May 1963


The following events occurred in May 1963:

[May 1], 1963 (Wednesday)

[May 2], 1963 (Thursday)

[May 3], 1963 (Friday)

  • In Brazil, 37 of the 50 people on a Cruzeiro do Sul airliner were killed as the Convair CV-340 was attempting to return to São Paulo shortly after its takeoff from the Congonhas Airport. The plane had been bound for Rio de Janeiro but its right engine caught fire. In its final approach to the runway, the aircraft nosed up to a 45-degree angle, stalled and struck a house on the Avenida Piassang.
  • Development testing of the Gemini Agena Model 8247 main engine at Arnold Engineering Development Center began, with an objective of verifying the engine's ability to start at least five times. Two major problems, turbine overspeed and gas generator valve failure in high temperature operations, were found.
  • Condingup, Western Australia, was declared a townsite.

[May 4], 1963 (Saturday)

  • All 55 people on an Air Afrique airliner died when the Douglas DC-6 crashed into Mount Cameroon less than half an hour after takeoff from Douala in Cameroon, bound for Lagos in Nigeria. Blame for the accident was placed on the pilot's decision to descend from to while flying toward the high mountain. One passenger, a U.S. diplomatic courier, initially survived the crash, but would die of his injuries on May 10.
  • New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller secretly married his girlfriend, Margaretta "Happy" Murphy, despite being advised that his remarriage, after divorcing the year before, would hurt his chances for the Republican Party nomination for the U.S. presidency. Television comedian Carol Burnett, 28, married television producer Joe Hamilton in a ceremony in Juarez, Mexico, on the same day, after Hamilton had obtained "a quickie Mexican divorce".
  • The sinking of a motor launch on the Nile River drowned more than 185 people in Egypt, nearly all of them Muslim pilgrims who were beginning the journey to Mecca from the city of Maghagha. The boat's capacity was only 80 people, but more than 200 people crowded on board to make the trip. Among the 15 people who survived were the boat's captain, its owner and its conductor, who were all jailed while the matter was investigated.
  • Police used high-pressure water hoses and police dogs to disperse a crowd of more than 1,000 African-American protesters in Birmingham, Alabama.
  • A fire at the Le Monde Theater in Diourbel, Senegal, killed 64 people.Died: Dickey Kerr, 69, American baseball pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, praised later for remaining honest during the corrupt Black Sox Scandal in 1919.

[May 5], 1963 (Sunday)

[May 6], 1963 (Monday)

[May 7], 1963 (Tuesday)

[May 8], 1963 (Wednesday)

[May 9], 1963 (Thursday)

  • Testing of the Gemini parachute recovery system began at El Centro, California, as a welded steel mock-up of the Gemini reentry section was dropped from a C-130 aircraft at to duplicate dynamic pressure and altitude at which actual spacecraft recovery would be initiated. The main problem, parachute tucking recurred in two drops and the Gemini Project Office would suspend testing until the condition could be corrected. Qualification testing resumed August 8.
  • After the first six attempts at a successful launch of the MIDAS satellite failed, MIDAS 7 was successfully placed into a polar orbit. During the first three years of attempts, three satellites failed to reach orbit, while the other three suffered power failures. MIDAS 7 would operate for 47 days and would detect nine Soviet missile launches.

[May 10], 1963 (Friday)

  • A settlement was reached between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the leading business owners of Birmingham, Alabama, with the SCLC agreeing to call off its boycott of local retailers, who in return "agreed to desegregate lunch counters, rest rooms, fitting rooms and drinking fountains" and to hire more African-Americans for sales and clerical jobs.
  • Author Maurice Sendak, working on his first book for children, made the decision to abandon his original title, Where the Wild Horses Are, after concluding that horses were too difficult to draw, and changed the characters in the book to friendly monsters. The book, Where the Wild Things Are, would become a Caldecott Medal winning bestseller and launch Sendak's career.Born: Sławomir Skrzypek, Polish financier; in Katowice Died:
  • * Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, 31, American NFL player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, died of a heroin overdose.
  • * Léonce Crenier, 74, French Catholic monk who promoted the theological/political concept of Precarity

[May 11], 1963 (Saturday)

[May 12], 1963 (Sunday)

[May 13], 1963 (Monday)

  • The U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Brady v. Maryland, setting the principle that in before trial in a criminal case, the prosecution disclose any exculpatory evidence to the defense team. Named for accused killer John Leo Brady, the "Brady disclosure" is now a requirement for prosecutors. Brady, who had been sentenced to death in the original 1958 case, would be afforded a new trial, resulting in a sentence of life imprisonment, from which he would eventually be paroled.
  • A smallpox outbreak was first detected in Stockholm in Sweden and would not be under control until July.
  • The comic strip Modesty Blaise made its debut in England as part of the Evening Standard of London.

