July 1967

[July 1], 1967 (Saturday)

• The first colour television broadcasts in the United Kingdom began at 2:00 in the afternoon as BBC Two telecast a match from Centre Court of Wimbledon between Cliff Drysdale and Roger Taylor. "It was a Wimbledon no one has ever seen on television before", a reporter noted the next day. "The clothes of the players were whiter than white, the Centre Court an inimitable green." Regular colour programming, a full colour service would begin on BBC2 on December 2.
• Canada celebrated its first one hundred years of Confederation. In honor of the centennial, Queen Elizabeth II visited from London and addressed 25,000 of her Canadian subjects in front of the Parliament Building in Ottawa and expressed her hope that Canada's next 100 years would "bring peace and prosperity, happiness and harmony, and a just reward for the work and endeavor of each one of you."
• The Seaboard Air Line Railroad merged with Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, to form the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad, nine years after the two lines had applied to the Interstate Commerce Commission for permission to join as one company. In 1980, the SCL would merge with the Chessie System railroad conglomerate to create today's CSX Transportation.
• American Samoa's first constitution became effective, with the U.S. territory having limited legislative power to make laws through a 20-member House of Representatives, and an 18-member Senate.
• The People's Republic of China announced the ouster of President Liu Shaoqi, in an article in the Communist Party journal Red Flag. Liu, who had believed at one time to be the eventual successor of Mao Zedong, had not been seen in public since 1966.
• Fidel Sánchez Hernández began a five-year term as the new President of El Salvador, succeeding Julio Adalberto Rivera.
• Born: Pamela Anderson, Canadian-born American actress; in Ladysmith, British Columbia
• Died: Gerhard Ritter, 79, German historian

  [July 2], 1967 (Sunday)

• "Operation Buffalo" began with the worst single-day loss suffered by the United States Marines during the Vietnam War. While patrolling the area around Con Thien in the Quảng Trị Province, near South Vietnam's border with North Vietnam, the 400 members of Alpha Company and Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines were ambushed by the North Vietnamese Army; 84 were killed, nine were missing and 190 were wounded for a total of 283 casualties. The total number of deaths in the operation would be 159 Americans and 1,290 of the North Vietnamese during the seven days between July 2 and July 8.
• The newly activated Vela 3 and Vela 4 satellites, activated in May to monitor Soviet nuclear testing by detecting gamma rays, recorded the first of many gamma-ray bursts of unknown origin, starting at 14:19 UTC. When the Vela satellites began picking up similar bursts every two weeks, "U.S. authorities were worried, but they soon realised that neither China nor the Soviet Union could test nuclear weapons every other week"; nearly 30 years later, on February 28, 1997, improved satellite technology would confirm that the gamma-ray bursts came from other galaxies, producing "the most violent explosions known to mankind" that "emit more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will generate in its entire lifetime."
• Parliamentary elections were held in East Germany for the 434 seats in the unicameral Volkskammer from a list of candidates drawn up by the National Front. "Some 583 candidates contested the 434 seats to be filled, which thus gave voters the possibility of striking out certain names on polling day if they wished to do so", but since only 8,005 of the 11,205,270 votes were against the Front's list "under the terms of the electoral law, only those whose names appeared at the top of the list were elected".
• The government of Israel announced that Palestinian Arab refugees, who had fled their homes in the West Bank after its invasion in June, would be allowed to return to their homes, but that they would only have until August 10 to do so. Between 80,000 and 150,000 residents had fled across the Jordan River during and after the Six-Day War, and were in camps in Jordan. The government announced, however, that anyone who crossed into Jordan after July 4 would not be allowed to return at all.
• In London, diplomat Yaakov Herzog of Israel conducted the first of his secret peace negotiation discussions with King Hussein of Jordan since the end of the Six-Day War.

  [July 3], 1967 (Monday)

• Twenty-three of 42 entombed miners in the Philippines were rescued alive, five days after a cave-in had sealed them 4,300 feet underground. The men, employed by the Philex Mining Corporation to extract gold and copper from the deep mine near Baguio, were sealed in when heavy rains from a typhoon buried the mine entrances in a landslide. One of the men would die soon after being brought out, and the bodies of the remaining 19 would be brought out later.
• Norwell Gumbs began duty with the Metropolitan Police Service as the first non-white policeman in London. Gumbs, a 21-year old British citizen originally from the West Indies, had started training on March 29, and was assigned to the West End Central Police Station. He would later change his surname to Roberts because of the frequent misspelling of the surname "Gumbs".
• Born: Brian Cashman, American baseball executive; in Rockville Centre, New York

  [July 4], 1967 (Tuesday)

