February 1971


The following events occurred in February 1971:

February 1, 1971 (Monday)

February 2, 1971 (Tuesday)

  • The Ramsar Convention, an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, was signed by representatives of seven nations in Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran. By its terms, the treaty went into effect on December 21, 1975. February 2 is now regularly observed by environmentalists as World Wetlands Day. The signing came on the same day that a meeting in the Iranian capital of Tehran, between the 10-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and representatives of 22 oil companies to negotiate a price rise in oil.
  • Eight days after leading a coup d'état, General Idi Amin Dada ordered the dissolution of the Ugandan Parliament and declared himself President of Uganda, assuming all executive and legislative authority and pledging to begin rule by decree.

February 3, 1971 (Wednesday)

  • In Tehran, the representatives of the ten OPEC member states adopted the "XXII Conference Resolution", in which each nation pledged that by February 15, they would have in place the necessary regulatory or legislative measures necessary to implement an embargo on shipments of crude oil to any of the 22 oil companies that failed to accept payment of a 55% tax, with the cutoff of oil to take place on February 21. The companies signed the agreement with the OPEC nations on February 14.
  • Eight people were killed by the explosion of a gas pipeline in Lambertville, New Jersey at about 8:00 in the morning, two hours after they had escaped injury in an earlier explosion in the same area.
  • An explosion at the Thiokol chemical plant near Woodbine, Georgia, killed 29 employees and seriously injured 50 others. The explosion, believed to have been due to a fire caused by tripflares being manufactured by Thiokol for use in the ongoing Vietnam War, occurred at 10:53 in the morning.
  • Died: Jay C. Flippen, 71, US actor

February 4, 1971 (Thursday)

  • The British luxury car and jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce declared bankruptcy, after sustaining financial losses in developing the engine for the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar jumbo jet under a misjudged price contract agreement. The British government would subsequently nationalise the Rolls engine operations as a matter of national security and British pride.
  • Died: Brock Chisholm, 74, Canadian World War I veteran, physician and first Director-General of the World Health Organization

February 5, 1971 (Friday)

February 6, 1971 (Saturday)

February 7, 1971 (Sunday)

  • In a referendum in Switzerland, male voters approved giving Swiss women the right to vote in national elections and the right to hold federal office, by a margin of 65.7% to 34.3%. In local elections, voting was still prohibited in eight the 22 cantons opposed could still prohibit women from voting in national elections.
  • Wladyslaw Gomulka was expelled from the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, which criticized the former General Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party for "serious mistakes in recent years". Gomulka had already been removed as the leader of the Party and from the Politburo on December 20.

February 8, 1971 (Monday)

  • NASDAQ, a new stock exchange of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, began operations in New York, initially as the reporter of the NASDAQ Composite Index which consisted of "securities less widely held or those that, for other reasons, do not appear on the daily Over-the Counter list". The first list was of price quotations of companies publicly listed ranging from the wholesale pharmaceutical seller AmerisourceBergen Corporation to the meatpacking company Zemco Industries, now a division of Tyson Foods.
  • Operation Lam Son 719, an attack by the First Infantry Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam from South Vietnam into the Kingdom of Laos, was launched in the Vietnam War against North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces operating across the border. The 3,000 ARVN troops crossed the border in armored columns and by American-piloted helicopter troopships and reached a trail complex south of Xépôn, the key enemy supply center for the Communists. The South Vietnamese designation replaced the American code name of "Operation Dewey Canyon II", and was the 719th ARVN operation to honor the Lam Son uprising by the Vietnamese people in 1418 against the Chinese Empire.
  • South Africa's white minority government eased its apartheid regulations to a degree by allowing mixed-race Africans to work in construction jobs formerly limited to whites only. Black South Africans were still barred from working on "white" projects in Pretoria, and the change in policy, prompted by a shortage of skilled workers, was limited to bricklayers and plasterers. Gert Beetge, the general secretary of the all-white Union of Building Workers, criticized the decision of the Labor Ministry and said that it marked "the death knell to white building workers".
  • The Siahkal incident marked the beginning of guerrilla attacks against the Iranian monarchy, with the killing of three police in the town of Siahkal in order to release two prisoners. The 11 surviving guerrillas, and both prisoners, were executed.
  • The IBM company retired its first high-selling computer model, the IBM 1401, that had been introduced in 1959 and sold 12,000 units. The company also halted further sales of its less expensive version of the 1401, the IBM 1440.
  • Born: Andrus Veerpalu, Estonian cross-country skier, Olympic gold medalist in 2002 and 2006; in Pärnu, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union

