May 1958

May 1, 1958 (Thursday)

• Television broadcasting began in the People's Republic of China as Peking Television at 7:00 in the evening local time with experimental two-hour broadcasts in Beijing. The station moved to three hours and 30 minutes of regular nightly programming on September 2, 1958, and would continue on that schedule for 20 years.
• The Nordic Passport Union came into force after an agreement signed on July 12, 1957, allowing residents of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway to cross through specially approved districts within the member nations without needing to show a passport.
• Arturo Frondizi became President of Argentina.
• U.S. space scientist James van Allen announced the discovery of Earth's magnetosphere. The initial reaction was that what is now called the Van Allen Radiation Belt, located above the Earth and with radiation 1,000 times more powerful than expected, "raises a new obstacle to manned space flight" and that spacecraft would need to be redesigned to protect against it. "The radiation is so intense," a reporter wrote, "that a space traveler could use up his weekly tolerance dose of radiation in one and a half hours."
• Died: Oscar Torp, Prime Minister of Norway from 1951 to 1955 and the incumbent president of Norway's parliament, the Storting.

  May 2, 1958 (Friday)

• The kidnapping of four of the five members of the ruling military junta of Colombia, as well as the expected incoming civilian President, Alberto Lleras Camargo, took place in Bogotá in an attempted coup d'etat by rebels within the armed forces. With two days left before the scheduled May 4 elections, at 4:00 in the morning, Colonel Hernando Forero and rebels within the military police went to the homes of the junta members (Major General Gabriel Paris, who was chairman of junta and the nominal head of state; Major General Deogracias Fonsceca, and Brigadier Generals Luis Ordonez and Rafael Navas Pardo, as well as that of Lleras. The other junta member, Admiral Rubén Piedrahíta, was able to avoid capture and alerted the rest of the Colombian armed forces, who refused to go along with the coup. The rebels surrendered after eight hours and released their hostages. Lleras would take office as expected on August 7.
• Voting was held for the 233 seats of the House of Representatives of South Korea. The Liberal Party or Jayudang, a right-wing party despite its name and led by President Syngman Rhee, retained its majority, winning 126 seats.
• Haiti's National Assembly voted to declare a state of siege in the Caribbean nation and granted emergency powers to the government, as well as authorizing the suspension of constitutional rights and ending parliamentary immunity for its members.
• The United Nations Security Council voted 11 to 1, to approve a proposal to prohibit nuclear weapons from being placed in the area above the Arctic Circle and to allow for international verification of compliance. The lone negative vote came from one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the Soviet Union, which used its veto power to deny the resolution.
• Died: Henry Cornelius, 44, South African-born British film director

  May 3, 1958 (Saturday)

• Tim Tam won the 1958 Kentucky Derby, the first "jewel" of the Triple Crown of American thoroughbred horse racing, and was favored to become the first horse since 1948 to win the Triple Crown.
• England's FA Cup was won by Bolton Wanderers, 2 to 0, over Manchester United, before a crowd of 99,756 at Wembley Stadium in London. Manchester United had only four of the players it had started with the season, in that eight teammates had been killed in a plane crash on February 6, but had reached the finals from a field of 16 teams still remaining after four rounds of play.
• Rioting broke out at a rock concert at the Boston Garden, where New York disc jockey Alan Freed was hosting a live broadcast of his Rock 'n' Roll Party show, and at least 15 people in attendance were robbed or assaulted. A grand jury in Boston indicted Freed a few days later for inciting the unlawful destruction of property.
• Died: Frank Foster, 69, English test cricket star who appeared in 159 first-class matches and 11 test matches, and whose career was cut short by a motorcycle accident

  May 4, 1958 (Sunday)

• Voting was held for the 60-seat Sapha Haeng Xat, the lower house of the parliament of the southeast Asian kingdom of Laos. The chamber had been increased by 21 seats since the last election and most of the new seats were won by the Neo Lao Sang Xat, a Communist political party of the Pathet Lao and led by Prince Souphanouvong. The moderate Phak Xat Kao Na led by Souphanouvong's half-brother, Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, lost its 22-of-39 seats majority but retained a plurality of 26 of 60 seats.
• Voters in Colombia overwhelmingly approved the election of Alberto Lleras Camargo, the first president in the South American nation to be nominated by both major political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. Another member of the Conservatives, Jorge Leyva, had been put forward by members of the parliament who had not approved of Lleras as a bipartisan candidate. Out of slightly more than three million votes cast, Lleras won 80 percent.
• Real Madrid finished in first place on the final day of the 1957-58 season in Spain's premier soccer football league, La Liga with a record of 20 wins, 5 draws and 5 losses, three points ahead of Atlético Madrid. Going into the 30th and final game, Real Madrid had already clinched the title after a match the week before where it and Atletico Madrid had played to a 1 to 1 draw.
• Born: Keith Haring, American pop artist and LGBTQ activist; in Reading, Pennsylvania
• Died: Elaine Sterne Carrington, 66, American writer and producer who in 1932 created the first soap opera, a radio drama series for the NBC Blue network. The program which would become the 15-minute afternoon show Pepper Young's Family, originated as a Sunday night show called Red Adams, before the Beech-Nut Gum manufacturer agreed to become a sponsor conditioned on the change in name to avoid association with a rival product, Adams Gum. Mrs. Carrington wrote the scripts for 12,000 episodes of three different soap operas.

