August 1980

August 1, 1980 (Friday)

• The premium cable network Cinemax was inaugurated in the U.S. as a films-only channel operated by Home Box Office The new service began at 10:00 in the morning Eastern Time.
• The wreck of the Dublin to Cork express train killed 18 people and injured more than 70, most of them teenagers who were on their way to Cork for a weekend vacation. Part of a group of 200 students, the victims were enjoying themselves in "two crowded restaurant cars located just behind the locomotive." At the railway station in the village of Buttevant in County Cork, only from their destination, the locomotive struck a faulty switch and derailed; the rear coaches then plowed into the back of the second dining car. The accident, at the time, was Ireland's deadliest crash.
• Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the 4th President of Iceland and the world's first democratically elected female president.
• Died:
• *Strother Martin, 61, American film actor known for Cool Hand Luke
• *Patrick Depailler, 35, French race car driver
• *María Lourdes de Urquijo and her husband, Manuel de la Sierra, were murdered in their Madrid home by their son-in-law, Rafael Escobedo. The couple, marquis and marchioness, were the heads of one of Spain's wealthiest families as part of the Urquijo banking group.

  August 2, 1980 (Saturday)

• A terrorist bombing killed 85 people at the Bologna Centrale railway station and wounded more than 200. At 10:25 in the morning, the bomb exploded inside the first-class and second-class waiting rooms of the station and collapsed the roof above a platform of the tracks onto three cars of a train pulling out to go to Basel in Switzerland. Two hours earlier, a judge in the Italian city signed the indictments of eight members of the right-wing Armed Revolutionary Nuclei Group.
• Born: Jose Sixto "Dingdong" Dantes, Philippine actor and film producer; in Quezon City
• Died:
• *Regina "Gene" Weltfish, 77, American anthropologist and authority in the history of the Pawnee people of the Plains Indians.
• *Verdun Scott, 64, the only athlete to be a member of both the New Zealand test cricket team and the New Zealand rugby league team.

  August 3, 1980 (Sunday)

• The closing ceremony was held in Moscow for the 1980 Summer Olympics. Of the 81 participating national teams, 18 marched with the Olympic flag instead of their national flags in order to show their disapproval of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Later, in place of the American flag to identify the nation that would host the next summer games, the flag of Los Angeles was hoisted instead.
• The first triathlon in Canada was held at Elk/Beaver Lake Regional Park near Saanich, British Columbia, almost six years after the modern event had been introduced in San Diego on September 25, 1974. The event of a one-mile swim across Elk Lake, a 20-mile bicycle race and a ten-kilometer run, attracted 51 competitors.
• Born:
• *Teuku Rifnu Wikana, Indonesian film actor, in Pematangsiantar, North Sumatra
• *Nadia Ali, Libyan-born Pakistani-American singer, in Tripoli
• Died: Donald Ogden Stewart, 85, American author and screenweriter

  August 4, 1980 (Monday)

• Hurricane Allen swept across Haiti, killing 220 people in 24 hours. After officials in Haiti discovered 140 additional bodies that had been buried in mudslides, the death toll was revised from 80 to 220. Of 272 people killed by Hurricane Allen, all but 52 of the deaths were in Haiti.
• As Hurricane Allen broke the high pressure system that had stalled over Texas and brought rainstorms, the record heat wave in much of the United States began to abate as Dallas and most of north Texas reached a temperature of only after six weeks in a row of "triple-digit heat" — daily highs of at least temperatures — since June 23.
• Died: Susan G. Komen, 36, American model, from breast cancer. In her memory, her younger sister Nancy Goodman Brinker founded the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

  August 5, 1980 (Tuesday)

• Two serial killers— Jorge Sagrado Pizarro and Carlos Topp Collins— committed the first of a string of 10 murders in a period of 16 months in the city of Viña del Mar in Chile. The first random victim was Enrique Gajardo Casales, an electrician
• Born:
• *A. G. Sulzberger, American journalist and publisher of The New York Times since 2018; in Washington, DC
• *Claire Kuo, Taiwanese singer, actress and television host; in Hong Kong
• Died:
• *Harold L. Runnels, 56, U.S. Congressman for New Mexico since 1971, died from respiratory failure related to cancer
• *Warren A. Taylor, 89, the first Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives

  August 6, 1980 (Wednesday)