February 9, 1971 (Tuesday)

  • At exactly 41 seconds after 6:00 in the morning local time, the 6.5 Sylmar earthquake struck the Greater Los Angeles Area with a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI and lasted 12 seconds. With an epicenter at the Pacoima section of Los Angeles, it killed 58 people by falling debris; another seven died from heart attacks. Most of the deaths were in the collapse of the Olive View hospital and the VA hospital in Sylmar.
  • The six member nations of the European Economic Community, also known as the "Common Market", approved a plan to create a common unit of currency over the next ten years. The European Currency Unit would be implemented by 1979 for use in international transactions involving the EEC members but the Euro would not be put in to circulation until 2002.
  • Satchel Paige became the first primarily Negro league player to become voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige had played five full seasons in the American League after the integration of Major League Baseball, but was enshrined for his 18 years in the first and second Negro National Leagues and the Negro American League. The original plan by the Hall was to admit one Negro league player per year "as part of a new exhibit commemorating the contributions of the Negro leagues to baseball" to be honored plaques separately-located, but equal to those of the MLB players. After critics pointed out the irony of segregating the honor to the enshrined stars, the plan would be revised in time for Paige's formal enshrinement. At the time of the decision, only two African-American players— Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella— were enshrined in the Hall of Fame. While both Robinson and Campanella had also played in the Negro leagues, they had both been voted in for their MLB achievements.
  • Apollo 14 returned to Earth after the third crewed Moon landing, with a splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean at 2105 UTC at a point south of Tonga. The capsule and the crew were picked up by the amphibious assault ship USS New Orleans.

February 10, 1971 (Wednesday)

February 11, 1971 (Thursday)

February 12, 1971 (Friday)

  • The United States and the Soviet Union entered into an agreement to respect each other's territorial waters when allowing their commercial fishing boats to fish for king crab or for tanner crab. The agreement, signed in Washington, entered into force the same day. Agreements between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on fishing.
  • Died:
  • *James Cash Penney, 95, American entrepreneur who founded the Golden Rule Store department store in Kemmerer, Wyoming in 1902 and had built it into a chain of 1,660 J.C. Penney stores by the time of his death.
  • *Ella Cara Deloria, 83, Native American educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist

February 13, 1971 (Saturday)

  • The Soviet Union publicly released its latest "Five-Year Plan", covering the period from January 1, 1971, to December 31, 1975, to be presented for approval at the 24th Soviet Communist Party Congress in April, and intended to focus on increasing the standard of living for the average Soviet citizen. The stated goals were "expanding economically-justified commercial, scientific and technical relations" with capitalist nations, and increases of at least 40% in national income, capital goods and consumer goods.
  • Jean Hengen replaced the retiring Léon Lommel as the Roman Catholic Bishop of Luxembourg.
  • Paul Esser, a 21-year-old cave diver, drowned in the Porth yr Ogof cave in Wales. His body would remain entombed in the cave for 39 years, and would not be recovered until April 2010.

February 14, 1971 (Sunday)

