June 1975

June 1, 1975 (Sunday)

• U.S. President Gerald R. Ford arrived in Salzburg, Austria for a meeting with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, and slipped and fell on the stairway while descending from Air Force One. Pictures of the tumbling U.S. President were seen again and again, giving Ford a reputation for being clumsy, both physically and in his handling of the presidency.
• Born: Nikol Pashinyan, Armenian politician, Prime Minister of Armenia, in Ijevan, Armenian SSR

  June 2, 1975 (Monday)

• Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced that Israel would remove tanks, troops and weapons from the Suez Canal as a peace gesture to Egypt.

  June 3, 1975 (Tuesday)

• New federal regulations, set to go into effect on July 21, were sent to Congress by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The new rules ended separate phys ed classes for boys and girls, and prohibited schools from excluding pregnant students from the classroom.
• Sultan Alimirah Hanfere, leader of Ethiopia's Afar people and of the Afar Liberation Front, declared war on the Ethiopian government.
• Uganda's President Idi Amin declared the nationalization of all land within the boundaries of Uganda.
• The Broadway musical Chicago premiered at the 46th Street Theatre and ran for 936 performances, closing on August 27, 1977.
• The first recorded ascent of the Himalayan mountain Kalanka was achieved by Japanese climbers Ikuo Tanabe, Noriaki Ikeda, Tsuneo Kouma, and Kazumasa Inoue.
• Died:
• *Eisaku Satō, 74, Prime Minister of Japan 1964-72, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974
• *Ozzie Nelson, 69, American actor best known for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

  June 4, 1975 (Wednesday)

• Israel completed its promise to withdraw half of its occupying troops from Egypt's Sinai peninsula.
• Born:
• *Angelina Jolie, American film actress, as Angelina Joline Voight, in Los Angeles
• *Julian Marley, Jamaican reggae musician, in London
• *Russell Brand, English comedian and actor, in Grays.
• Died:
• *Evelyn Brent, 73, American actress
• *Clark Kessinger, 78, American fiddler

  June 5, 1975 (Thursday)

• The Suez Canal opened for the first time since the Six-Day War eight years earlier. Because there were still mines left in the waters from 1967, the American guided missile cruiser USS Little Rock made the first transit, sailing from Port Said, where Egypt's President Sadat oversaw the celebration, to Ismailia.
• In the first yes-or-no referendum ever held in the United Kingdom, the electorate voted to stay in the European Community by a margin of 17,378,581 to 8,470,073.
• Died: Paul Keres, 59, Estonian chess grandmaster

  June 6, 1975 (Friday)

• A helicopter landed inside the grounds of the Southern Michigan Prison at Jackson at 11:05 am, picked up long time inmate Dale Remling, and departed again. Remling was re-captured two days later in Leslie, Michigan.
• A night train running between and derails at, Warwickshire, England due to overspeeding through a temporary track restriction, leading to 6 deaths and another 38 injuries.
• Died: Larry Blyden, 49, American stage actor and producer who won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 1972 for his performance in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, as well as a game show host known for of What's My Line?, died of injuries sustained in an auto accident in Morocco on May 31.

  June 7, 1975 (Saturday)

• General Paul Strehlin, former French Air Force Chief of Staff, was run over by a bus in Paris, hours after being revealed to have secretly been on the payroll of the Northrop aircraft manufacturing company. He would die of his injuries on June 22.
• A new constitution was adopted for Greece by a 208-0 vote in the Vouli ton Ellinon, the 300 member Greek Parliament, formally replacing the monarchy with a republic. All of the votes were by members of the ruling Nea Dimokratia party, as members of the other parties boycotted the vote in protest over the power given to the President.
• The first Cricket World Cup for One Day International cricket under the auspices of the International Cricket Conference, opened in England with all eight of the invited national teams competing for "Prudential Cup '75", sponsored by the Prudential Insurance Company. Group A had England, New Zealand, India and East Africa, while Group B had the West Indies, Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Under the format, the teams in each group would play each other once and the top two teams in each group would qualify for a "knockout stage" playoff, with the first place finisher of one group playing the second place finisher of the other group. The first games were played simultaneously in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester.
• After coming in second at the Kentucky Derby, a new jockey, Bill Shoemaker, won the Belmont Stakes aboard Avatar wins in a time of 2:28.2; retired to stud for the 1977 season, Avatar went on to become the sire of 19 stakes winners before his 1992 death.
• Born: Allen Iverson, American NBA player, 2001 MVP, 4-time scoring leader, 3-time steals leader; in Hampton, Virginia

