May 1964

[May 1], 1964 (Friday)

• At 4:00 a.m. at Dartmouth College, mathematics professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz ran the first program written in BASIC, an easy to learn computer programming language that they had created. The original version had 14 statements and nine built in DEF functions. Kemeny would write later that "We at Dartmouth envisaged the possibility of millions of people writing their own computer programs".
• Born: Yvonne van Gennip, Netherlands speed skater, winner of three gold medals at the 1988 Winter Olympics; in Haarlem

  [May 2], 1964 (Saturday)

• A North Vietnamese frogman sank the U.S. Navy aviation transport USNS Card after it had taken on a cargo of helicopters at Saigon. At about 5:00 in the morning, a hole was blown in the Card below the waterline, and the ship began sinking, eventually reaching the bottom of the deep Saigon River. The flight deck and superstructure remained above the surface, but five U.S. sailors were killed. The ship was soon refloated and repaired.
• An escalator accident injured 46 teenagers, one fatally, at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, where they were given free admission to a baseball game between the Orioles and the Cleveland Indians. Ironically, the youngsters were among 20,000 who had been invited for "Safety Patrol Day". Annette S. Costantini, 14, was at the front of the line and was crushed by the stampede that resulted when the top of the escalator was partially blocked by a wooden barricade.
• About 1,000 students participated in the first major student demonstration against the Vietnam War, marching in New York City as part of the "May 2nd Movement" that had been organized by students at Yale University. Marches also occurred in San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Madison, Wisconsin.
• Senator Barry Goldwater received more than 75% of the vote in the Texas Republican Presidential referendum, "a nonbinding survey of voter sentiment".
• The long running BBC television documentary series Horizon was broadcast for the first time, with the new BBC-2 network presenting "The World of Buckminster Fuller".
• West Ham United won the FA Cup for the first time in their history, beating Preston North End 3–2 at Wembley Stadium.
• Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh's seven-week-old son was christened Edward Antony Richard Louis – today he is The Duke of Edinburgh.
• Died:
• *Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, both 19, were hitchhiking in Meadville, Mississippi, when they were kidnapped, beaten and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their badly decomposed bodies would be found by chance two months later in July, during the search for three missing civil rights workers. More than 40 years would pass before James Ford Seale would successfully be prosecuted for the murders and convicted in 2007 at the age of 72. Seale would die in prison in 2011.
• *Lady Astor, 84, American-born British politician who became the first woman to ever serve in the United Kingdom's House of Commons. She was born as Nancy Witcher Langhorne near Danville, Virginia, in 1879, and served from 1919 to 1945.

  [May 3], 1964 (Sunday)

• Voting on independence for the European islands of Malta concluded after three days, with 54.5% of the valid votes in favor of a proposed constitution that provided for Malta as a parliamentary democracy with a British Governor-General. On the question "Do you approve of the constitution proposed by the Government of Malta, endorsed by the Legislative Assembly, and published in the Malta Gazette?", 65,714 voted "yes" and 54,919 voted "no".
• Voting for the 99-seat Parliament of Lebanon concluded after five consecutive Sundays, with independent candidates winning 70 of the contests. The other 29 seats were scattered among six political parties, with Camille Chamoun's National Liberal Party getting 7 of the seats.
• Born: Ron Hextall, Canadian ice hockey goaltender; in Brandon, Manitoba

  [May 4], 1964 (Monday)

• The soap opera Another World was first broadcast on NBC in the United States. Another World, which was a spin-off from two other soap operas, is set in the fictional town of Bay City and centers around on exotic melodrama between families of different classes and philosophies. The soap opera would air for 35 years on the network before airing its final episode on June 25, 1999.
• The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution, by voice vote, recognizing that bourbon whiskey was a "distinctive product of the United States" and asking that U.S. government agencies "take appropriate action to prohibit the importation into the United States of whiskey designated as bourbon whiskey". The measure, "an expression of congressional sentiment" rather than a law, had passed the U.S. Senate in September, and noted that Scotland, Canada and France prohibited the importation, respectively, of scotch, Canadian whisky and cognac.
• The Gandak River Irrigation and Power Project was inaugurated in Nepal by Nepal's King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah and India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, four years after the two nations had agreed to the construction of a barrage to dam the river to provide electrification of the area.