  • The "Tehran Agreement", obligating oil producers to pay a 55% tax rate on their exports of oil from six of the OPEC member states on the Persian Gulf was signed by the representatives of 23 oil companies, all of whom faced an embargo by February 21. The accord was signed at the Iranian Finance Ministry shortly after 3:00 in the afternoon local time. A turning point in history, the agreement "passed the initiative in oil pricing from the multinational companies to the exporting countries", which would then steadily raise the price of petroleum during the rest of the 1970s. The original agreement was to immediately increase the price of a barrel of crude oil by 35 cents, followed by 5 cent increases annually, and had been negotiated by teams headed by Iranian Finance Minister Jamshid Amouzegar for the OPEC nations and by British Petroleum Chairman George Fraser, 2nd Lord Strathalmond.
  • Poisonous fumes from a diesel fire killed 34 passengers and seriously injured 60 more on a train in Yugoslavia that had been halted in a tunnel outside of Vranduk, in what is now Bosnia. Most of the casualties were factory workers and miners who were among the 200 passengers. Investigators concluded that "nothing serious would have happened if the train had been in the open instead of a tunnel" and blamed the disaster on the train's engineer and fireman. An electrical spark had ignited diesel fuel in the locomotive's reservoir as it passed through the Vranduk tunnel, and the crew brought the train to a stop rather than exiting.
  • Born:
  • *Kris Aquino, Filipina actress, youngest daughter of Benigno Aquino Jr. and Corazon Aquino; in Quezon City
  • *Gheorghe Mureșan, Romanian-born basketball and the tallest National Basketball Association player, along with 7'7" Manute Bol; in Tritenii de Jos
  • *Nelson Frazier Jr., American professional wrestler for WWF and WWE, who performed under the ring names "Viscera", "Nelson Knight", "King Mabel" and "Big Daddy V"; in Goldsboro, North Carolina

February 15, 1971 (Monday)

  • On Decimalisation Day, the United Kingdom and Ireland both switched to decimal currency at 10:00 a.m. as banks opened for conversion of money. As a reporter pointed out to non-Britons, "The old currency, the most complicated in the world, divided the pound into 20 shillings and the shilling into 12 pence... Now the pound is divided into 100 new pence, each worth 2.4 American cents." The shilling and the florin were replaced by the five pence and ten pence coins, and unusual denominations like the half crown and the guinea had no decimal coin equivalent. The popular sixpence remained legal tender until being phased out. The Republic of Ireland converted its currency on the same day, allowing Ireland and the UK's Northern Ireland to have a similar system. Retired permanently was the old system of pricing in pounds, shillings and pence, referred to as £sd for the abbreviations of Latin terms for the British pounds, shillings and pennies. Thus, 2 pounds, 7 shillings and five pence was "£2.7s.5p." but became £2.37 afterward. However, the Decimal Currency Board had announced that "£sd will be legal tender for up to 18 months after D-day and some shops will be pricing and giving change in £sd," with the changeover period ending on August 15, 1972. In addition to Ireland, the African nation of Malawi went decimal on the same day, along with Gibraltar, while the Gambia, Nigeria and Malta continued to use the old system.
  • "President's Day" was celebrated as a legal holiday nationwide in the U.S. for the first time, as new federal legislation took effect moving the George Washington's birthday holiday from February 22 to the third Monday in February. Washington had been born on February 22, 1732 ; the third Monday only falls in a range from the 15th to the 21st of the month and never on the actual anniversary of his birth. The federal holiday would become popularly known as President's Day in that it comes between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and of Washington, both days that had been observed as state holidays in the past.
  • The government of Poland announced that it was reversing the increase of food prices that had triggered nationwide rioting in December, and that prices would return to normal on March 1. At the same time, Prime Minister Piotr Jaroszewicz announced that plans to raise wages would be halted as a compromise for the reduction of food prices.
  • Angry over proposed price increases for agricultural supplies proposed by the European Economic Community 's Agricultural Commissioner, a group of Belgian farmers brought three cows into a meeting room in Brussels where the six EEC nations' ministers of agriculture were meeting to discuss pricing. The "Young Farmers Alliance" carried out what one reporter noted was "a major feat of cowherding" in that they "had succeeded in driving three cows... through swift swing doors, past security guards, up three flights of marble steps, through a press room, down a corridor and into the council chamber." France's Minister of Agriculture commented that "It was an event unworthy of the construction of Europe".
  • In West Dallas, Texas, two heroin addicts abducted five law enforcement officers from the Dallas County Sheriff's Department and the Ellis County Sheriff's Office, killing three of them and wounding a fourth. The fifth deputy escaped and summoned help. The suspects would be apprehended four days later after an extensive manhunt.