[May 14], 1963 (Tuesday)

  • The scheduled launch of Mercury 9 was halted after the countdown had reached T-60 minutes, because of difficulty in the fuel pump of the diesel engine that would pull the gantry away during liftoff. After a delay of more than two hours for repairs, countdown resumed but was halted again at T-13 minutes, when the Bermuda tracking station reported a failure of a computer converter important in the orbital insertion decision, forcing the launch to be scrubbed. At 6:00 p.m. local time, MSC's Walter C. Williams reported that the Bermuda equipment had been repaired, and the launch was rescheduled for the next day.
  • In Denmark, the Frederick IX Bridge was officially opened, spanning the Guldborgsund strait between the islands of Falster and Lolland.
  • The Rolling Stones signed their first recording contract, after talent scout Dick Rowe asked them to audition for Decca Records.
  • The new office of Parliamentary Secretary was created in the Canadian government.
  • Kuwait became the 111th member of the United Nations, over the objections of Iraq.Died: Harold Stanley, 77, American businessman and one of the founders of Morgan Stanley in 1935

[May 15], 1963 (Wednesday)

  • At 8:04 a.m. at, NASA launched Mercury 9 from Cape Canaveral, with astronaut L. Gordon Cooper in the capsule designated Faith 7. Cooper's 22-orbit mission was the last for the Mercury program. Cooper entered the spacecraft at 5:33 a.m. for an 8:00 launch, and took a brief nap while awaiting liftoff. At T-minus 11 minutes and 30 seconds the countdown was halted for a problem in the guidance equipment, and another hold was called at T-0:19 to determine whether automatic sequencing was working. Liftoff happened four minutes after the original time, and visual tracking was possible for two minutes. Five minutes after liftoff at 8:09 a.m., Faith 7 was inserted into an orbit that ranged from to above the Earth and reached a maximum orbital speed of. Temperatures inside the capsule ranged from to, uncomfortable but tolerable, before cooling down. During his third orbit, Cooper became the first human to launch an object from an orbiting spacecraft. Cooper was able to see the flashing beacon on the night side of the fourth orbit.
  • Housewife Jean Nidetch founded the Weight Watchers company, with the first meeting held at a loft above a movie theater in Little Neck, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens.

[May 16], 1963 (Thursday)

  • Astronaut Gordon Cooper returned to Earth safely after making 22 orbits and traveling in the Faith 7 capsule. During reentry operation, Cooper fired the retrorockets manually and attained the proper re-entry attitude by using his observation window scribe marks to give proper reference with the horizon and to determine if he were rolling. From the command ship in the Pacific Ocean off the Japanese coast, John Glenn advised Cooper when to jettison the retropack. The main chute deployed at. Faith 7 splashed down from the prime recovery ship,, at 2323 UTC after 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds in space flight.Died: Oleg Penkovsky, 44, formerly a Soviet Army colonel and spy, was executed five days after being sentenced to death by a military tribunal for passing secrets to the United States and the United Kingdom.

[May 17], 1963 (Friday)

  • A U.S. Army OH-23 helicopter with two men on board, Captains Ben W. Stutts and Charleton W. Voltz, was shot down by North Korean ground forces after straying north of the Demilitarized Zone. The two men would be freed, after 365 days of imprisonment, on May 16, 1964, following the United Nations Command agreeing to sign a statement that Stutts and Voltz had committed espionage. North Korea declined to return the helicopter.
  • Challenger Bruno Sammartino faced champion Buddy Rogers of the World Wide Wrestling Federation in a professional wrestling match at New York's Madison Square Garden. Sammartino, using his signature move, "the Italian backbreaker", defeated Rogers in only 48 seconds, and would reign as the WWWF champion for the next eight years.

