June 1958

June 1, 1958 (Sunday)

• French Army General Charles de Gaulle, who had retired after World War II to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, was asked by President Coty to form a government as Prime Minister of France to restore order as a civil war was approaching. France's National Assembly approved De Gaulle's return by a vote of 329 to 224. In return for accepting the job, de Gaulle said that he wanted emergency powers to rule by decree.
• Elections were held in Sweden for the 231-member Andra kammaren, the Second Chamber or lower house of Sweden's parliament, the Riksdag. Though Prime Minister Tage Erlander's Social Democratic Party gained five seats, its 111 was still five short of a majority.
• Elections were held in Belgium for the 212-seat Chamber of Representatives and the 106 Senate seats. Prime Minister Achille Van Acker's Belgian Socialist Party and its coalition partner, the Liberal Party both lost seats while the Christian Social Party won 104 seats in the Chamber and won 53 seats in the Senate.
• Elections were held in Albania for slate of candidates for the 188-seat Kuvendi Popullor. Albania's Communist government reported that all but 127 of the nation's 788,250 registered voters turned out to show their enthusiastic approval of the Fronti Demokratik legislators.
• Iceland extended its fishing limits to 12 miles.
• The RCA tape cartridge, a forerunner of 1963's "compact cassette" that would become the industry standard, was demonstrated in a press conference by the RCA company as the first tape recording system that was enclosed in its own case and saved users from having to thread a tape machine. The "Stereo-Tape Cartridge" was long by wide, and its width tape could only be used on RCA equipment.
• A doubleheader between two Negro American League teams was played at New York City's Yankee Stadium and attracted 9,506 spectators, including scouts from six of the 16 major league teams. The Detroit Clowns beat the Memphis Red Sox, 13 to 3 in the first game and lost the second, 7-6 in six innings.
• Born: Nambaryn Enkhbayar, President of Mongolia from 2005 to 2009, Prime Minister from 2000 to 2004; in Ulaanbaatar.

  June 2, 1958 (Monday)

• All 45 people aboard Aeromexico Flight 111 were killed when the Lockheed Constellation crashed shortly after takeoff from Guadalajara with a destination of Mexico City, in the deadliest aviation accident in Mexico up to that time.
• The Royal Federation of Malaya Air Force, later the Royal Malaysian Air Force, was founded from the Malayan Volunteers Air Force that had been a branch of Britain's RAF.
• In San Simeon, California, Hearst Castle opened to the public for guided tours.
• In Washington D.C., Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were married and then moved back to Central Point, Virginia, where both had been raised. Because Mildred was black and Loving was White, the two were arrested on June 12 for violating Virginia Code §20-59, the state's law against miscegenation and interracial marriage. Convicted of breaking the law, but each receiving a one-year jail sentence, suspended on condition that they leave Virginia until 1984, Mr. and Mrs. Loving left Virginia but, in 1963, would file a motion in the Caroline County court to vacate the sentence. Their appeal would lead to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, finding unanimously that all state laws against interracial marriage were a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case would be cited in a 2015 Supreme Court decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, holding that restrictions against same-sex marriage in the U.S. unconstitutional as well.
• Born:
• *Sergey Medvedev, Soviet Russian journalist who later became the press secretary for Russian president Boris Yeltsin; in Kaliningrad, Russian SFSR
• *Lex Luger, American professional wrestler and pro football player; in Buffalo, New York
• Died:
• *Townsend Cromwell, 35, American oceanographer who discovered, in 1952, the Cromwell Current that flows beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean; in the crash of Aeromexico Flight 111
• *Dr. Carl Fried, 68, German-born Brazilian surgeon and pioneer in radiation therapy

  June 3, 1958 (Tuesday)

• By a vote of 350 to 161, France's parliament approved a constitutional law to empower the government of new premier Charles de Gaulle to draft a new constitution and to grant de Gaulle and his cabinet a six month period allowing the government to rule by decree, with some exceptions for basic rights of citizens. De Gaulle had threatened to resign immediately if the emergency power was not granted. The upper house of the parliament, the Council of the Republic voted, 256 to 30, to yield the power to reform the constitution to the De Gaulle government. The new constitution would create the French Fifth Republic, a system of government providing for more power to an elected president.
• Voters in the city of Los Angeles approved "Proposition B" the donation of of land in the Chavez Ravine to Brooklyn National League Club, Inc., which had already moved the Brooklyn Dodgers team to Los Angeles prior to the start of the 1958 season, for purposes of building a new stadium. With all votes counted, the site for Dodger Stadium was approved by a margin of 345,435 to 321,142.
• Born: Donatella Damiani, Italian film actress and supermodel; in Naples

  June 4, 1958 (Wednesday)

• French prime minister Charles de Gaulle visited Algeria. To the surprise of residents of France, De Gaulle said in a speech in Algiers that French Europeans of Algeria and Muslim Arab Algerians would become full citizens of France with equality of voting.
• Multiple tornadoes killed 28 people in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, with 25 deaths in Dunn County. Hardest hit was the village of Colfax, where 12 people died within the corporate limits.

