus 11 minutes and 30 seconds the countdown was halted for a problem in the guidance equipment, and another hold was called at T-0:19 to determine whether automatic sequencing was working. Liftoff happened four minutes after the original time, and visual tracking was possible for two minutes.[33][41] Five minutes after liftoff at 8:09 a.m., Faith 7 was inserted into an orbit that ranged from 100.2 miles (161.3 km) to 165.9 miles (267.0 km) above the Earth and reached a maximum orbital speed of 17,546.6 miles per hour (28,238.5 km/h). Temperatures inside the capsule ranged from 92 °F (33 °C) to 109 °F (43 °C), uncomfortable but tolerable, before cooling down. During his third orbit, Cooper became the first human to launch an object (the beacon) from an orbiting spacecraft. Cooper was able to see the flashing beacon on the night side of the fourth orbit.[33][41]
Housewife
Jean Nidetch founded the
Weight Watchers company, with the first meeting held at a loft above a movie theater in
Little Neck, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of
Queens.[42]
Astronaut Gordon Cooper returned to Earth safely after making 22 orbits and traveling 546,167 miles (878,971 km) in the
Faith 7 capsule. During reentry operation, Cooper fired the
retrorockets manually and attained the proper re-entry attitude by using his observation window scribe marks to give proper reference with the horizon and to determine if he were rolling. From the command ship in the Pacific Ocean off the Japanese coast,
John Glenn advised Cooper when to jettison the retropack. The main chute deployed at 11,000 feet (3,400 m). Faith 7 splashed down 7,000 yards (6,400 m) from the prime recovery ship,
USS Kearsarge (CV-33), at 2323 UTC after 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds in
space flight.[33][43][44]
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.[45]
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.[46] The two men would be freed, after 365 days of imprisonment, on May 16, 1964, following the United Nations Command agreeing to sign a statement that Stutts and Voltz had committed espionage. North Korea declined to return the helicopter.[47][48]
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.[49]
An accident killed 27 people, 12 of them children, who all drowned when their bus they were on was sideswiped by a passing pickup truck, and plunged into the 16-foot (4.9 m) deep
Hillsboro Canal near
Belle Glade, Florida.[50] Only the driver and 14 people survived. The victims were African-American farm laborers and their families, on their way home from a day of work of harvesting beans at the Kirchman Brothers Farm.[51]
Rocketdyne successfully tested a 25-pound-force (110 N) thrust chamber assembly (TCA) for the Gemini reentry control system. The development of a suitable ablative thrust chamber, however, remained a major problem, and testing was incomplete. Rocketdyne was already three months late in delivering TCA hardware to McDonnell, and completion of testing took three months longer than predicted.[3]
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.[52]
Died:Ernie Davis, 23, African-American football star who won the
1961 Heisman Trophy at Syracuse University; of
leukemia. He had been diagnosed after signing with the NFL's Cleveland Browns.
Astronaut Gordon Cooper appeared at a national televised
press conference to answer questions about the Mercury 9 mission. During the flight, he had seen the haze layer previously reported by
Wally Schirra of
Mercury 8 and John Glenn's "fireflies" seen on
Mercury 6. Cooper's most astonishing revelation was his ability visually to distinguish objects on the earth, including an African town where the flashing light experiment was conducted; several Australian cities including large oil refineries at
Perth; and wisps of smoke from rural houses in Asia. At the same conference, Dr.