February 16, 1971 (Tuesday)

  • The first recording by the secret taping system installed by U.S. President Nixon was made. There were nine original microphones in the Oval Office––five in the president's desk and one on each side of the fireplace; and two in the Cabinet Room under the table near the president's chair. Years after the Watergate scandal, former White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman would admit that it had been his suggestion to Nixon to make the system voice-activated rather than to be controlled by an on/off switch; Haldeman's thought at the time was "that this president was far too inept with machinery ever to make a success of a switch system." The first conversation, made sometime after 7:56 in the morning, was between Nixon and Alexander P. Butterfield and is saved as "Conversation 450-001" by the Nixon Library.
  • Residents of Reggio di Calabria in Italy rioted for five days after the Regional Council of Calabria moved the capital of the regione from Reggio to Catanzaro, away.
  • In what was later dubbed the "fuddle duddle incident", Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was accused of mouthing obscenities at Opposition MPs in the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. News reports tastefully reported that MPs sitting across from Trudeau had "accused him of mouthing a two-word expression commonly translated without profanity to mean 'get lost'" and that "The prime minister later told reporters that he had said 'fuddle-duddle or something like that'." The incident added the euphemism "fuddle duddle" to the Canadian vocabulary and has made the news annually ever since.

February 17, 1971 (Wednesday)

  • For the first time in 12 years, England won The Ashes, the quadrennial Test cricket tournament against Australia, bringing the ceremonial cremation urn back to England. England was represented by the Marylebone Cricket Club, captained by Ray Illingworth and the 7-Test Series came down to the Seventh Test in Sydney, played over six days beginning February 12. In that England had won the Fourth Test on January 14 and four other matches were played to a draw with no winner, Australia would have retained possession of the Ashes if it could end the series as a 1–1 draw. England won by 62 runs.
  • Born: Denise Richards, American film and TV actress ; in Downers Grove, Illinois.

February 18, 1971 (Thursday)

  • Greek archaeologists in Jerusalem discovered the remains of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a Greek Orthodox basilica that had been built in the 4th century roughly from the Rock of Calvary, the traditional site of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The church had been consecrated on September 13, 335.
  • U.S. President Nixon proposed his program for national health care, the National Health Strategy, to Congress. Under the Republican president's plan, all U.S. employers "ranging from giant corporations to the couple with a maid" would pay 65 percent of the health insurance premium for their employees starting on July 1, 1973, increasing to 75 percent by 1976.
  • Born: Thomas Bjørn, Danish golfer, one of Scandinavia's most successful-ever golfers, with 15 wins on the PGA European Tour; in Silkeborg
  • Died:
  • *Chuck Hostetler, 67, American baseball player remembered as "baseball's oldest rookie" for making his Major League Baseball debut at the age of 40 for the Detroit Tigers in 1944
  • *Afoafouvale Misimoa, 69, Western Samoan politician, and the Secretary-General of the South Pacific Commission

February 19, 1971 (Friday)

  • The U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center's Project Deep Ops, training pilot whales to retrieve submerged objects ran into a problem when "Ishmael" was released into the Pacific Ocean and used the opportunity to escape after three years in captivity. According to the final report on Project Deep Ops, "Ishamael was lost during an open-ocean training exercise. Several days were spent searching for him with surface craft and helicopters," without success. The whale's flight to freedom was aided by "a malfunctioning automatic direction finder system" that had been strapped to his back.
  • The Canada/USSR Agreement on Co-operation in Fisheries in the Northeastern Pacific Ocean off the Coast of Canada, entered into force, allowing fishing vessels of the USSR to conduct fishing with trawls in specified areas between 3 and 12 miles of the territorial sea of Canada.
  • The remains of Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee were discovered. She would remain unidentified until October 2025 when it was determined she was 21-year-old Maureen Rowan.
  • Born:
  • *Jeff Kinney, American children's book writer known for the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series of books; in Fort Washington, Maryland
  • *Gil Shaham, American-born Israeli violinist, in Urbana, Illinois

February 20, 1971 (Saturday)

