March 1958

March 1, 1958 (Saturday)

• At least 300 people died when the Turkish passenger ship capsized and sank in the Gulf of İzmit. The ship was carrying 370 paid passengers and a crew of 20 when it overturned during a sudden gale. About three-fourths of the passengers were high school and junior college students who went to school in Izmit and who would ride the noon ferry on Saturdays in order to spend the weekend at their family's homes in Gölcük on the other side of the Gulf. The ferry operator disclosed later in the day that in addition to the 370 passengers who had bought tickets, there were between 100 and 150 additional persons who had come aboard using transit passes bought earlier; the capacity of the Üsküdar was limited to 350 people.
• In Uruguay, the nine-member Consejo Nacional that served as the executive branch for the South American nation, held its annual meeting to select one of its members as the President of Uruguay. Carlos Fischer, the former Minister of Agriculture, was picked to succeed Arturo Lezama and would serve until March 1, 1959.
• In Japan, All Nippon Airways was created by the merger of FarEastern Airways of Japan and Nippon Helicopter Transport.
• Died: Giacomo Balla, 86, Italian Futurist painter

  March 2, 1958 (Sunday)

• The British Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition team, led by Sir Vivian Fuchs, completed the first overland crossing of the Antarctic, using snowcat caterpillar tractors and dogsled teams, in 99 days, via the South Pole. Fuchs had set off from the British base at Vahsel Bay of the Weddell Sea on November 24, reached the South Pole on January 19 and then proceeded to the Scott Station at McMurdo Sound, arriving at 1:47 a.m. local time.
• Greece's Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis announced his resignation after 15 parliament members announced that they would resign from his National Radical Union party, ending the 164-seat majority that the NRU had held in the 300-seat Hellenic Parliament. Two members of his cabinet, the Minister of Trade and the Minister of Public Works, resigned and Karmanalis asked that King Paul dissolve parliament and call a new election. The next day, King Paul appointed Konstantinos Georgakopoulos as Prime Minister of a caretaker government. Elections would be held on May 11, 1958 and increase the majority for the NRU, with Karmanalis returning as Prime Minister.

  March 3, 1958 (Monday)

• Richard A. Mack, one of the five commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission that regulated all broadcasting in the United States, was forced to resign after having been accused of accepting money to award a television station license to a friend in Miami. The charges had come to light in testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Legislative Oversight Committee. Mack was indicted by a federal grand jury, along with bribe payer Thurman A. Whiteside, on September 25. Charges against Mack would eventually be dropped because of his declining health.
• General Nuri al-Said agreed to return to his previous position as Prime Minister of Iraq after Prime Minister Abdul-Wahab Mirjan was asked by King Faisal II to resign. General Said had resigned in June because of illness. He and the King would both be assassinated in a coup d'etat on July 15.
• The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, that the U.S. Army did not have the authority to give a less than honorable discharge, premised solely on subversive activities that took place before their induction, to a person who had been drafted into the military. The Court also declined to review a decision by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that had found that Prince Edward County, Virginia had failed to follow the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and that the county was failing to make a "prompt and reasonable start" to end racial segregation of schools. After the Brown decision, Prince Edward County's supervisors had voted not to operate any public schools and to let education be handled by private schools funded by pledges and tuition. The Attorney General of Virginia had filed a petition for review on behalf of the county.
• Seven coal miners were killed in the Netherlands at the state-owned Staatsmijn Maurits coal mine near Geleen.
• Born: Miranda Richardson, English film actress, Golden Globe and BAFTA winner; in Southport, Lancashire
• Died: Wilhelm Zaisser, 65, former East German official who served as that nation's first director of its secret police agency, the Stasi. Zaisser also fought in the Spanish Civil War under the nom-de-guerre "General Gomez". He was removed from his position by the ruling Communist party, the SED, in 1953 on charges of failing to use sufficient force to prevent the uprising by East German workers, and later dropped from the party on charges of "forming a faction... with a defeatist line directed against the unity of the Party."

  March 4, 1958 (Tuesday)

• A ceasefire agreement between the Greek Cypriot paramilitary organization EOKA, and the British government that administered Cyprus at the time, was broken with new attacks by EOKA against colonial buildings.
• Born: Patricia Heaton, American comedian, TV actress and 3-time Emmy Award winner known as the star of The Middle and supporting actress on Everybody Loves Raymond; in Bay Village, Ohio

  March 5, 1958 (Wednesday)

