January 1963

[January 1], 1963 (Tuesday)

• In the United States, the #1 ranked USC Trojans and the #2 Wisconsin Badgers met in the 1963 Rose Bowl before a crowd of 98,696 people. At the time, American college football's national championship was determined by the Associated Press and UPI polls taken at the end of the regular season. The first and second ranked teams happened to be the respective champions of the Big Six Conference and the Big Ten Conference. USC won 42–37, holding off a fourth quarter, 23-point rally by Wisconsin.
• Osamu Tezuka's Tetsuwan Atomu, Japan's first serialized animated series based on the popular manga, was broadcast for the first time. It premiered on Japanese television station Fuji TV.
• The U.S. city of Chesapeake, Virginia, was created from a merger of the city of South Norfolk and the remainder of surrounding Norfolk County, Virginia.
• Died:
• *Robert S. Kerr, 66, U.S. Senator for Oklahoma since 1948 and oil multi-millionaire, nicknamed "the uncrowned King of the Senate". Kerr, who had been in Doctors Hospital in Washington, D.C., for three weeks from a "virus ailment", suffered a fatal heart attack "while sitting on a bed talking to his physician."
• *Dr. Gilbert Bogle, 38, research scientist with Australia's governmental scientific agency, CSIRO, was found dead along with Margaret Chandler, the wife of a colleague. Both were apparently overcome by poisonous fumes in bushland near the Lane Cove River, Sydney.

  [January 2], 1963 (Wednesday)

• The Battle of Ap Bac in South Vietnam began, and was the first time that Viet Cong forces stood and fought against a major South Vietnamese attack. At the outset, Viet Cong ground fire shot down a United States Army UH-1 attack helicopter and four U.S. Army CH-21 transport helicopters as they arrived at their landing zone. Republic of Vietnam Air Force C-123 Provider transport planes dropped about 300 South Vietnamese paratroopers later in the day. Despite outnumbering the Viet Cong 4 to 1, and having American armor, artillery and helicopters, "what should have been an ARVN victory turned into an exercise of everything that was wrong with the South Vietnamese army".
• Seventeen people were killed in an explosion at the Home Packing Company in Terre Haute, Indiana.
• Born:
• *Edgar Martínez, Puerto Rican American baseball player, five-time Silver Slugger Award for best performance as third baseman and designated hitter, 2019 enshrinee in the National Baseball Hall of Fame; in New York City
• *David Cone, American baseball pitcher, 1994 AL Cy Young Award winner, three-time MLB strikeout leader who pitched a perfect game in 1999; in Kansas City, Missouri
• Died:
• *Dick Powell, 58, American actor and singer, died from lymphatic cancer one day after his pre-recorded introduction to the stories of his anthology series, The Dick Powell Show, had been telecast. The show would continue for the rest of the season under the same name with various celebrities hosting, but without Powell's introductions.
• *Jack Carson, 52, Canadian-American comedian and character actor, died from stomach cancer.

  [January 3], 1963 (Thursday)

• At a press conference in Ottawa, U.S. Army General Lauris Norstad's answer to a reporter's question set in motion a series of events that would bring the downfall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. General Norstad had recently retired as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Asked by Charles Lynch of the Ottawa Citizen whether he was saying that Canada's refusal to accept nuclear weapons for its airplanes meant "that she is not actually fulfilling her NATO commitments", General Norstad said, "I believe that is right."
• Thirty-two Soviet civilians from Siberia forced their way into the United States Embassy in Moscow, describing themselves as "persecuted Christians" and seeking political asylum. After embassy officials told the group that they could not stay, the people were placed on a bus and taken away by Moscow police. The 6 men, 12 women and 14 children were sent back to Chernogorsk that evening, after the U.S. Embassy received assurances that the group would get "good treatment".
• Contact with the American Mariner 2 space probe was lost after 128 days of data transmitted from the planet Venus and from the Sun. Attempts from Earth on January 8 to restart transmission, failed, and the craft was not found during searches made on May 28 and August 16.
• The "Big Freeze of 1963" in the United Kingdom caused the cancellation of all but three of the scheduled third round matches of the 1962–63 FA Cup. The blizzard was "the worst snow in Britain's 100 years of recorded weather history".
• NASA made tentative plans to extend the Mercury 9 flight from 18 to 22 orbits.