[May 18], 1963 (Saturday)

  • An accident killed 27 people, 12 of them children, who all drowned when their bus they were on was sideswiped by a passing pickup truck, and plunged into the deep Hillsboro Canal near Belle Glade, Florida. Only the driver and 14 people survived. The victims were African-American farm laborers and their families, on their way home from a day of work of harvesting beans at the Kirchman Brothers Farm.
  • Rocketdyne successfully tested a thrust chamber assembly for the Gemini reentry control system. The development of a suitable ablative thrust chamber, however, remained a major problem, and testing was incomplete. Rocketdyne was already three months late in delivering TCA hardware to McDonnell, and completion of testing took three months longer than predicted.
  • Sukarno was named as President for Life of Indonesia. Sukarno, who had ruled since 1945, would serve for another four years before being deposed, and would spend the rest of his life afterward under house arrest, dying on June 21, 1970.Died: Ernie Davis, 23, African-American football star who won the 1961 Heisman Trophy while at Syracuse University; of leukemia. He had been diagnosed after signing with the NFL's Cleveland Browns.

[May 19], 1963 (Sunday)

  • Astronaut Gordon Cooper appeared at a national televised press conference to answer questions about the Mercury 9 mission. During the flight, he had seen the haze layer previously reported by Wally Schirra of Mercury 8 and John Glenn's "fireflies" seen on Mercury 6. Cooper's most astonishing revelation was his ability visually to distinguish objects on the earth, including an African town where the flashing light experiment was conducted; several Australian cities including large oil refineries at Perth; and wisps of smoke from rural houses in Asia. At the same conference, Dr. Robert C. Seamans said that a Mercury 10 flight was "quite unlikely."
  • British driver Bob Anderson won the 1963 Rome Grand Prix.

[May 20], 1963 (Monday)

[May 21], 1963 (Tuesday)

[May 22], 1963 (Wednesday)

[May 23], 1963 (Thursday)

[May 24], 1963 (Friday)

  • The New York Journal-American reported in a copyrighted story that NASA had revealed in a closed session of a congressional subcommittee that there had been five fatalities in the Soviet cosmonaut program, all of which had been covered up. According to the source, Serenty Shiborin had been the first man in space, launched in February 1959 and was "never heard of again after 28 minutes when the signals went dead". Other failed launches were said to have been Piotr Dolgov on October 11, 1960; Vassilievitch Zowodovsky in April 1961; and two persons, possibly a man and a woman, launched together on May 17, 1961. Alexei Adzhubei, the editor of the newspaper Izvestia and the son-in-law of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, denied the reports of four of the five deaths in the newspaper's May 27 edition, saying that the people had been "technicians working on space equipment" and that two of them were still alive, although no denial was made about the alleged 1959 death of Siborin.
  • U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invited James Baldwin and other Black leaders to discuss race relations at his apartment in Manhattan. The turbulent meeting gained wide publicity and had a significant impact on Kennedy.
  • Project Emily ended in the UK as the last squadron of Thor nuclear missile stations, located at RAF Hemswell, was disbanded.Born: Michael Chabon, American novelist ; in Washington, D.C.Died: Elmore James, 45, American blues musician and 1992 inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. died of a heart attack.

[May 25], 1963 (Saturday)

[May 26], 1963 (Sunday)

[May 27], 1963 (Monday)

  • North American began testing the half-scale two test vehicle for the Paraglider Landing System Program to investigate paraglider liftoff characteristics, helicopter tow techniques, and the effects of wind-bending during high-speed tows.
  • Columbia Records released The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's second and most influential studio album, which opened with the song "Blowin' in the Wind".Died: Grigoris Lambrakis, 50, Greek politician, physician and Olympic athlete, died five days after being attacked. More than 500,000 people attended his funeral the next day and marched in protest against Greece's right-wing government.

[May 28], 1963 (Tuesday)

  • A cyclone killed 22,000 people in and around the city of Comilla in East Pakistan. Winds as high as ripped the countryside, and "the many offshore islands were literally swept clean of people"; Chittagong and Cox's Bazar lost 5,000 people each, and waves were powerful enough to send ships inland, including four ocean liners.Born: Gavin Harrison, British drummer; in HarrowDied: Klaus Clusius, 60, German physical chemist

[May 29], 1963 (Wednesday)

[May 30], 1963 (Thursday)

[May 31], 1963 (Friday)