July 1963


The following events occurred in July 1963:

[July 1], 1963 (Monday)

  • ZIP Codes were introduced in the United States, as the U.S. Department of the Post Office kicked off a massive advertising campaign that included the cartoon character "Mr. ZIP", and the mailing that day of more than 72,000,000 postcards to every mailing address in the United States, in order to inform the addressees of their new five digit postal code. Postal zones had been used since 1943 in large cities, but the ZIP code was nationwide. Use became mandatory in 1967 for bulk mailers.
  • The crash of a Varig DC-3 airliner in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul state killed 15 of the 18 people on board. The flight was approaching the airport at Passo Fundo on the second-leg of a scheduled trip from Porto Alegre when it impacted trees.
  • Kim Philby was named by the Government of the United Kingdom as the 'Third Man' in the Burgess and Maclean Soviet spy ring.
  • Died: Abdullah bin Khalifa, 53, Sultan of Zanzibar since 1960, died two days after undergoing emergency surgery. He was succeeded by his son, Jamshid bin Abdullah, the last to hold the title.

[July 2], 1963 (Tuesday)

[July 3], 1963 (Wednesday)

[July 4], 1963 (Thursday)

[July 5], 1963 (Friday)

  • A delegation from the People's Republic of China, led by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, departed from Beijing on a train bound for Moscow, to attend talks in an effort to repair the poor relations between the Chinese Communists and Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The talks, intended to mend the Sino-Soviet split, would break down on July 14 when the Soviets published a rebuttal to Chinese charges that the Soviets had departed from the Communist ideology.
  • The U.S. Senate set a new record for briefest session by meeting at 9:00 a.m., and then adjourning three seconds later. There were only two Senators present for the meeting. The previous record for brevity had been a five-second meeting on September 4, 1951.
  • The sale of liquor, by the drink, was legal in the U.S. state of Iowa for the first time in more than 40 years, with "a restaurant in the lakes resort area in northwest Iowa" becoming the site of the first legal drink.
  • Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Leone won on a vote of confidence in the Italian Senate, 133-110.
  • McDonnell Aircraft Corporation began the first phase of Spacecraft Systems Tests on the instrumentation pallets to be installed in Gemini spacecraft No. 1. Gemini's inertial guidance system computer was integrated with the rest of the control systems, and all spacecraft wiring was found to be compatible with the computer, and operating with complete accuracy.

[July 6], 1963 (Saturday)

  • The Roman Catholic Church relaxed itse ban on cremation as a funeral practice, when Pope Paul VI issued the Instruction that "the burning of the body, after all, has no effect on the soul, nor does it inhibit Almighty God from re-establishing the body", although the decision would not be revealed until May 2, 1964.
  • Elections were held in Jordan for the 80 seats in the Chamber of Deputies of the National Assembly. All of the candidates were independent, in that political parties were banned at the time, and the results, as with most of the elections in Jordan to that time, were "poorly documented" and not officially published.
  • Blood Feast first premiered at the Bellevue Drive-In in Bellevue, Illinois. Composed, shot, and directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis, the film is considered to be the first Splatter film, a sub-genre of horror noted for its graphic depictions of on-screen gore.
  • The Vanoise National Park, located in the department of Savoie in the French Alps, was designated France's first National Park.
  • A partial lunar eclipse took place.
  • Died: George, Duke of Mecklenburg, 63, head of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz since 1934. He was succeeded by his son Georg Alexander.

[July 7], 1963 (Sunday)

[July 8], 1963 (Monday)

  • The British comic strip Fred Basset was introduced, starting with its first appearance in the Daily Mail. Created by Scottish cartoonist Alex Graham, the strip, about the adventures of a basset hound, is syndicated worldwide.
  • The British cargo ship Patrician sank off of Gibraltar after colliding with the U.S. ship Santa Emilia. Thirty-four of the 37 crew were rescued by Santa Emilia, but three men died.
  • McDonnell warned NASA that the capacity of the Gemini Guidance Computer was in danger of being exceeded. The original function of the computer had been limited to providing rendezvous and reentry guidance, but other functions had been added, requiring an immediate review of computer requirements. In the meantime, it advised International Business Machines to delete one of the added functions, orbital navigation, from computers for spacecraft Nos. 2 and 3.
  • Members of the 1963 American Everest Expedition team were awarded the Hubbard Medal by U.S. President John F. Kennedy for their achievement.

[July 9], 1963 (Tuesday)

[July 10], 1963 (Wednesday)

  • The all-white University of South Carolina was ordered to admit its first African-American student, Henri Monteith, by order of U.S. District Judge J. Robert Martin. On the same day, Judge Martin ordered the desegregation of all 26 of South Carolina's state parks.
  • The brief partnership of "Rodgers and Lerner" was dissolved, and production of the first Rodgers-Lerner musical, I Picked a Daisy, was halted permanently. Composer Richard Rodgers had successfully collaborated with lyricist Lorenz Hart, and then with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, while lyricist Alan Jay Lerner had a successful team with composer Frederick Loewe. The two were unable to work together successfully beyond "half a dozen" songs for Daisy.
  • Coordination between NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense in crewed space station studies was reported by a panel to be inadequate, especially at the technical level.
  • Project Emily, the deployment of American-built PGM-17 Thor Intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the United Kingdom, was disbanded.
  • A Vostok-2 rocket launched by the USSR failed shortly after take-off.

