January 1977

January 1, 1977 (Saturday)

• Jacqueline Means became the first woman to be officially ordained as a priest in the U.S. Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Bishop of Erie, Pennsylvania, conducted the ordination for Means at her All Saints Church in Indianapolis, Indiana.
• The University of Pittsburgh Panthers, ranked #1 in the wire service polls at the end of the 1976 college football season, defeated the #5-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, 27 to 3, in the Sugar Bowl to preserve its unbeaten record. Pitt would be voted #1 in the final AP and UPI polls for the unofficial college football championship.
• Born:
• *Hasan Salihamidžić, Bosnian footballer and sports administrator known for 20 seasons with Bayern Munich and 42 appearances for the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team; in Jablanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina
• *Jerry Yan, Taiwanese TV actor and singer; in Taoyuan
• Died:
• *Roland Hayes, 89, African-American lyric tenor and composer.
• *Danny Frisella, 30, American baseball pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers, was killed when the dune buggy in which he was riding overturned.

  January 2, 1977 (Sunday)

• The nation of South Yemen and its capital, Aden, switched from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right, consistent with the rest of the Arab nations.
• Nine people were killed in a hotel fire at the Walnut Towers Motor Inn in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Two volunteer firemen, one of whom was injured while trying to rescue the hotel's manager, were arrested six days later and charged with one count of arson and nine counts of homicide.
• Died:
• *Erroll Garner, 55, American jazz pianist and composer known for the hit song "Misty", died of cardiac arrest from emphysema.
• *Pete Cross, 28, former NBA player, died at his home of an epileptic seizure.
• *Émilien Amaury, 67, French publisher, was killed when he was thrown from his horse while riding in the Chantilly Forest.

  January 3, 1977 (Monday)

• Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, with a headquarters in Cupertino, California.
• The controversial 42nd Amendment to the Constitution of India went into effect, granting India's Parliament the authority to make further changes to the nation's Constitution without ratification by its states. The change in the fundamental law also prohibited India's court system from reviewing any of the amendments, and required two-thirds approval by Parliament to repeal a law.
• In the royal wedding in Thailand, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn married his first cousin, Soamsawali Kitiyakara. The ceremony took place at exactly 8:49 a.m. at Princess Sangwan's palace in Bangkok, a time planned by the royal astrologer. The couple would divorce in 1991, before Vajiralongkorn's ascension to the throne in 2016 as King of Thailand.
• BBC Radio Cymru, the first all-Welsh language radio station, went on the air in Britain at 6:45 with news from Gwyn Llewellyn and Geraint Jones, followed at 7:00 with the first episode of the breakfast show :cy:Helo Bobol, presented by Hywel Gwynfryn.
• In Lebanon, at least 24 people were killed in Beirut when a car bomb exploded near the headquarters of the Phalangist security service in the Christian district of Ashrafieyeh.
• The daily newspaper comic strip The Amazing Spider-Man was first published, 16 years after Spider-Man had been introduced as a comic book.
• The Pitt Panthers were voted as the national college football champion, under the system recognized by the NCAA prior to playoffs, based on the poll of sportswriters by the Associated Press, and a poll of 42 coaches by United Press International. In the UPI poll, Pitt outpointed the USC Trojans, 416 to 376.
• Died:
• *Avraham Ofer, 54, Israeli Minister of Housing, shot himself to death after driving to a beach near his home. Ofer had been implicated in a corruption scandal that would become known as the Yadlin affair.
• *Harry Hansen, 92, American author and encyclopedia editor

  January 4, 1977 (Tuesday)

• U.S. Congressman Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts was formally elected Speaker of the House in a 291 to 142 vote along party lines, as Democrats voted unanimously for him while Republicans voted unanimously for Minority Leader John J. Rhodes of Ohio. Neither O'Neill nor Rhodes voted.
• Hasan Muhammad di Tiro, founder of the Free Aceh Movement in Indonesia, proclaimed the independence of that nation's Aceh Province as the Acehnese Republic. The Free Aceh movement would be suppressed by the government by 1986.
• Following up on its December 27 announcement of an 18% increase in wages over a five-year period, the Soviet Union's government announced that it would cut prices for consumer goods by as much as 25% for "knitwear, underwear, women's footwear, medicines, refrigerators and some TV sets", while prices would increase for "carpets, some luxury items, handmade clothing and public transportation."
• Born:
• *Falalu A Dorayi, Nigerian film director; in Gwale
• *Irán Castillo, Mexican TV actress; in Veracruz
• Died: Ibrahim Biçakçiu, 71, Albanian politician who collaborated with the German occupation of Albania during World War II and was the last German-appointed nominal Prime Minister of Albania for 50 days in 1944. After his release from prison in 1962, he was given a job cleaning public restrooms in his hometown of Elbasan.