• Legislative elections were held in the Solomon Islands, with 241 candidates running for the 38 seats of the National Parliament. The United Party, led by Prime Minister Peter Kenilorea, won 16 of the 38 seats.
• Born: Will Pan, American-born Taiwanese TV actor, in West Virginia
• Died:
• *Gaetano Costa, 64, Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, was assassinated by the Sicilian Mafia. Costa, who had signed the arrest orders on 55 indictments of the Spatola-Inzerillo-Gambino heroin trafficking gang, was outside of a bookstore when he was shot by two gunmen on a motorcycle.
• *Bronte Woodard, American screenwriter who adapted the Broadway musical Grease to film; in Alabama

  August 7, 1980 (Thursday)

• The Belgian Senate voted, 132 to 23, to approve legislation to grant limited autonomy to the northern region of Belgium, Vlaanderen, where most residents speak Flemish, a Germanic language similar to Dutch and the southern region in Wallonie, with the Capital Region of Brussels to be separate. The vote followed approval earlier in the week in the Chamber of Representatives.
• In Poland, Anna Walentynowicz was fired from her job as a crane operator at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk for attempting to recruit new members to the unauthorized labor union Free Coastal Trade Unions. The firing came seven months before Walentynowicz would have qualified for retirement on a government pension, prompting shipyard electrician Lech Walesa to call a strike on August 14, 1980.
• Nanyang University was closed and merged with the University of Singapore into the new National University of Singapore. From 1956 to 1980, Nanyang was Singapore's only private university to teach its curriculum in the Chinese language. The final graduation ceremonies were conducted on August 16, 1980, with 599 bachelor's degrees and four master's degrees awarded.

  August 8, 1980 (Friday)

• Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos issued the National Service Law, making national service obligatory for all Filipino citizens. Although a prior law required all men between 18 and 30 years old to perform military service, the 1980 decree provided for citizens to perform civic welfare service, law enforcement service or military service.
• Production ceased on the Ford Pinto compact car as the final model came off of the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company of Canada plant in St. Thomas, Ontario at the last factory that manufactured the vehicle. The St. Thomas plant had manufactured the first Pinto almost exactly ten years earlier, on August 10, 1970.
• Five adults and five children were killed in a fire at the Central Hotel in the Irish seaside resort of Bundoran in County Donegal.
• Chuttalunnaru Jagratha, one of the most popular movies in India, was released as a Telugu language film and starred the actress Sridevi and the actor Krishna. Sridevi reprised her role in two remakes, the Tamil language Pokkiri Raja in 1982 and the Hindi language Mawaali in 1983.
• Born:
• *Armenchik, Armenian-born American pop music singer, in Yerevan, Armenian SSR, Soviet Union
• *Komila "Kim" Jagtiani, Indian-born Canadian television host; in Mumbai
• Died:
• *Yahya Khan, 63, former President of Pakistan
• *Titus Theverthundiyil, 75, Indian independence activist and adviser to Mahatma Gandhi
• *Lieutenant General Kim Hong-il, 81, South Korean military officer and diplomat, former activist for Korea's independence from Japan.

  August 9, 1980 (Saturday)

• Mohammad-Ali Rajai was nominated to be the first new Prime Minister of Iran in almost nine months, as the second choice of President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. The Islamic Republican Party had rejected Bani-Sadr's original pick, the moderately conservative Mostafa Mir-Salim, the director of the Iranian national police. On August 11, the Islamic Republic's new parliament, the Majlis, approved Education Minister Rajai, a hardliner who was more adamant about Islamic law. Iran had been without a prime minister since the resignation of Mehdi Bazargan on November 6.
• Takieddin el-Solh resigned as Prime Minister of Lebanon after 20 days of trying to form a coalition government during the Lebanon Civil War. President Elias Sarkis had selected el-Solh on July 20 to replace Salim Al-Hoss.
• Died: Jacqueline Cochran, 74, woman aviator who set numerous speed and altitude records and was the first woman to fly faster than Mach 1 and Mach 2.

  August 10, 1980 (Sunday)

• For the first time since the People's Republic had started the practice of allowing zoos in other nations to receive the endangered species of bear, a giant panda was born outside of China. "Xeng-Li" was born in captivity at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City, but lived only eight days after being accidentally smothered by its captive mother, "Yin-Yin".
• David Francis Hoffman murdered his wife, Carol Stebbins, at their home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, dismembered her body and then disposed of it with the help of his mother, Helen Ulvinen.
• An annular solar eclipse took place over the Pacific Ocean, visible primarily from the Galápagos Islands.
• Died: Gareth Evans, 34, British philosopher, from lung cancer