  June 5, 1958 (Thursday)

• The United Kingdom's project to build a supersonic jet fighter was virtually ended by the crash of its prototype Saunders-Roe SR.53 rocket plane, which shut down moments after taking off on its twelfth flight. The test pilot, John Stanley Booth, was killed in the crash.
• After serving as a liaison officer of NACA and as a participating member of an Advanced Research Projects Agency panel, Maxime A. Faget reported to Dr. Hugh Dryden on resulting studies and attending recommendations on the subject of human spaceflight. He stated that the Advanced Research Projects Agency panel was aware that the responsibility for such a program might be placed with the soon-to-be-created civilian space agency, although they recommended program management be placed with the U.S. Air Force under executive control of NACA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The panel also recommended that the program start immediately even though the specific manager was, as yet, unassigned. The Advanced Research Projects Agency suggested a system based on the Atlas launch vehicle with the Atlas-Sentry system serving as backup; retrorockets were to be used to initiate return from orbit; the spacecraft was to be non-lifting, ballistic type, and the crew was to be selected from qualified volunteers in the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force.
• Born: Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi, President of Comoros 2006 to 2011; in Mutsamudu
• Died:
• *Evelyn Ellis, 64, African-American stage actress on Broadway and theatrical director
• *Saint John of Valamo, 85, Russian-born monk canonized in 2018 in the Eastern Orthodox Church

  June 6, 1958 (Friday)

• As part of the policy of apartheid and the new Group Areas Act 1957, the city of Pretoria, executive capital of South Africa, ordered the transfer of South Africans of Indian descent to relocate out of the White Areas of Pretoria and to the newly-created township of Laudium.
• In a speech to supporters in Oran, where French Army officers had led a coup d'etat against the existing French government, Prime Minister de Gaulle declared his support for maintaining Algeria and its European-minority government as a part of Metropolitan France, proclaiming "Vive l'Algérie française!". He repeated the sentiment later in the day in Mostaganem. Nevertheless, de Gaulle would later change his stance and support the independence of Algeria as a republic ruled by the area's Arab majority.
• China Medical College, later China Medical University, was established in the city of Taichung.
• The Detroit Tigers put an African-American player on the field for the first time, 11 years after Jackie Robinson had integrated Major League Baseball, as Ozzie Virgil Sr. was put in at third base in an away game against the Washington Senators. Virgil had one hit in five times at bat and scored one run in an 11 to 2 win.
• Died:
• *Lloyd Hughes, 60, American film actor
• *Virginia Pearson, 72, American stage and film actress

  June 7, 1958 (Saturday)

• In a landmark date in medical imaging, the British medical journal The Lancet published the paper "Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound", by obstetricians Dr. Ian Donald and John MacVicar, and medical physicist T. G. Brown detailing the first use of medical ultrasound for diagnosing problems of an unborn child still in the womb.
• Tim Tam, the thoroughbred racehorse who had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, seemed poised to be the first winner of U.S. horse racing's Triple Crown as the favorite in the Belmont Stakes, but broke a sesamoid bone and went lame a quarter of a mile before the finish line. Tim Tam, whose racing career was ended, placed second to Cavan, who had not run in the Derby or the Preakness.
• After an angry meeting with officials in Stockholm, the People's Republic of China withdrew from FIFA, the governing body for soccer , in protest of FIFA's admission of a team from Taiwan. The Chinese team had last played in FIFA competition on June 2, 1957, when it lost to Indonesia, 2-0, in the World Cup qualification tournament.
• Berry Gordy Jr. founded the recording company "Tamla Records" in Detroit. On April 14, 1960, Tamla would be incorporated as the Motown Record Corporation, a portmanteau of Detroit's automotive manufacturing reputation as "The Motor Town".
• The was launched from the Great Lakes Engineering Works shipyard at River Rouge, Michigan. At in length, she would be the largest freighter on the North American Great Lakes for more than a dozen years, but eventually go down with her crew of 29 in 1975.
• Born: Prince, American rock musician, inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; in Minneapolis, Minnesota