• Luhansk, a city in the Ukrainian SSR that had been renamed Voroshilovgrad in 1935 in honor of Defense Minister Kliment Voroshilov, was restored to its original name after a decree by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that cities could not be named after living persons. At the time, Voroshilov was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the nominal head of state of the U.S.S.R.; upon Voroshilov's death in 1969, the name of Luhansk would be changed again to Voroshilovgrad and then back to Luhansk in 1990.
• Explorer 2 was launched from Cape Canaveral, at 1:27 p.m. local time, with a payload of an cylinder, similar to that of Explorer 1, launched six weeks earlier. Contact with the Explorer 2 was lost a few minutes after liftoff, and the U.S. Army's team announced the next day that the second Explorer had failed to reach orbit after the final stage of the Jupiter rocket failed to ignite at an altitude of. The satellite burned up on re-entry to the atmosphere over the Caribbean Sea.
• Born:
• *Andy Gibb, English pop singer and stage actor; in Stretford, Lancashire
• *Nassar, Indian film star; in Palur, Tamil Nadu state

  March 6, 1958 (Thursday)

• North Korea released the 26 passengers and crew who had been on a Korean National Airlines plane hijacked on February 16. On the same day, anti-aircraft artillery from the north side of the Korean Demilitarized Zone shot down a U.S. Air Force F-86 Sabrejet that had strayed into North Korean airspace during a training mission.
• U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave approval to Operation Argus, a series of low-yield, high-atmosphere nuclear weapons tests and missile tests to test the Christofilos effect, the theory of nuclear physicist Nicholas Christofilos that the explosion of nuclear weapons in the Earth's magnetic field would create large electrical currents that could destroy the electronic systems of enemy missiles. The Argus tests, which would be secretly conducted over the South Atlantic Ocean starting on August 27, 1958, and continuing to September 9, demonstrated that the disruption created by the Christofilos effect could disable the electronics of radar systems and satellites, but was not strong enough to damage missiles.

  March 7, 1958 (Friday)

• Catholic University of Argentina was founded as a private university. Sixty years after its founding, it would have an enrollment of 18,000 students on six campuses.
• "The Sharpshooter", a pilot for a TV series, was telecast as the week's offering on Zane Grey Theatre on CBS. The telecast, which featured Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford as a father and son moving to a new town, was popular enough to be picked up in the fall on the ABC network as the series The Rifleman.
• Born: Rik Mayall, English comedian and TV actor; in Matching Tye, Essex

  March 8, 1958 (Saturday)

• Television was introduced to the Kazakh SSR, now the Republic of Kazakhstan, as Gostelradio Kazkh began broadcasting.
• The Kingdom of Yemen joined the United Arab Republic, formed in February by the merger of Egypt and Syria, as Yemeni Crown Prince Saif al-Islam Mohammed al-Badr came to Cairo and, with the UAR's President Gamel Abdel Nasser, signed the documents necessary to join the federation. For purposes of providing for Yemen's Imam Ahmad bin Yahya to continue as absolute monarch there, the name of the nation was announced as the "United Arab States".
• The was decommissioned, leaving the United States Navy without an active battleship for the first time since 1895, as the U.S. completed the shift of its warships to aircraft carriers and submarines. John O. Miner, captain of the battleship Wisconsin, formally delivered the vessel to the New York Group of the U.S. Navy's Atlantic Reserve Fleet at Bayonne, New Jersey. By 1958, the United Kingdom's Royal Navy had no active battleships and the Soviet Union's navy had one. USS Wisconsin would later be recommissioned on October 22, 1988.
• Born: Gary Numan, English electronic musician; in London

  March 9, 1958 (Sunday)

• The Kanmon Roadway Tunnel, at the longest undersea highway tunnel in the world at the time, was opened to traffic to connect the Japanese islands of Honshu and Kyushu beneath the Kanmon Straits in the Sea of Japan. The tunnel allowed driving between the city of Shimonoseki and the town of Moji on Kyushu.

  March 10, 1958 (Monday)

• The Sacred Congregation of the Council of the Vatican announced the excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church of three priests in Hungary who had become members of the Communist-dominated Parliament of Hungary, in violations of a decree against participation in politics made the previous July. Richard Horvath, Nicholas Beresztoczy and Janos Mate were barred from administering the sacraments to Catholic worshipers.
• The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, predecessor to NASA, presented its report on "recoverable crewed satellite" configurations— the launching of an American astronaut into space. One involved a blunt, high-drag, zero-lift vehicle that would depend on a parachute landing for final deceleration. Another was a winged vehicle that would glide to a landing after reentering the atmosphere. The third proposal was a combination of the two.
• A working conference in support of the Air Force "Man in Space Soonest" program began at the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles. General Bernard Schriever told the crowd that events were moving more quickly than expected, in that the Soviet Union was also making progress on its goal to put the first man into outer space. The U.S. Air Force concept consisted of three stages: a high-drag, no-lift, blunt-shaped spacecraft, with landing to be accomplished by a parachute; a more sophisticated approach by possibly employing a lifting vehicle or one with a modified drag; and a long-range program that might lead to creating a space station or a trip to the Moon.
• Born:
• *Carol Johnston, Canadian gymnast who competed at the collegiate level despite having been born without a right hand; in Calgary
• *Frankie Ruiz, American Latino singer; in Paterson, New Jersey
• *Sharon Stone, American film actress; in Meadville, Pennsylvania