  May 5, 1958 (Monday)

• Elections were held in the Kingdom of Iraq for all 145 seats in the Majlis an-Nuwwab, the lower house of the parliament. The races for 118 of the seats were featured unopposed candidates who supported the government. In the other 27 races, independent candidates defeated the pro-government contenders in only five contests. The National Union Front, a coalition of parties that included the Ba'ath Party that would later rule the Middle Eastern nation, boycotted the election.
• Born: Robert "Dipper" DiPierdomenico, Australian rules football midfielder for the Hawthorn Hawks; in Hawthorn, Victoria
• Died:
• *Viscount Ruffside, 78, British politician and Speaker of the House of Commons from 1943 to 1951
• *James Branch Cabell, 79, American novelist,
• *Otto Abetz, 55, German ambassador to France during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944, was killed in a car accident along with his wife. Abetz, who had served five years of a 20-year prison sentence in France after World War II, was a passenger in the car as his wife drove on the autobahn, when she lost control and struck another vehicle head-on near Langenfeld in West Germany, and burned to death.

  May 6, 1958 (Tuesday)

• Millions of people in the United States, including U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, went to the fallout shelter nearest to them in a nationwide civil defense drill, Operation Alert 1958. The exercise was held in 46 of the 48 U.S. states, with Michigan and Indiana excused from participation because of pre-scheduled statewide events. At 10:30 Eastern time, sirens signaled that persons outside should look for the nearest shelter as an exercise for the time that a nuclear bomb might be dropped on their area. The drill ended after 10 minutes.
• The last execution in Wales took place at the Swansea Prison when Vivian Frederick Teed, a 24-year-old man, was hanged for the 1957 hammer murder of the manager of the branch post office of Fforestfach during a robbery.
• Died: Alfred M. Best, 81, American insurance industry executive who founded the A. M. Best service to evaluate and publish a rating of the financial stability of insurance companies.

  May 7, 1958 (Wednesday)

• Flying the recently introduced Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, U.S. Air Force Major Howard C. Johnson set a new record for highest altitude reached, making a "zoom climb" after taking off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and ascending to — more than 17 miles — breaking the previous record set five days earlier by a French Trident-06 of by more than.

  May 8, 1958 (Thursday)

• A head-on collision between two trains killed 128 people in Brazil in the city of Mangueira, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, and injured more than 300. A signalling error had routed an outgoing commuter train onto the same track as an incoming local train. The collision resulted in a 'horrible mass of twisted steel and mangled bodies' as the two trains telescoped together. Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek dismissed three officials of the Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil for negligence.
• U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon was threatened by a hostile crowd of 2,000 leftist rioters while he was visiting Lima, the capital of Peru, as part of an official tour of South America. Nixon got out of his automobile to confront demonstrators who had massed outside of the University of San Marcos and "was spat upon, grazed on the neck by a stone, shoved and booed". A reporter at the scene wrote, "Pale with anger but keeping a tight smile on his lips, Mr. Nixon stood his ground for four minutes though engulfed by screaming demonstrators. He challenged them to face him in a debate."
• King Mohammed V of Morocco promulgated a royal charter to guide the North African nation to a constitutional monarchy, providing for an elected legislature and delegating more power to his cabinet of ministers. The King requested Ahmed Balafrej to form a new government as prime minister under the new system. Balafrej accepted and formed a cabinet five days later.
• The collapse of a wall, in a mine tunnel beneath the seabed near the Japanese city of Sasebo, drowned 29 coal miners.
• Lebanese journalist Nasib Al Matni, publisher of a Beirut newspaper, The Telegraph, was shot and killed in his office after his paper's continuous criticism of President Camille Chamoun. Matni's assassination outraged the Sunni Muslim and riots against the government of Chamoun broke out, beginning a civil war that would later be ended by U.S. intervention.
• U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., whose district encompassed Harlem in New York City, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of income tax evasion.
• Horror of Dracula, released by Britain's Hammer Film Productions, was premiered with Christopher Lee making the first of nine appearances as the vampire from the Bram Stoker 1897 novel, and Peter Cushing in the first of five films as Count Dracula's nemesis, Dr. Van Helsing. Despite being produced in the United Kingdom, the film premiered in the United States before being premiered as Dracula two weeks later, on May 22 in London (the title had been altered in the U.S. to avoid conflict with the 1931 Universal Pictures film. The British version embellished Count Dracula with fangs, red contact lenses, and more blood.
• Died: Norman Bel Geddes, 65, American industrial designer and theatrical producer, died of a heart attack while having lunch with a friend at New York City's University Club.