January 1950


The following events occurred in January 1950:

January 1, 1950 (Sunday)

January 2, 1950 (Monday)

  • The 1949 college football season was completed as the post-season bowl games were played on the day after New Year's Day. In the Rose Bowl, previously unbeaten #3 California was upset by #6 Ohio State before a crowd of 100,963. Unbeaten #2 Oklahoma won 35–0 over #9 LSU in the Sugar Bowl. The other two unbeaten college teams of 1949, #1 Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team|Notre Dame] and #4 Army Cadets football team|Army], did not play in a bowl game. The final AP and UPI polls had already been taken prior to the bowl games, with Notre Dame being the unofficial national champion.
  • The government of Argentina immediately shut down the Communist newspaper La Hora the same day that the paper appeared without the slogan "the year of the Liberator, General San Martín" on its masthead or at the top of every page, as all the other Argentine dailies were doing in compliance with a declaration by President Juan Perón that 1950 was San Martín Year. The paper would resume publication in 1958.
  • Born: David Shifrin, American clarinet artist
  • Died: Emil Jannings, 65, Swiss-born film star, winner of the first Academy Award for Best Actor, and later the star of German propaganda films

January 3, 1950 (Tuesday)

January 4, 1950 (Wednesday)

  • U.S. President Harry S. Truman delivered his State of the Union address to Congress and asked for a tax increase, with "changes in our tax system which will reduce present inequities, stimulate business activity, and yield a moderate amount of additional revenue".
  • The New York Sun, which had published every afternoon since 1833, had its final issue. The operation was bought by the rival evening paper, the New York World-Telegram.
  • The city of Town and Country, Missouri, with 162 wealthy residents, was incorporated as a village at the site of a defunct farming town Altheim, near St. Louis. Incorporation was granted by the St. Louis County Court after 102 people had signed a petition two months earlier. The move came following concerns that either of two neighboring towns south of the area and east would attempt an annexation. In 1974, voters would approve the village's transformation into a fourth-class city. Town and Country would have over 11,000 residents by 2018.
  • Died: George P. Putnam, 62, American publisher who had been the husband of Amelia Earhart when she disappeared in 1937. After she was declared dead in 1939, Putnam, who had been the high bidder for Charles Lindbergh's autobiography, remarried twice.

January 5, 1950 (Thursday)

January 6, 1950 (Friday)

  • The United Kingdom gave diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China and the Communist regime of Mao Zedong as the legitimate government of the nation of 460,000,000 people. Norway, Denmark and Ceylon followed suit.
  • Workmen renovating the White House found a small marble box that had been buried underneath a floor slab commemorating the last renovation. The box, which contained three Washington, D.C. newspapers, 27 cents and the label from a bottle of Maryland rye whiskey, had apparently been placed there on December 2, 1902. President Truman ordered that the contents, along with current newspapers, be sealed up again and that the box be reburied "somewhere in the reconstruction now going on."
  • Born:
  • *Louis Freeh, American judge who was the FBI Director from 1993 to 2001; in Jersey City, New Jersey; and his immediate successor,
  • *Thomas J. Pickard, Acting FBI Director June 25 to September 4, 2001, following Freeh's resignation; in Woodside, New York
  • Died: Isaiah Bowman, 71, Canadian-American geographer

January 7, 1950 (Saturday)

January 8, 1950 (Sunday)

January 9, 1950 (Monday)

  • Nationalist Chinese warships shelled an American freighter, the Flying Arrow, in international waters after the ship had run a blockade of Shanghai.
  • President Truman submitted the annual federal budget, calling for the spending of $42,439,000,000 in the 1952 Fiscal Year. The budget had a deficit of more than five billion dollars, and the accompanying budget message was, at 27,000 words, the "longest presidential message in history".

January 10, 1950 (Tuesday)

  • Yakov Malik, the Soviet Ambassador to the U. N., angrily walked out of a session of the United Nations Security Council, after the ten members voted 8–2 against replacing the Nationalist Chinese delegation with one from the Communist Chinese leaders who had taken control of nearly all of China in October. Although the Nationalist government was confined to the island of Taiwan, it continued to be allowed to speak for, and to exercise the veto power for, the 460 million people in China.
  • Born: Ernie Wasson, American horticulturalist and author of gardening books, in Berkeley, California

January 11, 1950 (Wednesday)

January 12, 1950 (Thursday)

  • The death penalty was partially restored in the Soviet Union, after having been abolished on May 26, 1947. It was retroactively applied to "traitors, spies, subversives, and saboteurs" regardless of when the alleged offense occurred.
  • The British submarine Truculent collided with the Swedish oil tanker Divina in the Thames Estuary and sank, killing 64 people. Only 15 crewmen were able to escape. All of them had been in the conning tower of the sub, which had been cruising on the surface of the Thames.
  • U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson delivered his 'Perimeter Speech', outlining the boundary of U.S. security guarantees. South Korea was not included within the area subject to American protection, and would be invaded from North Korea less than six months later.
  • Italy's Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi resigned along with his entire cabinet.
  • Born:
  • *Sheila Jackson Lee, U.S. Representative for Texas since 1995, in New York City
  • *Dorrit Moussaieff, Israeli-born businesswoman and wife of the President of Iceland; in Jerusalem