  January 5, 1977 (Wednesday)

• The protest occupation of Bastion Point, known as Takaparawhau to the Māori people in New Zealand, began after the New Zealand government announced that it had acquired the land and would be auctioning it to the highest bidder for development of high income housing. Joe Hawke, a Māori leader, led a group that camped at the site, then began planting gardens, two days before construction was to begin, to prevent the loss of the scenic land on Waitematā Harbour. The protest would continue for 506 days, until May 25, 1978, with the arrest of the occupiers by police assisted by the New Zealand Army. A new government would return Takaparawhau/Baston Point to the Māoris in 1988.
• A disgruntled former pilot for Australia's Connellan Airways, a small commuter airline, killed himself and four other people by crashing an airplane into the airline's offices at Alice Springs. Colin Forman, who had been fired in September, drove about from his home in the Queensland city of Mount Isa to Wyndham Airport in Western Australia, stole a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron from the airport, and then flew it to Alice Springs and the building housing Ord Air Charter.
• Israel's parliament, the Knesset, voted to dissolve itself and to schedule national elections for May 17.
• Died: Matt McGinn, 48, Scottish folk singer and songwriter died in a fire after falling asleep while smoking in bed.

  January 6, 1977 (Thursday)

• Charter 77, a manifesto by Czech and Slovak citizens of Czechoslovakia against the eastern European nation's Communist government, was published in West Germany along with the names of 242 people who had signed the document, including future president Vaclav Havel. The Czechoslovakian government followed up from the publication by arresting the signers.
• Andrew Daulton Lee, an American spying for the Soviet Union, was arrested by police in front of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. Initially charged with littering for throwing trash on the ground, Lee was searched and found to have a microfilm of top secret U.S. documents. During his interrogation under torture, Lee admitted to espionage and implicated his friend, Christopher John Boyce, who would be arrested in the U.S. 10 days later. The next day, based on Lee's statement, police also arrested Ivan Rogalsky, a Soviet resident of the U.S., and charged him with passing secret agent about the U.S. space shuttle program to Yevgeniy Karpov, a KGB agent who was a member of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations. Lee would be convicted of espionage on May 14, and sentenced to life imprisonment, but would be paroled in 1998.
• Born:
• *Tom Boxer, Romanian musician and record producer; in Craiova
• *Genevieve O'Reilly, Irish film actress; in Dublin.
• Died:
• *Dolly Sinatra, 79, mother of singer Frank Sinatra, was killed along with three other people in the crash of a chartered Jet Avia Learjet 24 that had taken off from Palm Springs, California, toward Las Vegas. The Learjet wreckage was found on the slope of Mount San Gorgonia, from Palm Springs, after a two-day search.
• *Dardo Cabo, 36, Argentine journalist and right-wing terrorist, was executed in detention by Argentina's military government.
• *Abdul Majid Daryabadi, 84, Indian Muslim scholar

  January 7, 1977 (Friday)

• Police in France raided a hotel in Paris and arrested Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Daoud, a suspected leader of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics. A French court rejected West Germany's extradition request, however, and deported Daoud to Algeria on January 11 before a new request could be made.
• Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto announced in a speech in the nation's 216-seat National Assembly that he would ask the president to dissolve Parliament and to schedule a new election. Voting for the National Assembly would take place on March 7.
• Born: Andi Siebenhofer, Austrian extreme sports athlete; in Knittelfeld
• Died:
• *Marvin Pipkin, 87, American engineer and inventor known for creating the "soft white" frosted light bulb
• *Bunker Spreckels, 27, American surfboard designer and heir to the Spreckels Sugar Company fortune, died of an overdose of morphine.

  January 8, 1977 (Saturday)

• A bomb explosion killed 7 people in a crowded Moscow subway car at 5:33 in the afternoon. The train car was between the Izmailovskaya and Pervomaiskaya stations of the Moscow Metro when the blast occurred. At 6:05, a second bomb detonated inside a grocery store close to KGB headquarters, and at 6:10, a third bomb exploded near another grocery store on 25 October Street, just a few hundred meters away from the headquarters of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. TASS, the Soviet news agency reported the explosion two days later with a statement that the subway blast was not large and that "medical help was given to those suffering injury," without mention of deaths. The bombings would later be attributed to three members of an Armenian separatist group, who would be executed on January 29, 1979.
• Soviet Army General Viktor Kulikov was announced as the new commander in chief of the Warsaw Pact military alliance to replace the late Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky.
• Died:
• *Juan Jose Peruyero, 46, Cuban exile to the U.S., opponent of the Cuban communist government and veteran of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, was shot to death by two men as he stepped outside of his home in Miami.
• *William D. Pawley, 80, U.S. financier and philanthropist, and former U.S. ambassador to Peru and to Brazil, shot himself to death.