December 1969

[December 1], 1969 (Monday)

• The first draft lottery in the United States since 1942 was held, and September 14 was the first of the 366 days of the year selected, with Congressman Alexander Pirnie of New York making the first selection. The significance was that those to be given highest priority by their local draft boards were men born on September 14, 1950, and those born on September 14 from 1943 to 1949. The drawing took place at the Selective Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., starting at 8:00 in the evening and concluded 87 minutes later. The random drawing was made from 366 plastic capsules, each one containing a piece of paper with one of the dates of the year. The remaining nine days picked were April 24, December 30, February 14, October 18, September 6, October 26, September 7, November 22 and December 6, while the 366th and last selection was June 8. On January 4, 1970, The New York Times would run a long article, "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random".
• Municipal elections are held in Ottawa, Canada. Kenneth Fogarty is elected mayor, winning 81.26% of the vote.
• TriMet, the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon, began operations with bus service in the three counties in Portland, Oregon, the day after its contract with drivers and mechanics was approved by Union Local 757. It would add railway service in 1986 with the start of MAX Light Rail.

  [December 2], 1969 (Tuesday)

• In China, Lin Biao's son, Lin Liguo, was promoted to the position of Deputy Chief of Operations of the People's Liberation Army Air Force, and allowed full command of that branch of the service. The order came from Lin Biao himself, the Defense Minister of the People's Republic of China. Nearly 11 years later, former PLAAF General Wu Faxian would testify at his own trial that he had carried out Lin Biao's order and that the resulting chaos "nearly destroyed the Air Force" and that many of Wu's colleague's were killed as the Cultural Revolution decimated the air service. Wu was one of 10 defendants in the Gang of Four trial held in 1980.
• The Boeing 747 jumbo jet made its first passenger flight. It carried 191 people, 110 of them reporters and photographers, from Seattle, to New York City. Piloted by Jack Waddell, the chartered Pan American World Airways flight departed the manufacturer's test site, Boeing Field, at 7:25 in the morning local time and arrived in New York four hours and two minutes later, where the time was 2:27 in the afternoon. It was greeted upon its arrival by Charles A. Lindbergh, the first person to make a solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
• At least 51 people were killed in a fire at Repos du Viellard, an "old folks home" in Notre-Dame-du-Lac, Quebec; 22 other people survived, including the rest home's owner, wife and children.
• Died:
• *José María Arguedas, 58, Peruvian novelist, shot himself while sitting in his office at the National Agrarian University in La Molina, a suburb of Lima. As part of what one critic would describe later as "what must be the most ambitious suicide note in history", Arguedas left behind detailed instructions for the completion of his unfinished novel, The Fox From Up Above and the Fox From Down Below, which would be published posthumously in 1971.
• *Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, 88, former nominal head of state of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1960 as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, for whom the KV tank series was named.

  [December 3], 1969 (Wednesday)

• Air France Flight 212 crashed into the Caribbean Sea shortly after takeoff from the Caracas airport in Venezuela toward Pointe-à-Pitre on the island of Guadeloupe, killing all 62 people on board. A later investigation would conclude that a dynamite bomb had been placed within one of the wheel wells prior to the Boeing 707's takeoff. Over a year earlier, on March 5, 1968, another Flight 212 for Air France crashed during its scheduled flight from Caracas to Pointe-à-Pitre, killing all 63 people on board.
• Born: Hal Steinbrenner, American businessman and baseball executive, chairman of Yankee Global Enterprises, in Culver, Indiana
• Died: Ruth White, 55, American character actress on television and stage, 1964 Emmy Award winner and 1962 off-Broadway Obie Award winner, died from cancer.

  [December 4], 1969 (Thursday)

• The Tokyo Convention, formally known as the Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft, came into effect after being agreed on September 14, 1963.
• A Boy Named Charlie Brown, the first feature film based on the Peanuts comic strip, was released to theaters for the first time.
• Born: Jay-Z, American rap music author and record producer; in Brooklyn
• Died: Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, American civil rights activists, were killed by the Chicago Police during a raid on the Panther location at 2337 Monroe Street after the signing of a search warrant for illegal weapons. Hampton, the Black Panther Party's Illinois chairman, was unarmed and asleep in bed when shot.

