July 1969

[July 1], 1969 (Tuesday)

• The formal investiture of the United Kingdom's Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales took place at Caernarvon Castle in Wales, as the crown prince's mother, Queen Elizabeth II, placed the coronet on in his head. For the first time, the ceremony was televised live to British viewers, and was seen by an estimated half a billion viewers in the United States and in the British Commonwealth. Charles had been declared Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester on July 26, 1958, when he was nine years old, but the investiture ceremony was not carried out until Charles's 21st birthday. Prior to the ceremony, Welsh nationalists planted bombs to protest against the English prince's installation, and two employees of the town of Abergele, both members of the nationalist group Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru, were killed while attempting to plant a gelignite bomb using nitroglycerin in a local hotel; eight hours after the ceremony, a British Army soldier was killed by a bomb when he started an Army van.
• Assignment of a "service number" for United States Army and United States Air Force personnel was discontinued more than 50 years after the first Army service number had been issued on February 28, 1918, though the U.S. Marines would continue to use numbers until the end of 1970 and the U.S. Navy until the end of 1971. The identifier, more commonly referred to as part of the "name, rank and serial number", was replaced with the service member's Social Security number for all people sworn in after midnight of June 1. Besides eliminating the 8-digit service number, the Army and Air Force also retired the prefixes. In at least one location, the Richards-Gebaur Air Reserve Station in Missouri, induction was delayed so that one recruit could be sworn in before midnight on Monday and given the last service number, and another a few minutes later on Tuesday to be "given a Social Security number as his service number".

  [July 2], 1969 (Wednesday)

• The Ireland cricket team surprised the world of cricket by scoring an upset against one of the five national teams that met regularly in test cricket matches, defeating the visiting West Indies team 125 runs to 25 in the first innings of an unofficial one day match.
• The newest and largest casino and resort in Las Vegas, the International Hotel, opened to guests. Renowned singer Barbra Streisand performed the first concert date to inaugurate the 1,510-room hotel, at the time the tallest building in Nevada.
• Born:
• *Tim Rodber, English rugby union flanker with 44 appearances for the national team; in Richmond, Yorkshire
• *Jenni Rivera, American Latin music singer; in Long Beach, California
• *Matthew Cox, American white-collar criminal; in Tampa
• Died:
• *"Iron Mike" DiBiase, 45, American professional wrestler and former college wrestling champion; of a heart attack during a match in Lubbock, Texas. As the match began, DiBiase was preparing to fight Gary Fletcher, but before the two could grapple, DiBiase collapsed and fell backward out of the ring.
• *Mikio Naruse, 63, Japanese film producer

  [July 3], 1969 (Thursday)

• The Soviet Union's race to land a man on the Moon, already far behind the American program, ended with the explosion after launch of its N1 rocket, the Soviet counterpart to the American Saturn V. Although the N1 was capable of carrying the mass of a large payload out of Earth orbit, the Soviets had yet to accomplish what the U.S. had done with Apollo 8 in December, putting men into orbit around the Moon. Although U.S. intelligence officials suspected that the launch had been a failure after noting that a mission had not taken place as expected, the extent of the failure would not be clear until six weeks later, when an analyst with the National Photographic Interpretation Center saw the damage from the explosion on film from an American spy satellite. Unlike Apollo 11, the Zond capsule on top of the N1 was uncrewed. An American CIA analyst would comment later in a top secret report that the unsuccessful launch "was probably intended to send an unmanned spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon and return it to earth" and that the blast heavily damaged the launch pad at Baikonur.
• A press release from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, announced the existence of what would become the internet, with the note "Stanford University and the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, will be tied in this fall to a nationwide network that for the first time will link together computers of different makes and machine 'languages.' The system will pool computer power programs and specialized know-how of about 15 computer research centers stretching from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the California coast. Other California stations will be at the Rand Corp. and System Development Corp., both of Santa Monica; the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California, and UCLA." A similar press release from the University of California, Los Angeles, is cited in one source as the first mention of the internet.
• Died: Brian Jones, 27, English guitarist of The Rolling Stones, was found dead in his swimming pool at Hartfield, East Sussex a month after quitting the band to perform his own music. Jones was at his home, Cotchford Farm, a 16th-century estate where English author A. A. Milne had written his Winnie the Pooh stories. Jones's death at age 27, followed in succession by the deaths of three other 27-year old rock musicians — Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison— in the two-year period that followed, would give rise to the notion of the "27 Club", the concept that popular musicians were more likely to die after their 27th birthday and before they reached the 28th.

