July 1977

July 1, 1977 (Friday)

• The last Railway Mail Service mail train in the U.S. completed its run, bringing an end to almost 113 years of service. The final train departed New York on Thursday, June 30 and arrived in Washington DC the next morning, after which the service was permanently discontinued. At its height, the RMS had 30,000 employees, while only 68 were left when the final train made its delivery. Starting in the 1950s, jet aircraft had gradually replaced the slower method of shipping mail by train.
• Uganda's dictator Idi Amin lifted restrictions that he had imposed on June 8, when he said that the remaining 240 British residents would not be allowed to leave the East African nation. The decision was announced on Radio Kampala.
• By a single vote, a proposal failed in the U.S. Senate to end all funding for development of an American neutron bomb. A motion by Senator Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon lost, 42 to 43.
• The U.S. Department of State announced that diplomatic relations with Cuba would be restored on September 1, when ten U.S. diplomats would be stationed in Havana and ten Cuban diplomats would open and office in Washington D.C.
• Serial killer Patrick Kearney of Redondo Beach, California, sought for the murder of eight people, voluntarily turned himself in at the office of the Riverside County Sheriff.
• The East African Community was dissolved.
• Tennis star Virginia Wade became the last British woman to win the women's singles title at Wimbledon. It was her third, and final Grand Slam win in tennis. After losing the first set, 4–6, in the best-2-of-3 Wade defeated Betty Stöve, Wade won the second set, 6–3, and the deciding set, 6–1.
• Born: Liv Tyler, American actress; in New York City

  July 2, 1977 (Saturday)

• In defiance of South Africa's apartheid laws of favored treatment for white citizens and of racial segregation, the Boy Scouts Association of South Africa combined its four branches into a single Boy Scouts of South Africa organization. The decision took place at the Scouting associations' first multiracial convention, the Quo Vadis Conference in Pietermaritzburg.
• Björn Borg of Sweden won the men's singles title at Wimbledon, defeating Jimmy Connors of the U.S. in the best-3-of-5 series. Borg, who had won the 1976 Wimbledon title, lost the first and fourth match before defeating Connors in the deciding fifth, 3–6, 6–2, 6–1, 5-7 and 6–4.
• Born: Carl Froch, British professional boxer, world super-middleweight champion for the WBC, IBF and WBA ; in Nottingham
• Died:
• *Vladimir Nabokov, 78, Russian-born American novelist known for Lolita. Nabokov had been writing a new novel, The Opposite of Laura and had completed the equivalent of 30 manuscript pages before becoming ill. His son Dmitri Nabokov would complete the manuscript more than 30 years later, and with the altered title of The Original of Laura, the book would be published in 2009 by Penguin Books and Knopf Publishing.
• *Gert Potgieter, 47, South African operatic tenor known for his performances in the operas Peter Grimes, In die Droogte and La bohème, was killed in a car accident.

  July 3, 1977 (Sunday)

• The first MRI scan of a human being was performed with the use of magnetic resonance imaging by Dr. Raymond Damadian on Larry Minkoff, who had volunteered to be the test subject. The 5-hour process took place at the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Brooklyn. The imaging process would be perfected by Paul C. Lauterbur, a professor of chemistry at SUNY Stony Brook.
• Turkey's Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit resigned after losing a vote of no confidence in his government. Members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey voted, 229 to 217, against Ecevit's Republican People's Party, which finished with the highest number of seats in the June 5 general election but fell short of a majority. After the vote, Ecevit drove to the presidential palace in Ankara to present his resignation to President Fahri Koruturk, but agreed to stay on as premier until a new government could be formed.
• Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto received a warning from Major General K. M. Arif that Pakistan's military was planning a coup d'état, and was urged to negotiate with the opposition parties in the Pakistan National Alliance. Although Bhutto and the PNA leaders reached an agreement for new elections to be called, the coup would be carried out anyway.
• A pair of hired assassins shot and killed Haiti's Ambassador to Brazil as he was leaving a bar at the Meridien Hotel in the beach resort of Salvador. The two gunmen, who shot Delorme Mehu in the back, told police that they had been hired by Louis Robert Makensie, Haiti's secretary to President Jean-Claude Duvalier, to carry out the assassination.
• Soviet athlete Vladimir Yashchenko broke the world record for the high jump, clearing 7 feet, 7¾ inches, half an inch better than the mark of 7'7¼" set by Dwight Stones in 1976. Yashchenko's mark was set at the USSR-USA Junior track meet in Richmond, Virginia at the University of Richmond.
• The championship of Mexico's top soccer football league, the Primera División de México, was won by the UNAM Pumas of Mexico City, 1 to 0 over the Leones Negros of Guadalajara after the two teams had played to a 0-0 draw on June 29 in the two game series.
• A.C. Milan defeated Inter Milan, 2 to 0, to win the Coppa Italia, the playoff tournament of Italy's premier soccer football league. A.C. Milan had finished in tenth place in the regular season, while Inter Milan had placed fourth.
• Died: Gertrude Abercrombie, 68, American painter known as "the queen of the Bohemian artists"

