February 1964

[February 1], 1964 (Saturday)

• At least 70 people, most of them passengers on the Argentine Railways "Firefly Express" train, were killed in a head-on collision with a freight train. The express train was carrying 1,040 passengers who were returning to Buenos Aires from the vacation resort of Mar Del Plata. As it was approaching the station at Altamirano, from Buenos Aires, the express crashed into a steam-hauled freight train. Both locomotives exploded, spreading burning diesel fuel over a wide area and setting the first three-passenger cars on fire. Rescue workers were unable to search for survivors for several hours because of the intensity of the blaze. A police doctor, giving an estimate of 34 deaths, conceded that "There is no telling how many bodies burned up in the fire".
• The first commercial Boeing 727 flight was made as Eastern Airlines Flight 638 departed Miami at 8:30 a.m., on a flight to Washington D.C.'s Dulles Airport and a final arrival at Philadelphia. United Air Lines would inaugurate its service on February 6, and American Airlines would follow on April 12.
• McDonnell Aircraft Corporation began Gemini spacecraft pyrotechnic hatch firing tests in conjunction with the ejection seat system. On the first test, the hatch opened and locked in 350 milliseconds, but the result was still 50 milliseconds over the allowable time.
• The Beatles vaulted to the #1 spot on the U.S. singles charts for the first time, with "I Want to Hold Your Hand", officially starting the British Invasion in the U.S.
• Died: J. Robert Atkinson, 76, blind American publisher and founder of the Braille Institute of America

  [February 2], 1964 (Sunday)

• The Ranger 6 American lunar probe began its descent to the Moon at 4:09 in the morning, Eastern time, but when the command came from NASA ground control for its six television cameras to turn on, nothing happened. During its 14-minute drop to the lunar surface, the probe was supposed to take 3,000 pictures and relay them back to Earth before impact. It crashed in the Mare Tranquillitatis at 09:24:33 between the Pliny and Dionysius craters.
• Fred Hastings, a 29-year-old skydiver from Louisville, Kentucky, survived a plunge to Earth despite the failure of his parachute. The lines of his main parachute became tangled with the canopy, and the emergency chute on his chest got tangled with the main chute. The reserve chute, however, caught enough air to slow his speed to, moments before he crashed into rain-soaked ground adjacent to the Freeman Municipal Airport in Seymour, Indiana.
• The nude body of Hannah Tailford, a 30-year-old prostitute, was found in the River Thames near the Hammersmith Bridge in London, ten days after she had last been seen at her home. Tailford was the first of six victims of a serial killer whose modus operandi would lead to the designation "Jack the Stripper".
• Manufacture of the heatshield for Gemini spacecraft No. 3 was completed. This shield was thick, twice as thick as those for the uncrewed spacecraft Gemini 1 and Gemini 2.
• The U.S. Coast Guard seized four Cuban fishing boats in U.S. territorial waters near the Dry Tortugas and jailed the fishermen at Key West. In retaliation, Cuba would cut off the water supply to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.
• Born: Ramesh Kumar Nibhoria, Indian Punjabi engineer and inventor; in Firozpur

  [February 3], 1964 (Monday)

• The New York City school boycott, also known as Freedom Day, described by one American author as "the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation's history", began and involved more than 460,000 African-American and Puerto Rican students and 3,500 teachers, who refused to show up at the city's public schools, as a protest against alleged de facto racial segregation. The number represented at least one-third of the city's schoolchildren, and shut down predominantly black schools in Harlem and in Brooklyn.
• The North Vietnamese Air Force established its first jet fighter unit, Fighter Regiment No. 921, nicknamed the Sao Dao regiment. A few weeks later, the first North Vietnamese jet pilots, prepared to fly MiG-17s, began their training in the Soviet Union, and based their operations at the Noi Bai base near Hanoi. North Vietnamese jet fighter units would be based in the People's Republic of China until August 1964 while their pilots underwent training.
• Ewald Peters, who had been the chief bodyguard for West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard only four days earlier, hanged himself in his jail cell in Dortmund, where he was being held on suspicion of war crimes. Peters, who had been assigned to Nazi-occupied Ukraine during World War II, was arrested on January 31 after returning with Chancellor Erhard from a state visit to Italy.
• The Warren Commission began its first hearings in the investigation of the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. The first of 93 witnesses whose testimony was taken by the Commission was Marina Oswald, the widow of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who appeared in a closed-door session.
• Garrett Corporation's AiResearch Manufacturing Division was awarded a contract for $133,358 for the Project Gemini extravehicular pressurization and ventilation system.