  [July 4], 1969 (Friday)

• Michael Mageau, 19, became the first person to survive a murder attempt by a man who would become known as the "Zodiac Killer", and the first to provide a description to the police. Mageau and a friend, 22-year old Darlene Ferrin, were shot while sitting in Ferrin's car parked at a municipal park in Vallejo, California. The killer then called police from a pay phone near the Vallejo Police Department. Ferrin died at the hospital, but surgeons were able to save Mageau. On August 1, the Vallejo Times Herald and two San Francisco newspapers would receive letters from a man who would claim responsibility for Ferrin's murder and for the December 20 murder of two high school students in Benicia, along with a cryptogram, and demanded that the three papers publish the letters to avoid more murders.
• A sudden storm killed 42 people in Ohio and Michigan, many of them people who had been outside during American Independence Day celebrations. The National Weather Service received the first storm warnings at 7:33 in the evening, and told the Emergency Broadcast System to stand by for an alert to be sent, but never gave the go-ahead for a warning to be sent to people in and around Cleveland. Several people attending a Fourth of July event in neighboring Lakewood, Ohio, were killed when a tornado swept through the city park.
• Died: Ted Rhodes, 55, African-American professional golfer who challenged the PGA "Caucasians only" clause in the late 1940s.

  [July 5], 1969 (Saturday)

• The Rolling Stones performed a live rock concert in front of at least 250,000 fans at Hyde Park in London. The event was their first public concert in more than two years, and had originally been planned as the debut of guitarist Mick Taylor, who had joined the Stones after Brian Jones had quit the band in May. Jones would later die in an accident two days before the Hyde Park Festival. Lead singer Mick Jagger opened the show with a tribute to his late friend, telling the crowd to "Cool it for a minute, because I would really like to say something about Brian... I'm just going to say something that was written by Shelley." Jagger was referring to 19th century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the crowd of rock and roll fans quietly listened to classical verse from Shelley's poem "Adonais", an elegy to another artist who had died young, John Keats. After the release of hundreds of butterflies, the Stones played 14 songs, starting with a cover of the Johnny Winter song "I'm Yours & I'm Hers".
• Tom Mboya, Kenya's Minister of Economic Planning and Development and one of the founders of the nation, was fatally shot while leaving a pharmacy in Nairobi. Mboya, considered by African observers to be the likely successor of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, was approached by a young man who fired two bullets into his chest, and died after being taken to a hospital. The assassin was seen jumping into a car. A 32-year old member of the Kenya's majority Kikuyu tribe, Nahashon Njoroge, would be convicted of after the murder weapon was found under his bed with his fingerprints on it; Mboya was Luo, and second largest tribe was killed by a Kikuyu sent by Kikuyu Kenya's governing officials, was of the Luo tribe. He would be hanged in prison on November 8.
• The crew of Apollo 11 told a press conference in Houston that they had given names to the two lunar spacecraft. Mission commander Neil Armstrong told reporters that crew had christened the Apollo Lunar Module as Eagle, "since the eagle is the symbol of the flight", and the lunar orbiter was named for "Columbia, the statue that stands on top of our capitol. Columbia also was the name of Jules Verne's spacecraft that went to the Moon." Armstrong was arguably wrong on both counts, in that the statue is officially called the Statue of Freedom, and the name of type of cannon which launched the lunar ship in Verne's 1865 book From the Earth to the Moon was actually Columbiad.
• Born: RZA, American rapper and de facto leader of the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan; in Brooklyn
• Died:
• *Ben Alexander, 58, American TV and film actor known as Jack Webb's costar in the original Dragnet TV and radio series; of a heart attack
• *Leo McCarey, 70, American film director and three time Oscar-winner
• *Tom Mboya, 38, Kenyan Justice Minister and national economist
• *Lambert Hillyer, 75, American film director
• *Walter Gropius, 66, German architect