Robert C. Seamans said that a
Mercury 10 flight was "quite unlikely."[33]
Tigran Petrosian won the
World Chess Championship, defeating fellow Soviet grandmaster and world champion
Mikhail Botvinnik, 12+1⁄2 to 9+1⁄2, to win the match after 22 games. 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.[53]
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.[54]
Representatives of NASA, the U.S. Air Force Space Systems Division, and
Lockheed established new rules for revising Agena development and delivery schedules, moving the
Agena target vehicle rendezvous to
April 1965, more than seven months after the original date. The first Atlas target launch vehicle was to be delivered in
December 1964, and the Agena was to be delivered in
January 1965.[3]
Born:Kevin Shields, American-born Irish musician, singer-songwriter, composer, and producer, best known as the vocalist and guitarist of the band
My Bloody Valentine; in
Queens[57]
Greek anti-Fascist politician
Grigoris Lambrakis was assassinated shortly after delivering the keynote speech at an anti-war meeting in
Thessaloniki. Lambrakis was run down by a trikyklo (a three-wheeled delivery truck) and then clubbed to death by hired killers. He 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 1969 film Z.[58][59]
The New York Journal-American reported 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 was "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.[61] 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 people 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.[62]
At the track and field competition for six universities in what is now the
Pac-12 Conference,
Phil Shinnick jumped 27 feet 4 inches (8.33 m) in the long jump, 0.75 inches (19 mm) 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",[65] so the mark was not submitted as a world record.
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".[71]
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.[72]
North American began testing the half-scale two test vehicle (HSTTV) for the Paraglider Landing System Program to investigate paraglider liftoff characteristics, helicopter tow techniques, and the effects of wind-bending during high-speed tows.[3]
Died:Grigoris Lambrakis, 50, Greek politician, physician and Olympic athlete, died five days after being attacked.[59] More than 500,000 people attended his funeral the next day and marched in protest against Greece's right-wing government.[59]
A
cyclone killed 22,000 people in and around the city of
Comilla in East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh).[73][74] Winds as high as 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) ripped the countryside, and "the many offshore islands were literally swept clean of people";[75]Chittagong and
Cox's Bazar lost 5,000 people each, and waves were powerful enough to send ships 0.5 miles (0.80 km) inland, including four ocean liners.
Titan II flight N-20, the 19th in the series of Air Force research and development flights, failed 55 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral and yielded no data. The U.S. Air Force announced that no further Titan II development flights would carry the POGO fix, but the decision was reversed and POGO fix was flown again on Titan II flight N-25 and two later flights.[3]
The vertical test facility (VTF) at Martin-Baltimore was activated with a 165-foot (50 m) tower and an adjacent three-story blockhouse with ground equipment similar to that used at NASA's
Complex 19. After systems tests concluded, the launch vehicle was presented to the U.S. Air Force for acceptance.[3]
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.
The
Coca-Cola Company publicly announced its first diet drink, "
TaB cola", with "one calorie per six-ounce serving" made with
saccharin instead of sugar.[77]
^Boyne, Walter J., ed. (2002). "Defense Support Program (DSP) and Missile Detection". Air Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. Vol. Two.
ABC-CLIO. pp. 170–171.
^James Waller, Prejudice Across America (University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 187.
^Claudette Hegel, Newbery and Caldecott: Trivia and More for Every Day of the Year (Libraries Unlimited, 2000), p. 45.
^"U.S., Canada Agree on A-Weapons", Miami News, May 12, 1963, p. 1.
^Tucker, William; MacLeese, Alan (May 19, 1963). "Bus Plunges Into Canal And 27 Die". Miami News. p. 1.
^Jessup, John E., ed. (1998). "Sukarno, Achmed". An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Conflict and Conflict Resolution, 1945-1996. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 701–703.
^Daves, Jim; Porter, W. Thomas (2001). The Glory of Washington: The People and Events That Shaped Husky Athletic Tradition.
Sports Publishing LLC. p. 189.
^"The United States Of Africa — A Plan". Miami News. May 26, 1963. p. 1.
^du Plessis, Max (2006). "The African Union". International Law: A South African Perspective. Kluwer. p. 546.
^"Aldo Moro Next Chief Of Italy". Miami News. May 26, 1963. p. 1.
^"New Low Calorie Tab Goes on Market Soon", Thomasville (NC) Times Enterprise May 30, 1963, p. 8; Advertising began in the June 6 issues of some newspapers, including the Arlington Heights (IL) Herald, where the beverage was promoted as a substitute for cola in mixed drinks.
^"Parnelli Jones Stunned, Dazed And Lot Richer", Miami News, May 31, 1963, p. 1C.