  [February 4], 1964 (Tuesday)

• Yuri Nosenko, an officer of the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, defected to a representative of the American spy agency, the CIA, in Geneva. Instead of receiving favorable treatment, Nosenko instead would be imprisoned by the CIA for nearly four years in a CIA holding area near Clinton, Maryland, and interrogated regularly because the agency believed that he was a double agent. On October 27, 1967, Nosenko would be moved and confined in "a comfortable safehouse in the Washington area" and interrogation gave way to his being "interviewed under friendly, sympathetic conditions" by another office within the CIA. A 1970 internal CIA report would later conclude not only that Nosenko was a bona fide defector, but also that he was "the most valuable and economical defector this Agency has ever had".
• In a ceremony at the White House, the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution was officially certified, 12 days after it had been ratified by the 38 states. Bernard L. Boutin, the Administrator of General Services signed the certificate as required by law, and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed as a witness to the amendment, which outlawed the poll tax in federal elections.
• Police in the village of San Pablo District of the Canchis Province of Peru fired into a crowd of about 8,000 peasants who had protested at an open market, killing 19 people, mostly women. Afterward, government troops imprisoned about 200 agitators in the region.
• General Motors introduced the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser and the Buick Sport Wagon.
• Died: Alfred Wiener, 78, German Jewish politician who had been General Secretary of the Central Organization of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith during the 1920s, before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933.

  [February 5], 1964 (Wednesday)

• India's chief delegate to the United Nations, Education Minister M. C. Chagla, told the UN Security Council that "I wish to make it clear on behalf of my Government that under no circumstances can we agree to the holding of a plebiscite in Kashmir," responding to charges by the Pakistan Foreign Minister that India had backed out of its 1948 offer to hold elections so that the Kashmiri people could decide which nation they wished their region to be part of. In 1965, India would incorporate its claimed area into what would become the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Since 1990, February 5 has been observed as "Kashmir Day" by the nation of Pakistan, and by Kashmiri nationalists in India.
• The Gemini rocket's stages were erected in the vertical test facility at Martin-Baltimore for subsystems functional verification testing. Bell Aerosystems began testing the primary propulsion system for the Agena target vehicle. Initial testing caused visible cracks in the outer shell that leaked the propellants as a result of intergranular corrosion. The defective tanks were replaced by start tanks with a new heat-treated shell.
• Born: Laura Linney, American actress; in New York City

  [February 6], 1964 (Thursday)

• At 1:58 p.m. local time, Cuba cut off the normal water supply to the United States Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in reprisal for the U.S. seizure the previous Sunday of four Cuban fishing boats off the coast of Florida, by shutting off a freshwater pipeline from the Yateras River. Cuban Premier Fidel Castro told foreign correspondents that he would allow water to flow to the U.S. Navy base, which had been leased from Cuba for decades before Castro came to power, for one hour each day "out of deference to the families of American personnel on base". At the time, there were 10,500 U.S. residents on the base, 2,400 of whom were women and children. Over the next ten months, U.S. Navy tankers would deliver fresh water to the Guantanamo base from Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and Port Everglades, Florida, until a desalinization plant could be constructed. On December 6, 1964, the base would be able to convert the ocean into potable water.
• The governments of the United Kingdom and France made simultaneous announcements in London and Paris that they had reached an agreement for construction of the first railway tunnel underneath the English Channel. The original plan for the proposed Channel Tunnel was for a railroad tunnel running from Dover to Sangatte.
• Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Ebaya, 44, the Chief of Staff of the Army of the Congo and second in command to General Joseph Mobutu, was assassinated by a poison arrow shot by rebels in the Kwilu Province. Ebaya had been ambushed while in a convoy on the road between the provincial capital of Kikwit and the besieged town of Gungu.
• Died: Emilio Aguinaldo, 94, Filipino freedom fighter who led the insurgency against Spain, and later the United States, during their occupation of the Philippines in the late 19th century.