• After a bitter all-night debate, the British House of Commons voted 99 to 14 to approve the Sexual Offences Act 1967, decriminalizing homosexuality in England and Wales. The law, which would receive royal assent on July 27, removed penalties only for relations between gay men over the age of 21. Sexual relations between lesbians were still prohibited, and the law did not apply to Scotland or to Northern Ireland. Moreover, the change in the law did not apply to the armed forces or to the merchant marines, and while the age of consent for heterosexual relations was 16 years old, the law still penalized homosexual acts involving anyone 20 years old or younger.
• The formal coronation ceremony for King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV of Tonga took place at a chapel in Nukuʻalofa, on the monarch's 49th birthday. Tonga's royal chaplain, Reverend George Harris of Australia, placed the crown upon the king's head. Tupou had been Prime Minister of Tonga since 1946 and had been head of state of the British protectorate since the death of his mother, Queen Salote, on December 16, 1965.
• For the first time in major league baseball history, two brothers faced each other as starting pitchers. Phil Niekro, 28, pitched for the Atlanta Braves, who were hosting the Chicago Cubs, who started with Joe Niekro, 22, in the first game of a doubleheader. Joe pitched three innings, while Phil pitched the entire game in an 8–3 win that ended the Cubs' seven-game winning streak. In 1924, Jesse Barnes had come in as a relief pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in a 7–6 win over a New York Yankees team whose pitcher was his brother Virgil Barnes.
• Hundreds of Muslim and Christian citizens of Bethlehem, known for being the birthplace of Jesus Christ and captured from Jordan during the Six-Day War, petitioned the Israeli government to ask that their city be formally annexed into Israel. While Israel had annexed a large part of the territory west of the Jordan River, Bethlehem had been excluded.

  [July 5], 1967 (Wednesday)

• A group of 1,500 soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, led by 11 white soldiers of fortune under the command of mercenary Jean Schramme of Belgium, mutinied and attacked Camp Ntele, a military base outside of Stanleyville, and massacred 400 people. The uprising against President Joseph Mobutu would kill at least 2,000 people before being suppressed on November 5. Other troops from Schramme's group came across the border from neighboring Rwanda and took control of the border city of Bukavu.
• A group of three university presidents, three university vice-presidents, and four university library directors met on the campus of Ohio State University to hear the proposal of Frederick G. Kilgour to implement the first plan for an online computer network of library holdings, the Ohio College Library Center, OCLC. OCLC would later expand beyond Ohio and change its name, though not its initials, to Online Computer Library Center.
• With the approval by its people on March 19 for a continued association with France, the colony of French Somaliland renamed itself as an overseas territory, with representation in France's National Assembly and its Senate as the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas. It would become an independent nation on June 27, 1977, as Djibouti.
• Died: Bruce Barton, 80, American advertising executive and co-founder of the Barton, Durstine & Osborn agency that merged with in 1928 with the George Batten agency to create BBDO, the world's largest advertising agency. Besides serving as a Congressman for Tennessee and creating the character of Betty Crocker for General Mills, Barton also wrote the controversial bestseller The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus, in which he described Jesus Christ as "the greatest salesman who ever walked the Earth".

  [July 6], 1967 (Thursday)

• A railway crash killed 94 people, mostly children at a crossing in East Germany at the town of Langenweddingen, seven miles southwest of Magdeburg. The double-decker train collided with a gasoline truck that was stopped on the railroad tracks.
• In Thailand, 43 people were killed and dozens injured in the city of Korat when the driver of the bus they were on pulled into the path of an oncoming express train. Most of the victims were women and children. According to Thai officials, 86 passengers were inside the bus, and 10 were riding on top. Survivors said that when the driver realized that he would be unable to stop, he opened the door and jumped to safety before the bus rolled into the path of the train.
• Nigerian forces invaded the secessionist Southern Region, which had declared its independence as the Republic of Biafra on May 30, beginning the Nigerian Civil War. Before the war's end on January 13, 1970, between one and three million Nigerian Biafrans would die, most of them from starvation, along with several hundred thousand Nigerians. The first attacks were at Ogoja and Nsukka and the towns of Obudu and Obolo were captured the next day.
• Died:
• *U.S. Air Force Major General William J. Crumm, 47, was one of six people killed when the B-52 bomber he was on collided with another B-52 over the South China Sea. Major General Crumm, who was accompanying the crew on a bombing raid, became the highest ranking U.S. casualty of the Vietnam War as a result of the accident.
• *General Nguyen Chi Thanh, 53, military strategist for North Vietnam's operations in South Vietnam, died of a heart attack hours after getting final approval for the planned 1968 Tet Offensive from North Vietnam's President Ho Chi Minh and NVA General Võ Nguyên Giáp.
• *Hilda Taba, 64, Estonian-born American educator