March 1981

[March 1], 1981 (Sunday)

• Bobby Sands, a Provisional Irish Republican Army member incarcerated at the Maze prison, began a hunger strike seeking a change in the treatment of the other IRA member inmates. Sands would die 65 days later, on May 5, and was followed in death by nine other prisoners.
• Robert Goizueta became CEO of Coca-Cola. During his tenure, the Cuban-born businessman tripled the company's sales, and introduced both the successful "Diet Coke" and the disastrous "New Coke"
• Born: Adam LaVorgna, American TV actor ; in New Haven, Connecticut

  [March 2], 1981 (Monday)

• The asteroids 4923 Clarke and 5020 Asimov were discovered on the same night by astronomer Schelte J. Bus, and named by him in honor of authors Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
• Inventors Jim Bornhorst and Rusty Brutsche applied for a patent on Vari-Lite, a "computer controlled lighting system having automatically variable position, color, intensity and beam divergence", which would become a standard feature in concerts and stage productions. The system, which received U.S. Patent No. 4,392,187, would be unveiled on September 25 during a concert in Barcelona by Genesis in its Abacab tour.
• Pakistani International Airways Flight 326 was hijacked by three gunmen shortly after takeoff from Karachi.
• Valéry Giscard d'Estaing announced that he would run for re-election as President of France.
• Born: Bryce Howard, American film actress ; in Los Angeles
• Died: Ahmed Badawi, 54, Egyptian Defense Minister, in a helicopter crash at the Siwa Oasis.

  [March 3], 1981 (Tuesday)

• At the Hotel Rütli in Zürich, Turkish national Musa Serdar Çelebi offered Mehmet Ali Ağca 1.5 million dollars to kill Pope John Paul II. Ağca carried out the plan, shooting the Pope on May 13.
• At the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, all 14 voting members and 8 non-voting members of the Politburo were re-elected to five-year terms, the first time that there had been no change in the Soviet leadership by a party congress. Those re-elected included First Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko and the youngest of the group, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
• Chun Doo Hwan was inaugurated to his first elected term as President of South Korea. Chun commuted the sentences of 5,221 prisoners, with at least 3,400 released from incarceration.
• Born: Lil' Flip, American rapper, as Wesley Weston Jr.; in Houston
• Died: Rebecca Lancefield, 86, pioneering American microbiologist

  [March 4], 1981 (Wednesday)

• Six days after he had come into possession of $1.2 million in cash that had fallen from an armored car, Joey Coyle was arrested at JFK International Airport, where he had been preparing to fly to Mexico City. Coyle was acquitted of theft less than a year later. He committed suicide on August 15, 1993, a month before the release of a film based on his story, Money for Nothing
• CBS Sports paid $48,000,000 for the rights to broadcast the NCAA men's basketball tournament for three years, outbidding the NBC network, which had built the popularity of the playoffs since 1969. Bryant Gumbel would later comment, "I thought, How weird. We make the tournament a big deal and basically give it away."
• Died: Yip Harburg, 84, American lyricist, was killed in an auto accident

  [March 5], 1981 (Thursday)

• Continental Airlines Flight 72 was briefly hijacked by a man who had been fired the day before from his job at the Los Angeles International Airport. Victor Malasauskas brought a 9-mm automatic pistol with him after buying a seat in first-class on the flight bound from LAX to Phoenix. An alert flight attendant saw that he had a concealed weapon, and all but four passengers and two flight attendants were able to get off of the airplane before he realized that he had been spotted. The last of the hostages escaped later in the day. Malasauskas, whose claim that he had a bomb turned out to be false, was later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

  [March 6], 1981 (Friday)

• After 19 years as the anchorman of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite signed off for the last time. Cronkite had anchored the show since April 16, 1962.
• Born: Ellen Muth, American actress ; in Milford, Connecticut

  [March 7], 1981 (Saturday)

• John W. Hinckley Jr. was met at the airport in Denver by his parents, who followed the advice of his psychiatrist and barred him from returning home. The senior Hinckley would later testify, in what he would describe as "the greatest mistake of my life" that he gave his son "a couple of hundred dollars" and told him "O.K., you're on your own. Do whatever you want to." Twenty-three days later, the younger Hinckley carried out an assassination attempt against the President of the United States.
• Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, announced the arrests of former Prime Minister Patrick John and Defence Force Commander Frederick Newton. Charles said that a coup had been planned for March 14, and she added "I would hope that death would be the penalty, but I can't say that for sure."
• Died:
• *Bosley Crowther, 75, American film critic for the New York Times
• *Hilde Krahwinkel Sperling, 72, American tennis player, French Open champion 1935-37
• *Chet Bitterman, 28, American missionary taken hostage in Colombia
• *Mel C. Yorba, 18, first person to ever be murdered at Disneyland
• *Kiril Kondrashin, 67, Soviet conductor who defected to the Netherlands in 1978