  • The U.S. Emergency Broadcast System sent an erroneous warning to all the nation's radio and television stations, meant to be a standard weekly test conducted by NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado at 7:33 in the morning. Many stations didn't notice that the warning included the message authentication code word provided to all Federal Communications Commission licensed stations on a quarterly basis. Those that did, and that verified the code word "hatefulness", broadcast the warning "This is not a test. A state of national emergency exists. This station will now go off the air. Please tune your dial to a station on the Emergency Broadcast System for a message from the President. This is not a test. This is not a test." Instructions were then given for how to locate the EBS station broadcast serving the area. Although the reason for the alert wasn't directly mentioned by announcers, the activation of the EBS for a nationwide emergency was normally reserved for a warning of an attack on the United States. All broadcast stations had heard the tone, followed by a teletype message with the authentication word that said "Message authenticator: Hatefulness – Hatefulness. This is an Emergency Action Notification directed by the President. Normal broadcasting will cease immediately. All stations will broadcast EAN Message One preceded by the attention signal, per FCC rules. Only stations holding NDEA may stay on air in accord with their state EBS plan." Thirteen minutes later, news services informed broadcasters that a mistake had been made and that stations should disregard the order to go off the air, and the official cancel notice did not get sent until 10:30 Eastern time with the statement "Message authenticator: Impish- Impish. Cancel message sent at 09:33 EST. Repeat Cancel message sent at 09:33 EST." The mistake was traced to a long-time civilian employee of NORAD who mistakenly loaded the wrong tape when sending the message to all stations. He told reporters "I can't imagine how the hell I did it." The FCC later reported that a survey showed that only 8 percent of the nation's TV and radio stations went off of the air as directed by the alert; of the 92% that kept broadcasting, one-third said that they questioned whether the message was valid and another one-third didn't see the alert until after it had been canceled.

February 21, 1971 (Sunday)

  • Tornadoes killed 123 people as nineteen storms raged across the Deep South part of the United States, primarily in the state of Mississippi, but also in northeastern Louisiana and southern Tennessee. Hardest hit was the town of Inverness, Mississippi, with the black residential section destroyed.
  • Pakistan's President, Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, announced the firing of his 10-member cabinet of ministers, 11 days before the nation's 313-member National Assembly was to meet in Dacca in East Pakistan, which had more members than Yahya Khan's West Pakistan for the first time in history.
  • The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was signed at Vienna at a conference attended by representatives of 71 nations. Under the agreement, which would become effective upon ratification by 40 nations, governments would maintain strict restrictions on four different classes of drugs and 32 identified substances, with the strictest controls over hallucinogens including LSD and mescaline.

February 22, 1971 (Monday)

  • Speaking about the Bengali minority in East Pakistan, the Republic of Pakistan's President, General Yahya Khan, said "Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands." In the civil war that followed East Pakistan's declaration of independence, Yahya Khan's West Pakistan soldiers killed at least 26,000 Bengalis and perhaps as many as 100,000. The statement was recorded by journalist Robert Payne during an interview.

February 23, 1971 (Tuesday)

February 24, 1971 (Wednesday)

  • The government of Algeria seized majority control of stock ownership in all French oil companies and nationalizing the natural gas pipelines and gasoline pipelines constructed by the companies.

February 25, 1971 (Thursday)

February 26, 1971 (Friday)

  • Secretary General U Thant signed the United Nations proclamation of the March equinox as international Earth Day. Earth Day continues to be observed in the U.S. and much of the Western world on April 22, the date of the original 1970 movement.
  • Eleven students and four police were killed in Cali, Colombia, in rioting that arose after students at the Universidad del Valle accused the university's president of misusing funds and then occupied the administration buildings.
  • Per Borten, the Prime Minister of Norway, admitted that he had lied to investigators about disclosing confidential information to an opponent of Norway's application to the European Economic Community, prompting a demand by the opposition leader in the Stortinget, Trygve Bratteli, that Borten resign. Lawyer Arne Haugestad, the EEC opponent to whom Borten showed a confidential report from Norway's ambassador on February 15, then leaked the report to the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet, which published on February 19. Borten would step down and Bratteli would form a new government as prime minister on March 17.
  • France and the United States signed an agreement confirming cooperation between the two nations in fighting the trafficking of narcotics. U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and France's Minister of the Interior Raymond Marcellin concluded the agreement in Paris.

February 27, 1971 (Saturday)

February 28, 1971 (Sunday)