June 1959

June 1, 1959 (Monday)

• Four days after her flight into space, Miss Able, a rhesus monkey, died of a reaction to anesthesia during surgery to remove electrodes.
• Two small groups of Nicaraguan exiles invaded from Costa Rica, landing airplanes at two locations, in an attempt to overthrow President Luis Somoza. The invasion, which Somoza believed to have been instigated by Cuba's Fidel Castro, was crushed on June 11.
• The number of people in Project Mercury was announced as 383 by NASA, with 204 at the Space Task Group, 98 at Langley Research Center, 44 at Lewis Research Center, and 21 on the Mercury tracking network.
• Died: Sax Rohmer, 76, British novelist and the creator of Fu Manchu, died from complications of Asiatic flu.

  June 2, 1959 (Tuesday)

• Beatrice Foods purchased the independent Dannon Milk Products Company of Long Island City, New York from founders Joe Metzger and Dan Carazzo. Over the next decade, Beatrice developed America's taste for yogurt by introducing the Dannon Yogurt brand across the United States.
• Twelve people were killed and 15 injured in Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, in the explosion of a propane truck. The truck had caught fire 30 minutes earlier after being rammed from behind, and many of the victims had been watching from a distance.

  June 3, 1959 (Wednesday)

• The army of Ecuador brutally suppressed rioting in Guayaquil, killing more than 500 people.
• The United States Air Force Academy graduated its first class, with 207 students commissioned as officers.
• The United States attempted to launch four mice into orbit aboard the satellite Discoverer III, but the mission failed when the rockets fired the vehicle downward rather than horizontally; the satellite burned up on re-entry.

  June 4, 1959 (Thursday)

• At a staff meeting, Space Task Group Director Robert R. Gilruth suggested studying a Mercury follow-on program using maneuverable Mercury capsules for land landings in predetermined areas.
• The 190th and final Three Stooges film short, Sappy Bull Fighters, was released to theaters nationwide.

  June 5, 1959 (Friday)

• Singapore was made a self-governing state within the British Empire, with Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Minister, and Sir William Goode serving as Governor-General for the first six months. Singapore achieved full independence in 1965.
• Nikolay Artamonov, commander of a Soviet Navy destroyer, defected to the United States, with his fiancée Eva, after escaping in a motorboat to Oland Island in Sweden. As Nicholas Shadrin, Artamonov, worked for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency until the Soviets recaptured him in 1975.
• The Army Ballistic Missile Agency submitted a proposal for a Mercury-Redstone inflight abort sensing system to monitor attitude and angular velocity, electrical power, and rocket propulsion. If the limits were exceeded, the space capsule spacecraft would separate from the rocket and descend with the aid of a parachute.

  June 6, 1959 (Saturday)

• The first satellite communication was made when a radio message from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was bounced off the Moon to Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was dedicating the new Prince Albert Radio Laboratory.
• Born: Marwan Barghouti, Jordanian-born Palestinian leader instrumental in launching the 1988 intifada; in Kobar on the West Bank

  June 7, 1959 (Sunday)

• The United Nations Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, also known as the New York Convention, entered into force, under terms adopted by the U.N. on June 10, 1958. The agreement encourages international arbitration of disputes, in that all nations that have accepted the 1959 agreement recognize the results of the arbitration as legally binding. The USSR ratified the treaty in 1960, the US in 1970 and Britain in 1975.
• A.C. Milan won the championship of Italy's top professional soccer football league, finishing in first place on the last day of competition for Serie A with 20 wins, 12 draws and 2 losses for 52 points, ahead of two other teams with 20 wins, ACF Fiorentina and Inter Milan. Antonio Angelillo was the top scorer with 33 goals
• Charly Gaul of Luxembourg won the Giro d’Italia bicycle race.
• Born: Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States from 2017 to 2021; in Columbus, Indiana

  June 8, 1959 (Monday)

