January 1970

January 1, 1970 (Thursday)

• The epoch of the Unix time standard for timestamps in computer programming is at 00:00:00 UTC on this date.
• In Dallas, the University of Texas Longhorns, ranked No. 1 in the nation by the Associated Press, won the Cotton Bowl game, 21 to 17, in the final two minutes against the No. 9 ranked Fighting Irish of the University of Notre Dame. The win allowed the Longhorns, already voted No. 1 in the final UPI poll, to stay unbeaten at with 11 wins and no losses or ties. The No. 2 ranked Penn State Nittany Lions also finished unbeaten, at 11-0-0, with a 10 to 3 victory in the Orange Bowl over the No. 6 University of Missouri Tigers.
• The National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law by U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, and went into effect as the first comprehensive environmental protection legislation of the 1970s.
• Died: Alfred Lauck Parson, 80, British physicist and chemist known for proposing the toroidal ring model for subatomic particles, known as the Parson magneton

  January 2, 1970 (Friday)

• California became the first of the 50 United States to permit "no-fault divorce", in which a divorce could be granted without the petitioner having to allege misconduct on the part of his or her spouse. Other states would enact similar legislation, with dissolution of marriage being allowed simply on grounds of "irreconcilable differences" between the two partners. The Family Law Act applied to all pending divorce cases filed under the old law, as well as the new ones filed for dissolution, which became the preferred term. The law had gone into effect the day before, but courts were not open for proceedings on the holiday. On the first domestic court hearings in Los Angeles County on January 5, a record number of marriages were ordered ended in a single day, with the average time for a hearing being "less than two minutes per case".
• Clifton R. Wharton Jr. became the first African-American to serve as president of a major state university, taking office as president of Michigan State University.
• Born: Oksana Omelianchik, Soviet gymnast and three-time gold medalist at the 1985 World Championships; in Ulan-Ude, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

  January 3, 1970 (Saturday)

• At 8:14 p.m. local time, a large meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere over central Oklahoma and broke into fragments. The largest piece was a meteorite that was the first whose fall was captured on film by multiple camera stations. Four of the 16 stations in the Prairie Meteorite Network, operated by the Smithsonian Institution, had photographed the meteorite's descent. Using triangulation, astronomers at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory determined that the object's impact had been near Lost City, Oklahoma. On January 9, using the coordinates from the observatory, the camera network's field manager, Gunther Schwartz, located the object on a snow-covered dirt road near Lost City.
• The final recording of a song by The Beatles took place at the Abbey Road Studios in London for inclusion on the group's last released album, Let It Be, as Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr completed a song written by Harrison, "I Me Mine".
• Edwarda O'Bara, a 16-year-old U.S. high school student in Miami, went into a 42-year coma after suffering insulin shock while being treated for diabetes and pneumonia. She would never emerge from a vegetative state and would die on November 21, 2012.
• The body of Sister Catherine Cesnik, who had been missing since November 7, was found in a wooded area in the Baltimore County community of Lansdowne, Maryland. More than 47 years later, a controversial documentary television series, The Keepers would be aired by Netflix about the crime, which remains unsolved.
• The Texas Longhorns were voted the NCAA college football champions for the 1969 season in the Associated Press poll of sportswriters, receiving 910 points on a weighted system where a first place vote was worth 20 points, a second place vote good for 18 points, and 15th place worth one point. Two other unbeaten and untied teams, the Penn State Nittany Lions and the USC Trojans were ranked second and third in the final poll of the year.
• The tenth and final Playoff Bowl, a postseason game to determine third place in the National Football League and to raise money for the NFL's pension fund, was played in Miami. Before a crowd of 31,151 in the 72,000-seat Orange Bowl stadium, the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Dallas Cowboys, 31 to 0. Initially, the game had matched the second-place finishers in the Eastern and Western Conferences; in later years, the game was a matchup between the losers in the semifinals.
• British actor Jon Pertwee made his first appearance as the third version of Doctor Who in the classic science fiction series, succeeding Patrick Troughton, Pertwee was introduced in part one of Spearhead from Space.
• Died: Robert B. Sinclair, 64, American Broadway stage and film director, was stabbed to death by a burglar in his home.