  July 4, 1977 (Monday)

• The Nestlé boycott of products of the Swiss food manufacturer was inaugurated by the Infant Formula Action Coalition in the U.S. with an announcement in the U.S. from INFACT headquarters in Minneapolis. The boycott would become a worldwide campaign against Nestlé S.A. for its aggressive marketing of infant formulas as an alternative to breast milk in the world's poorest nations. The World Health Organization had condemned the powdered infant formula in areas where the water supply was no sanitary. The INFACT boycott would be halted in 1984 after Nestlé changed its marketing strategy.
• At least 52 people in India drowned when a passenger ferry sank in the Ganges River
• At a ceremony at the U.S. National Archives in Washington D.C., museum curators sealed and hid away a "tricentennial time capsule", to be opened on July 4, 2075.
• Died: Muhammad Husayn al-Dhahabi, 64, the former Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments, was "executed" two days after he had been kidnapped by the terrorist group Takfir wal-Hijra.

  July 5, 1977 (Tuesday)

• General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq led a coup d'état to overthrow Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. The day before, Bhutto and other military chiefs had been guests at ceremonies at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad for the U.S. independence day. Bhutto, his cabinet ministers, and opposition leaders were placed in "temporary protective custody" and General Zia announced that a four-member military council would rule the Asian nation until free elections could be held in October. The elections, however, did not take place. Bhutto and the other government members arrested were released on July 28 so that they could participate in the promised October elections, but Bhutto would be arrested again later.
• The Ugandan Army arrested playwright John Male, Uganda National Theatre director Dan Kintu, and an undersecretary of the Ugandan Ministry of Culture, Mark Sebuliba, after the staging of a play titled "The Office Is Empty". President Idi Amin inferred that the title of the play and the story was a reference to him, and the three men were charged with "insulting the president". After a trial by a military tribunal, Male, Kintu, and Sebuliba would be executed on July 24.

  July 6, 1977 (Wednesday)

• A flood off the Yan River killed 134 people in the city of Yan'an in China's Shaanxi province.
• The "Night of the Neckties", a mass roundup by the Argentine Army of six lawyers and eight of their family members in the city of Mar del Plata, was carried out. Only five survived after being taken to the GADA 601 detention center. Of the other eight, six became "desaparecidos" and were never seen again. The bodies of lawyers Jorge Candeloro and Norberto Centeno would be found later.
• Mexico's new agency for regulation and censorship of broadcasting and movies, the RTC was founded. Mexico's President José López Portillo appointed his sister, Margarita López Portillo y Pacheco as the first RTC Director.
• Born:
• *Max Mirnyi, Belarusan tennis player with six Grand Slam doubles titles in the French Open and U.S. Open ; in Minsk, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union
• *Audrey Fleurot, French TV actress known for Un village français; in Mantes-la-Jolie, Yvelines département

  July 7, 1977 (Thursday)

• Fan Yuanye, a pilot of China's People's Liberation Army Air Force veered off course after taking off from Jinjiang and became the first person to deliver Communist China's new Shenyang J-6 fighter to the West. Fan, the third Chinese PLAAF pilot to defect to Taiwan, and the first since 1965, brought secret documents with him and was promised a reward of 5,000 ounces worth of gold, worth US$698,400 at that time. Six other pilots would defect while flying the J-6 between 1979 and 1990.
• The Marxist nation of Albania, led by Communist Party Chief Enver Hoxha, criticized "its only friend in the world", the People's Republic of China, as China worked on closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The official Communist Party newspaper, Zeri I Popullit, featured an editorial, apparently authored by Hoxha, that said that "'My enemy's enemy is my friend' cannot be applied when it is a matter of the two imperialist powers, the Soviet Union and the United States," adding that "The present theories about the so-called Third World and nonaligned countries are intended to curb the revolution and defend capitalism.". Three weeks later, Albania asked China to remove its military advisers from the Balkan nation.
• The reggae album Two Sevens Clash by the Jamaican group Culture and its songwriter and lead vocalist Joseph Hill, was released to coincide with the date 7/7/77, in anticipation of a prediction by Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey that the date would be a time when chaos would ensue and wrongs would be righted. Although the prediction caused great concern in Jamaica, no unusual incidents occurred.
• The governing body of the San Diego chapter Hells Angels Motorcycle Club gang voted unanimously to declare war on the rival Mongols Motorcycle Club gang in a dispute over territory in southern California. Over the summer, four Mongols members and a 15-year-old boy would be killed, and six others injured in shootings and bombings. In October, 32 members of the San Diego Hells Angels chapter would be arrested.