January 13, 1950 (Friday)

  • The grounds of the United States consulate in Peiping were invaded by a group of police and civilian officials, who seized control of the building housing the offices of Consul General O. Edmund Clubb. The U.S. Department of State protested to the new Communist government of the People's Republic of China, without success.
  • Three days after the UN Security Council refused to let the Communist Chinese government exercise China's veto power, Ambassador Malik left indefinitely, saying that the U.S.S.R. would not participate in the Security Council as Nationalist representative T. F. Tsiang remained at the table. The Soviet protest proved to be a blunder, in that the Soviets could have exercised their veto power when the Security Council voted on June 27, 1950, to send its forces to combat the North Korean invasion of South Korea in the Korean War.

January 14, 1950 (Saturday)

January 15, 1950 (Sunday)

January 16, 1950 (Monday)

January 17, 1950 (Tuesday)

  • A gang of 11 thieves stole more than two million dollars from the headquarters of the Brinks Armored Car Company at 165 Prince Street in Boston, Massachusetts. A group of men, wearing Halloween masks, used keys to walk through five locked doors, walked into the counting room, tied up the employees at gunpoint, filled 14 bags with money and disappeared. The haul from the job, which took a year and a half to plan and 17 minutes to carry out, was $1,218,211.29 in cash and another $1,557,183.83 in checks, money orders and securities. The gang would be indicted in 1956, only five days before the statute of limitations on the robbery would have expired.
  • The famous battleship USS Missouri got stuck at the entrance to Maryland's Chesapeake Bay after running aground on the shoals, and remained stuck for two weeks. The ship would finally be freed on February 1, after a salvage effort that cost $225,000.
  • Favored to win by nine points, and ranked by the AP as the #3 college basketball team in the U.S., Long Island University lost to North Carolina State, 55–52, in a game at New York City's Madison Square Garden; an investigation the following year would reveal that LIU players Eddie Gard and Dick Feurtado had been paid $2,000 by gambler Salvatore Sollazo to engage in "point shaving" in order to ensure that LIU lost the game. On January 2, Kentucky had narrowly defeated Arkansas, in a game where three players would admit later to accepting $1,000 bribes in return for keeping the winning margin low.
  • Born: Luis López Nieves, Puerto Rican novelist
  • Died: Seiichi Hatano, 72, Japanese religious philosopher

January 18, 1950 (Wednesday)

January 19, 1950 (Thursday)

  • A request by President Truman, to provide an additional $60 million in economic aid to South Korea, failed to pass in the U.S. House of Representatives, 191–193, in "the first flat setback the President has encountered in his many requests for global recovery funds". By the time a revised bill passed and was put into effect, the Korean War would begin.
  • Pebble in the Sky, the first novel for science fiction author Isaac Asimov, was published. Previously, all of Asimov's printed works had been short stories. One estimate places the number of fiction and non-fiction books written by Asimov at 506.
  • The Avro Canada CF-100 Canuck, the only Canadian-designed fighter aircraft to be mass-produced, made its first test flight, with Bill Watterton at the controls.
  • Died: Johnny Mann, American test pilot and cross-country flier, after returning home following an unsuccessful attempt to set a new record for a non-stop flight from Los Angeles to Miami.

January 20, 1950 (Friday)

January 21, 1950 (Saturday)

January 22, 1950 (Sunday)

  • Preston Tucker, who had attempted to found his own automobile manufacturing company after World War II and had created the innovative 1948 Tucker Sedan, was acquitted by a jury on all criminal charges. Tucker and several associates had been indicted in June, 1949, on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy, and violation of federal securities laws in the course of attracting investment in his company.
  • Play finished at the first ever LPGA Tour event, the Tampa Women's Open. Amateur Polly Riley won by five shots over Louise Suggs.
  • Died: Alan Hale, Sr., 57, American film actor who was the sidekick for Errol Flynn

January 23, 1950 (Monday)

January 24, 1950 (Tuesday)

January 25, 1950 (Wednesday)

January 26, 1950 (Thursday)

January 27, 1950 (Friday)

January 28, 1950 (Saturday)

January 29, 1950 (Sunday)

January 30, 1950 (Monday)

January 31, 1950 (Tuesday)

  • U.S. President Harry S. Truman ordered the development of the hydrogen bomb, after the Soviet Union had become the second nation to acquire the secret of the atomic bomb on August 29, 1949. "It is my responsibility as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces," Truman said in a public statement, "to see to it that our country is able defend itself against any possible aggressor. Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super bomb." The first thermonuclear explosion would take place on November 1, 1952. On March 1, 1954, the U.S. would detonate the first "H-bomb".
  • The Soviet Union announced recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, led by North Vietnamese Communist Ho Chi Minh.