[July 11], 1963 (Thursday)

[July 12], 1963 (Friday)

[July 13], 1963 (Saturday)

[July 14], 1963 (Sunday)

[July 15], 1963 (Monday)

[July 16], 1963 (Tuesday)

  • At Seattle, five men began a 30-day engineering test of life support systems for a crewed space station in The Boeing Company space chamber. Designed and built for NASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology, the chamber was first in the U.S. to include all life-support equipment for a multi-person, long-duration space mission. In addition to the life support equipment, a number of crew tests simulated specific problems of spaceflight. Five days into the 30-day test, however, the simulated mission was halted because of a faulty reactor tank.
  • The Peerage Act 1963 was approved by the House of Lords, 105 to 25. The change of rules, which received royal assent on July 31, cleared the way for hereditary peers within the House of Lords to disclaim their peerages in order to be allowed to run for and take a seat in the elected House of Commons. Tony Benn, who lost his seat in Commons in 1960 when he inherited the title of Viscount Stansgate and automatically became a member of the House of Lords, disqualified himself under the new law and successfully ran for office under in a by-election.
  • Born:
  • *Srečko Katanec, Slovenian soccer football midfielder with 31 games for the Yugoslav national team, later manager who coached the national teams of five different countries ; in Ljubljana, SR Slovenia, Yugoslavia
  • *Paul Hipp, American actor and musician; in Philadelphia
  • *Phoebe Cates, American actress; in New York City

[July 17], 1963 (Wednesday)

[July 18], 1963 (Thursday)

  • Colonel Jassem Alwan of the Syrian army, backed by financing from President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, led an attempt to overthrow the government of Syria in order to establish a pro-Nasser government that would reunite with the United Arab Republic. The coup attempt came only 30 minutes after President Lu'ay al-Atassi had departed from Damascus on an invitation from President Nasser for a meeting in Egypt. After Alwan seized the Damascus radio station and the Syrian Army headquarters, Interior Minister Amin al-Hafiz, "sub-machinegun in hand", directed the Ba'ath Party National Guard on a counterattack and regained control. Hundreds of people were killed in the battle; Alwan was able to escape, but 27 officers who had participated in the coup were executed by firing squad, marking an end of "the time-honoured tradition whereby losers were banished to embassies abroad". President Atassi would resign on July 27 in protest over the brutal treatment of the coup leaders.
  • Olympiacos F.C. won the final of the Greek Cup football competition, 3 to 0 over Pierikos.
  • Born: Marc Girardelli, Austrian Olympic alpine ski racer; in Lustenau

[July 19], 1963 (Friday)

  • An artificial heart pump was placed inside a human being for the first time, at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas University of Houston by a team led by Dr. Michael E. DeBakey. The unidentified patient survived for four days before dying of complications from pneumonia.
  • A bomb was inadvertently dropped on downtown San Francisco by a U.S. Navy Reserve pilot on a routine exercise flight. The unarmed bomb fell at the intersection of Market Street and Front Street, bounced over the eight-story tall IBM building and damaged another building three blocks away, but nobody was injured.
  • American test pilot Joseph A. Walker, flying the X-15, reached an altitude of, achieving a sub-orbital spaceflight by recognized international standards.
  • Died: Guy Scholefield, 86, New Zealand archivist who compiled the ''Dictionary of New Zealand Biography''

[July 20], 1963 (Saturday)

[July 21], 1963 (Sunday)

[July 22], 1963 (Monday)

[July 23], 1963 (Tuesday)

[July 24], 1963 (Wednesday)

[July 25], 1963 (Thursday)

[July 26], 1963 (Friday)

[July 27], 1963 (Saturday)

[July 28], 1963 (Sunday)

[July 29], 1963 (Monday)

  • The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published its copyrighted story, "Black Muslim Founder Exposed as a White", declaring that W. D. Fard, who had started the black nationalist organization in 1930, had actually been a white man named Wallace Dodd. The Herald-Examiner story included photographs supplied by the FBI, but Fard's successors at the Nation of Islam denied the story as a hoax.
  • West Indies defeated England in the 4th Test by 221 runs, at Headingley, Leeds.
  • The Tu-124A prototype, SSSR-45075, made its first flight.

[July 30], 1963 (Tuesday)

  • The Soviet newspaper Izvestia, and Radio Moscow, reported that Kim Philby, a double agent who had been spying for the Soviets while employed by Britain's MI5 spy agency, had been given asylum in Moscow. Philby had disappeared on January 23.
  • Maxime A. Faget, Engineering and Development Director for MSC's Space Vehicle Design Branch, enlisted North American Aviation to study modifications to the basic Apollo spacecraft that would extend its capabilities to function in orbit for missions of up to 100 days— more than three months— without resupply. Faget's objective was a space laboratory for a three-person crew, with an orbital altitude of between and, and light enough to be launched on a Saturn IB rocket. Two separate vehicles were under consideration, an Apollo command module and a command module and separate mission module to be used as living quarters. Despite the possibility of a 100-day flight, the longest of the Apollo missions would be the final one, Apollo 17, which would last for a little more than 12 days.
  • Born: Lisa Kudrow, American TV actress and Emmy Award winner best known for portraying Phoebe Buffay on Friends; in Encino, California
  • Died: Patrick J. Hurley, 80, U.S. Secretary of War from 1929 to 1933

[July 31], 1963 (Wednesday)