  [January 4], 1963 (Friday)

• An express train crashed into the rear of a standing passenger train at Meghnagar, Madhya Pradesh, India. Eight passenger cars were crushed or caught fire after an explosion. At least 38 people were confirmed dead and 90 injured.
• The Soviet Union successfully launched Luna E-6 No.2, but a malfunction kept the craft from going beyond low Earth orbit. Seven days later, the decay of the orbit would cause the satellite to re-enter and burn in the atmosphere.
• The Manned Spacecraft Center directed McDonnell Aircraft Corporation to study requirements for space rendezvous experiments on the second and third Project Gemini flights.
• Born:
• *Till Lindemann, German singer, songwriter and poet ; in Leipzig, East Germany
• *Dave Foley, Canadian-American actor; in Etobicoke, Ontario
• Died: Yusuf Izzuddin Shah, 72, Sultan of Perak since 1948. He received the posthumous title of "Marhum Ghafarullah".

  [January 5], 1963 (Saturday)

• The military government of Peru began a nationwide roundup of suspected Communists, arresting more than 300 people accused of plotting subversion.
• In New York City, the musical Camelot closed after 873 performances and a Broadway run of more than two years.
• Died:
• *Stanisław Jaros, 30, Polish electrician and would-be political assassin, convicted of attempting to kill Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, was executed by hanging.
• *Rogers Hornsby, 66, American baseball player and manager, inductee to the Baseball Hall of Fame
• *Erik Strandmark, 43, Swedish film actor, was killed in a plane crash.

  [January 6], 1963 (Sunday)

• Voters in Brazil overwhelmingly rejected a parliamentary form of government in a plebiscite, and approved a strong executive system under President João Goulart. Only 2,073,582 were in favor of retaining the ministerial system, while 9,457,448 voted against it.
• The Shah of Iran launched his six-point White Revolution for ending illiteracy, reforming agriculture and industry, advancing women's suffrage, and nationalization of forests.
• The British musical Oliver!, based on the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, made its debut on Broadway, at the Imperial Theatre, and ran for 774 performances.
• Born:
• *Tony Halme, Finnish professional wrestler who worked for WWF and MMA ; in Helsinki
• *Paul Kipkoech, Kenyan long-distance runner ; in Kapsabet

  [January 7], 1963 (Monday)

• The price of mailing a letter in the United States rose from four cents to five cents, with a 25% increase in the price of a first class stamp. The increase was the first since August 1, 1958, when the price had changed from three cents to four.
• Final acceptance tests were conducted on the U.S. Project Mercury space flight simulator at Ellington Field in Texas. The equipment had been moved from Virginia's Langley Field to Houston. The MSC and the Farrand Optical Company conducted the acceptance tests.
• The Soviet national airline Aeroflot launched its service to Cuba from Moscow to Havana, using Tu-114 turboprop airplanes.
• Died: Arthur Edward Moore, 86, Australian politician, Premier of Queensland from 1929 to 1932

  [January 8], 1963 (Tuesday)

• Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was exhibited in the United States for the first time, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an event attended by President Kennedy and 2,000 other guests of honor. The masterpiece was on view for 27 days in Washington, during which 674,000 visitors came to see it, then moved on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from February 6 to March 4.
• MSC outlined requirements for McDonnell to use for Gemini aborts in orbit. These included onboard controlled reentry for all aborts, except for guidance and control system failure; onboard selection emergency abort target areas; navigational accuracy to a radius error at the point of impact; and crew capability to eject from the spacecraft with the paraglider deployed.

  [January 9], 1963 (Wednesday)

• A relatively rare total penumbral lunar eclipse took place, with the Moon passing entirely within the penumbral shadow without entering the darker umbral shadow.
• Flight Operations Division set requirements for the remote stations of the Gemini worldwide tracking network.
• Born:
• *Monika Bittl, German writer, journalist and screenwriter; in Beilngries, Bavaria
• *Michael Everson, American-Irish linguist, script encoder, typesetter, type designer and publisher; in Norristown, Pennsylvania

  [January 10], 1963 (Thursday)

• The Soviet Air Forces space program of selected its second cosmonaut group of 15 men to train for future Soyuz missions. The group included Vladimir Shatalov, Anatoly Filipchenko, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Yury Artyukhin, Lev Dyomin, Aleksei Gubarev and Vitaly Zholobov.
• The American film Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson, was finally released in the United Kingdom, but only after Thompson agreed to 161 cuts of dialogue ordered by the censors of the British Board of Film Classification in order to avoid an "X" rating.
• Representatives of MSC, McDonnell, and the Eagle-Picher Company reviewed plans for developing the silver-zinc batteries for the Gemini spacecraft. McDonnell concluded that a four-battery installation, if closely monitored, would be adequate.
• Titan II flight N-15 was launched from Cape Canaveral. It was the second to achieve significantly reduced levels of longitudinal oscillations by means of propellant tank pressurization.
• Duma Nokwe, the Secretary-General of the African National Congress, fled from South Africa before he could be arrested under the nation's Sabotage Act.
• Emmett Hall, the Chief Justice of the Saskatchewan Supreme Court, was sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.
• Died: Tadeusz Szeligowski, 66, Polish composer, educator, lawyer and music organizer