  [March 8], 1981 (Sunday)

• An accident at the Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant in Japan led to the spill of thousands of gallons of radioactive wastewater. Fifty-six plant employees were exposed to radiation after being sent to mop up the leak. The incident was not revealed to the public until six weeks later, on April 21.
• In Argentina, an express train, that was bringing 800 passengers back from vacation, crashed into two derailed fuel tanker cars, killing 45 people and injuring 120. The "Firefly" express was returning to Buenos Aires from the seaside resort of Mar del Plata.

  [March 9], 1981 (Monday)

• The first successful human heart-lung transplant was performed. A team at the Stanford University Medical Center, led by Dr. Bruce Reitz, used a new technique that retained a portion of the recipient's right atrium. The recipient was Mary Gohlke, a 45-year-old woman from Mesa, Arizona, with end-stage primary pulmonary hypertension. The donor was a 15-year-old boy who had died from severe head trauma two days earlier
• Dan Rather began a nearly 24-year tenure as lead anchorman for the CBS Evening News, lasting until he was pressured to retire on March 9, 2005.
• Born: Antonio Bryant, NFL wide receiver; in Miami
• Died:
• *Max Delbrück, 74, German biophysicist, 1969 Nobel Laureate
• *Steven Judy, 24, Indiana murderer, fourth person to be executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977

  [March 10], 1981 (Tuesday)

• The eleven-year controversy over Roger Coleman began when the body of Wanda Fay McCoy was discovered in her home in Grundy, Virginia. Coleman, her brother-in-law, was convicted of her rape and murder based on blood and hair evidence, as well as testimony from a cellmate, and sentenced to death. Coleman fought for a new trial and maintained his innocence all the way to his execution in the electric chair on May 21, 1992. More than 13 years later, DNA testing confirmed that the pubic hairs found on the victim had indeed been those of Coleman, and that the blood found on his pants had been that of McCoy. "
• U.S. Patent No. 4,255,811 was issued to Dr. Roy L. Adler under the title "Key Control Block Cipher System" for a data encryption algorithm developed by him in 1974 while he was employed at IBM. Besides being applied in cryptography, the 128-bit encoding algorithm was also used in creating more secure keycard entry systems.
• Born: Samuel Eto'o, Cameroonian footballer; in Nkon

  [March 11], 1981 (Wednesday)

• The start of an uprising, that would lead to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the independence of the Republic of Kosovo, began with student discontent over inefficient food service at the University of Pristina. Tired of being made to wait in line, for hours, for poor quality food, students began demonstrating. Within days, the protests over conditions for students turned into discontent over the treatment of the ethnic Albanian population by the Serbian majority, and then to rioting and demands for an independent Kosovar nation.
• Joseph Sardler, 32, of Mount Airy, North Carolina, had his sight restored after five years of blindness. Sardler had fallen down a flight of stairs and banged his head, then regained the vision in his left eye. His physician, Dr. J. Dale Simmons, reported that Sadler "can read now and recognize things that he could not before."
• Born:
• *LeToya Luckett, American singer and member of Destiny's Child; in Houston
• *David Anders, American TV actor known for Alias; in Grants Pass, Oregon
• Died: Maurice Oldfield, 65, British intelligence expert and Chief of MI-6 from 1973 to 1978

  [March 12], 1981 (Thursday)

• Women, children and other inhabitants of the El Salvador village of El Junquillo were murdered on orders of Salvadoran Army Captain Carlos Medina Garay, at the conclusion of a nine-day long military operation against rebellious forces. The details of the massacre were brought out in an investigation more than a decade later by the "Commission on Truth", which had been created as part of a 1992 peace agreement.
• Timothy Hill, 13, disappeared in Atlanta, 10 days after his 15-year-old friend Joseph Bell had vanished, as the two became the latest victims of the murder of children in Atlanta. Hill's body would be found on March 30, and Bell's on April 19. They would prove to be the last of 23 African-American children to be murdered in Atlanta over a nearly two-year period. Wayne Williams, who was suspected in the killings, was charged with and convicted of the murders of two adult victims.