• An experiment with "missile mail" proved successful, if not practical. At, the launched a Regulus I rocket, containing 3,000 letters, from a point offshore from Norfolk, Virginia. The "wheeled missile" was guided to the naval air station at Mayport, Florida, a parachute deployed, and it landed 22 minutes after firing. Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield predicted that deliveries of mail by missile would become a regular practice.
• The North American X-15 rocket-powered aircraft made its first flight.
• In Marigliano a protest by the farmers of the province of Naples degenerated into a riot: the city Hall was devastated; a tax and mail office and the carabineers' station were set on fire.
• The Big Joe spacecraft for the Project Mercury reentry test was delivered to Cape Canaveral.
• The Space Task Group announced the creation of survival items for crewed missions that McDonnell would package in containers, including a PK-2 raft, a distress signal, a dye marker, signal mirrors and whistles, a first aid kits, shark repellent, survival rations, matches, and a radio transceiver, and asked the U.S. Navy assistance to help procurement the items. STG and the School of Aviation Medicine met the same day to discuss details for bio-packs for NASA's Little Joe flight program. The packs, furnished by the school, would gather life support data to be applied to Project Mercury's crewed flights.
• In a Project Horizon report, Wernher von Braun, then with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, advanced a theory that he had conceived years earlier for using a booster's spent stage as a space station's basic structure. This would later evolve into the "wet stage" concept for the Skylab Program.
• Died: Pietro Canonica, 90, Italian sculptor and senator for life

  June 9, 1959 (Tuesday)

• American spy planes intercepted telemetry from a Soviet missile in flight for the first time. Flying near the Iran-USSR border, a U-2 aircraft and an RB-57 Canberra picked up 80 seconds of transmissions from the ICBM to the Tyuratam ground station.
• The West African Customs Union, forerunner of the West African Economic Community, was established by treaty between Dahomey, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Upper Volta, with headquarters in Ouagadougou, Upper Volta.
• The first ballistic missile submarine,, was launched at from Groton, Connecticut. On June 28, 1960, the sub was fitted with two Polaris nuclear missiles.
• In Italy, the broadcast of a TV movie, I figli di Medea, caused a mass hysteria, similar to the 1938 panic caused by Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. Vladimiro Cajoli's script was in the form of a fictitious news program that started with a bulletin that a sick child of an actress was being held hostage by his father, portrayed by actor Enrico Maria Salerno. The mother, "Medea", was portrayed by well-known actress Alida Valli, whose plea to viewers was so realistic that thousands of people thought that the celebrity was the victim of a crime. One of the viewers came with a gun, into the RAI broadcast studios, preparing to shoot actor Salerno. To make matters worse, the fictional news program gave out a phone number that belonged to a major hospital, whose switchboard was jammed by callers offering tips for finding the "missing child".
• Born: Miles O'Brien, CNN aviation reporter; in Detroit
• Died: Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus, 82, winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

  June 10, 1959 (Wednesday)

• A month after withdrawing a six-month ultimatum for the Western powers to withdraw from Berlin, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev issued a new deadline when talks broke down in Geneva. Khrushchev demanded that the U.S., Britain, and France withdraw their armies from West Berlin by June 10, 1960. The ultimatum was withdrawn on September 27 when Khrushchev met with President Eisenhower at Camp David.
• Harold Geneen became President of International Telephone & Telegraph. Over a 28 years, Geneen built the company into a gigantic conglomerate, increasing revenues from in 1959 to by his retirement on January 1, 1978.
• Rocky Colavito of the Cleveland Indians hit four home runs in four consecutive appearances at bat for an 11–8 win over the Baltimore Orioles.
• Born:
• *Carlo Ancelotti, Italian footballer and trainer; in Reggiolo
• *Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York for 14 months before resigning in the wake of a scandal; in the Bronx

  June 11, 1959 (Thursday)

• Turkey's President Celâl Bayar became the first leader of the Islamic nation to be received as a guest by a Roman Catholic Church, as Pope John XXIII welcomed Bayar to the Vatican. The two men had met during World War II when the future pontiff, Bishop Angelo Roncalli, had been the Vatican's apostolic delegate to Istanbul.
• The first large hovercraft, the Saunders-Roe Nautical One SR-N1, made its maiden voyage on the English Channel.
• Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence, was barred from distribution in the United States by order of the Postmaster General. Grove Press had announced, in April, publication of the "unexpurgated edition" of Lawrence's novel, and the Postmaster barred it under section 1461 of Title 18 of the United States Code as "obscene and un-mailable".
• Born: Hugh Laurie, British actor and comedian; in Oxford, Oxfordshire

  June 12, 1959 (Friday)

• Construction began on, the first British nuclear submarine. Prince Philip laid down the first steel at the Vickers-Armstrongs shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness. The sub was launched in 1960 and served until 1980.
• Singer Billie Holiday was arrested for heroin possession while in her room at New York's Metropolitan Hospital, where she had been since collapsing on May 31. Because she could not be moved, NYPD detectives fingerprinted her and took mug shots while she lay in bed, to face charges upon release. She would die, without regaining consciousness, on July 17.
• Born:
• *Beniamino Vignola, Italian football player; in Verona
• *John Linnell, American musician; in New York City