  June 8, 1975 (Sunday)

• The Venera 9 space probe was launched by the Soviet Union to explore the planet Venus. It would land on Venus on October 22 at 13:12 Venus solar time and transmit data for 53 minutes.
• Two passenger trains collided head on near Munich, West Germany, killing 38 people.
• Born: Shilpa Shetty, Indian film actress, in Mangalore

  June 9, 1975 (Monday)

• A fire inside a jail at Sanford, Florida, killed eleven people; most of the inmates were trapped in their cells.
• Born: Andrew Symonds, English-born Australian cricketer, in Birmingham
• Sohail Abbas, former contribution player for Pakistan men's national hockey team and bronze medal for 2000 Summer Olympics, total scored 348 and 311 caps, in Karachi, Sindh Province, Pakistan.

  June 10, 1975 (Tuesday)

• At a press conference in New York City, Pelé, the Brazilian superstar footballer, signed a contract with the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League that made him the highest paid professional athlete in the world. The salary for Pelé, who grew up in poverty, was $4,700,000 for 107 regular season games for the Cosmos in 1975, 1976, and 1977.
• In Washington, DC, the Rockefeller Commission issued its report on CIA abuses, recommending a joint congressional oversight committee on intelligence.

  June 11, 1975 (Wednesday)

• The United Kingdom became an oil-producing nation as the first crude oil was pumped from a well drilled into the North Sea. The Transworld 58 submersible drilling rig, located 180 miles off of the coast of Scotland, pumped the first oil from the Argyll oil field into the tanker Theogennitor.
• The U.S House of Representatives voted 209 to 187 to reject President Ford's proposal for a 23 cent federal fuel tax on each gallon of gasoline sold in the U.S. The President had promoted the tax as a step in eliminating U.S. dependency on foreign oil by 1985.
• Alice Olson, whose husband Frank Olson had jumped to his death more than 20 years earlier, on November 28, 1953, learned for the first time that her husband had been the subject of secret CIA experiments with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. Mrs. Olson had been unaware of the CIA's role in her husband's death until reading the details in a front-page story in that morning's Washington Post, and recognized the unidentified "civilian employee" of the U.S. Army referred to in the story headlined "Suicide Revealed". The news item, in turn, was drawn from the recently released report of the Rockefeller Commission on CIA activities.
• The new Communist government of South Vietnam sent an order to all "puppet soldiers" of the losing Army of the Republic of Vietnam, directing soldiers to attend three days of "re-education", and former officers to bring supplies for one month of training. Most of the officers, complying with the order, were imprisoned for more than one month.
• Born: Choi Ji-woo, South Korean actress and model, in Paju

  June 12, 1975 (Thursday)

• At 9:35 a.m., Judge Jagmohanlal Sinha of the city of Allahabad ruled that India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had used corrupt practices to win her seat in the Indian Parliament, and that she should be banned from holding any public office. Her main opponent for the Raebareli Constituency seat in 1971, Raj Narain had brought a petition to unseat her, charging that she had won the 1971 parliamentary election improperly. Mrs. Gandhi sent word that she refused to resign.
• The Australian Family Law Act 1975, allowing "no-fault divorce" was given assent, to take effect on January 5, 1976.
• Movimiento Nacional General Secretary Fernando Herrero Tejedor, who had been expected to succeed Carlos Arias Navarro as Prime Minister of Spain, was killed in an automobile accident near the city of Villacastín.
• Greece applied for membership in the European Union, and would become a member state in 1981.
• Systran made the most successful demonstration of machine translation up to that time, as professors and military officers in Zürich watched the computer translate 30,000 words of Russian text into English.
• Died: Edward G. Connors, 42, former welterweight boxer and an organized crime figure in Boston, was set up for a hit by Whitey Bulger and Howie Winter, in retaliation for talking too much. Winter directed Connors to appear at a specific phone booth in Dorchester, Massachusetts. While Connors was engaged in conversation, Bulger and his partner Stephen Flemmi drove up and fired multiple shots into the phone booth.

  June 13, 1975 (Friday)

• In Baghdad, Iraq and Iran signed a peace treaty formalizing an agreement reached in Algiers. After the monarchy in Iran was replaced by a republic, Iraq's President Saddam Hussein would declare the agreement void on September 17, 1980, seize the Shatt al-Arab river dividing the two nations, and begin the eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War.
• Died: Merrill Denison, 81, Canadian playwright and author