  January 4, 1970 (Sunday)

• In Houston, NASA's Deputy Chief George M. Low announced a revision in the Apollo Moon exploration schedule, and the cancellation of the Apollo 20 lunar landing that would have taken place in 1975 at the Tycho crater. A historian would note later, it was "the shortest-lived Apollo landing mission, being cancelled almost as soon as the planning document was published." Low said instead that Apollo 13, 14, 15 and 16 would land before the end of 1971; that the Apollo program would be paused for the launch of the Skylab space station in July 1972, and subsequent missions to Skylab running through March 1973; and that Apollo 17, 18 and 19, with longer stays on the Moon, would take place in 1973 and 1974. According to the original NASA schedule for future launches, Apollo 20 would have been launched in December 1972 and would have landed at the Copernicus crater with astronauts Don Lind, Jack Lousma and Stuart Roosa. Roosa would later pilot the Apollo 14 mission, Lousma would pilot the Skylab 3 mission, and Lind would be a mission specialist on a 1985 flight of space shuttle Challenger. Apollo 19 was rescheduled by Low for December 1973, but would be canceled by NASA on September 2. Eventually, Apollo 17, the final crewed lunar landing, would be launched on December 7, 1972.
• In Argentina, the city of Mendoza was deluged by a flash flood after a dam burst, and more than 30 people drowned.
• The last game of the American Football League was played as the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Oakland Raiders, 17 to 7, to win the final AFL championship and to gain the right to meet the Minnesota Vikings in the Super Bowl. The Vikings beat the Cleveland Browns, 27 to 7, to win the last National Football League title.
• Keith Moon, drummer for the classic rock band The Who, ran over and killed his bodyguard and chauffeur, Neil Boland, after getting intoxicated and fleeing from a hostile crowd of English youths in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Boland had driven Moon's Bentley automobile to Hatfield so that Moon, his wife and two friends could attend the opening of the Red Lion discothèque, and Boland had gotten out to the car to keep the crowd away. The death of Boland, who was dragged underneath the Bentley while Moon was trying to drive away from the scene, was ruled to be an accident by investigators, and Moon, who would die of a drug overdose in 1978, was never charged with a crime.
• Born:
• *Basil Iwanyk, American film producer and founder of Thunder Road Films; in Teaneck, New Jersey
• *Chris Kanyon, American pro wrestler who worked for WCW and WWF; in Queens, New York City
• Died: David John Williams, 84, Welsh nationalist and Welsh-language writer

  January 5, 1970 (Monday)

• A 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck China's Yunnan province less than a minute after 1:00 in the morning local time. The Chinese government did not acknowledge the disaster until four days later, when Radio Peking reported that the local populace was acting "in the revolutionary spirit, fearing neither hardship nor death" and that "the people creatively applied the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and fought the natural disaster all in one heart and with 100-fold confidence." According to statistics later released by the People's Republic of China, the quake killed 14,621 people in Kunming and surrounding Tonghai County, and injured 26,783.
• The first episode of the American soap opera All My Children was introduced on the ABC television network. The show billed itself as "the first daytime television serial to deal with current controversial political and social issues" and starred Rosemary Prinz as "Amy Tyler... a liberal political activist dedicated to the peace movement, who married into a conservative family with considerable wealth and stature." The show would run for more than 41 years on ABC, with a final broadcast on September 23, 2011.
• The bodies of defeated United Mine Workers of America presidential candidate Jock Yablonski, his wife, and his 25-year-old daughter, were found at the Yablonski home in the community of Clarksville, Pennsylvania. Mr. Yablonski had not been seen since New Year's Eve. All three victims had been shot to death. Three suspects would be arrested on January 21, which would be traced to UMW President Tony Boyle.
• The American merchant freighter SS Badger State, formerly the U.S. Navy transport ship USS Starlight, sank in the Pacific Ocean. Ten days earlier, it had exploded while carrying a cargo of artillery shells and bombs, killing 26 of its crew of 40.
• Died:
• *Max Born, 87, West German physicist and 1954 Nobel Prize winner for his interpretation of the wave function in quantum mechanics
• *Cyril Fagan, 73, Irish-born American astrologer