  [December 5], 1969 (Friday)

• The initial plan for the first network of computer systems in different U.S. states, ARPANET, was realized as the University of Utah in Salt Lake City became the fourth of the four nodes for the data sharing of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. The Utah node joined the three in California at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
• Born: Catherine Tate, English television actress and comedienne; as Catherine Ford in Bloomsbury
• Died: Princess Alice of Battenberg, 84, English princess who was the mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II as the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

  [December 6], 1969 (Saturday)

• In a rare matchup in college football between the top two ranked teams in the nation, the #1 ranked Texas Longhorns rallied from a 14–0 deficit with two fourth quarter touchdowns, to edge the #2 Arkansas Razorbacks, 15–14, at Fayetteville. The game was attended by the U.S. President Richard Nixon and several high-ranking government dignitaries, including future President George H. W. Bush. The victory clinched the national championship for the Longhorns of the coaches poll conducted by United Press International. Texas would win the postseason Associated Press poll of sportswriters and the national championship by defeating Notre Dame, 21–17, in the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day.
• The Altamont Free Concert was held at the Altamont Speedway near Tracy, California and drew 300,000 people. Hosted by The Rolling Stones, it was an attempt at a "Woodstock West" and was better known for the four deaths that happened during the day, including the beating and stabbing to death of one of the spectators, Meredith Hunter, by the Hells Angels motorcycle group hired as security guards. Mark Seiger and Richard Salov died when a car ran off the highway and plowed into them while they sat around a campfire. Another man, identified almost two weeks later as Leonard Kryszak of New York, climbed over a fence and drowned in one of the canals of the California Aqueduct.

  [December 7], 1969 (Sunday)

• The animated Christmas special Frosty the Snowman, adapted from the song of the same name, was shown on television for the first time, shown at 7:30 in the evening on CBS. Produced by Rankin/Bass Productions, the special was popular with critics and viewers; the Boston Globe commented that the show was "a delightful charade that deserves to become a yuletide fixture".
• Born: Patrice O'Neal, American comedian; in New York City
• Died: Francis "Lefty" O'Doul, 72, American professional baseball manager and former MLB outfielder, enshrinee in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame.

  [December 8], 1969 (Monday)

• All 90 people on board Olympic Airways Flight 954 were killed when the DC-6 plane crashed into the side of Mount Paneio near the Greek village of Keratea, about from its destination of Athens. The plane had taken off an hour earlier from the island of Crete and was caught in what was described as "driving rain and hurricane-force winds" as it approached the Greek capital.
• A grand jury in Los Angeles indicted Charles Manson and four of his followers on seven counts of murder arising from the Tate-LaBianca murders exactly four months earlier. A sixth defendant, Leslie Sankston, was charged with two counts of murder in connection with the LaBianca murders.

  [December 9], 1969 (Tuesday)

• W. A. "Tony" Boyle was re-elected as president of the United Mine Workers of America, defeating challenger Joseph "Jock" Yablonski by a wide margin. Three weeks after the election, Yablonski and two members of his family would be murdered, and Boyle would eventually be convicted of the conspiracy to kill them.
• Born: Jakob Dylan, American rock musician and founder of The Wallflowers; in Los Angeles, as the son of Bob Dylan and Sara Noznisky Dylan

  [December 10], 1969 (Wednesday)

• Construction of the Federal Reserve Bunker, a storage facility for several billion dollars' worth of United States currency, was completed. The building and its underground facilities were housed within Mount Pony, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Culpeper, Virginia, with the purpose of preventing the failure of the United States economy in the event of a nuclear war or a similarly catastrophic national emergency. Following the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the currency was removed and the storage facilities now used by the Library of Congress as an archive for fragile media created during the 20th Century, including film stock and audio and video recordings.
• The Viale Lazio massacre was carried out in Sicily at Viale Lazio 106 in Palermo, location of the Girolamo Moncada Construction Company, the front for Sicilian Mafia gang boss Michele Cavataio. Dressed in police uniforms, five hitmen led by Bernardo Provenzano raided Cavataio's office in what appeared to be a routine arrest, then opened fire with machine guns. In the gun battle that followed, Cavataio and three of his associates were killed, along with one of the members of the hit squad, Calogero Bagarella. The attack brought an end to a truce between the rival gangs in Sicily.
• Émile Derlin Zinsou, the President of Dahomey since his installation by the West African nation's Army on July 17, 1968, was overthrown in a coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Kouandété. Lt. Col. Kouandété would be removed from office in a second coup three days later.