  [May 5], 1964 (Tuesday)

• The government of Israel announced that it had completed construction of the National Water Carrier of Israel, an irrigation project for increased usage of the Jordan River. On January 16, Egypt's President Nasser and the leaders of 12 other Arab nations had declared that they would divert the three main tributaries of the river away from Israel. After warnings from the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Nations, the Arab nations dropped their diversion plans and made no further objections to the Jordan Waters project.
• Born: Heike Henkel, German track athlete and Olympic gold medalist in the women's high jump, 1992; in Kiel, West Germany
• Died: Howard Zahniser, 58, American environmentalist who authored the Wilderness Act of 1964, died from heart disease two months before Congress passed the legislation.

  [May 6], 1964 (Wednesday)

• In the case of Dering v Uris, Dr. Wladislaw Dering won a Pyrrhic victory in a court of the Queen's Bench division against novelist Leon Uris and his publisher, Kimber and Company, in a suit for libel arising from Uris's bestselling novel Exodus. Judge Frederick Lawton agreed that Dr. Dering, a physician at the Auschwitz extermination camp, had been defamed by an untrue statement that he had failed to use anesthesia in some of his experimental operations on Jewish inmates, but awarded the doctor damages of a single halfpenny— and ordered Dr. Dering to pay more than £25,000 as the plaintiff's one-half of the court costs. Dr. Dering would pass away later in the year before the costs could be paid. In 1970, Uris would publish another bestseller, QB VII, loosely based on the Dering trial.
• Joe Orton's black comedy Entertaining Mr Sloane premièred at the New Arts Theatre in London.
• Born: Dana Hill, American film actress; as Dana Lynne Goetz in Encino, California

  [May 7], 1964 (Thursday)

• Pacific Air Lines Flight 773 crashed near Concord, California, killing all 44 people on board. The Fairchild F-27 had started from Reno, Nevada, made a stop at Stockton, California and was short of its San Francisco destination when it went down. Among the first clues of what had happened was the discovery of a cocked.357 caliber revolver, found in the wreckage, with six spent cartridges. The next day, the FBI confirmed that the cockpit recorder had picked up pilot Ernest Clark shouting, "My God, I've been shot!" before the plane went down. The revolver's serial number was traced to passenger Francisco "Frank" Gonzales, who had represented the Philippines in sailing at the 1960 Summer Olympic games, and who had taken out a $100,000 life insurance policy before boarding at Reno.
• U.S. president Lyndon Johnson first used the term that would describe his vision of federally funded social programs to create "the Great Society". Speaking to college students at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, President Johnson said, "America is yours — yours to make a better land — yours to build the great society." He would describe the concept further at the University of Michigan on May 22.
• Two people were killed by the explosion of a rocket in a demonstration of rocket mail on Hasselkopf Mountain, near Braunlage, West Germany, by aeronautical engineer Gerhard Zucker. The West German government banned civilian rocket launches after the disaster.
• Born: Denis Mandarino, Brazilian composer, artist and writer; in São Paulo

  [May 8], 1964 (Friday)

• Ronald Wolfe became the last person in the United States to be executed for the crime of rape without homicide, after his conviction for a brutal attack in 1959 against an 8-year-old girl in Troy, Missouri. Wolf's execution took place in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
• Born:
• *Melissa Gilbert, American actress and TV director, former president of the Screen Actors Guild; in Los Angeles
• *Bobby Labonte, American stock car racer and 2000 NASCAR Winston Cup Series champion; in Corpus Christi, Texas
• *Dave Rowntree, English drummer for the rock band Blur; in Colchester
• Died: Kichisaburo Nomura, 86, former Japanese Ambassador to the United States at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor

  [May 9], 1964 (Saturday)

• A plot to assassinate U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was foiled, three days before his visit to South Vietnam, with the arrest of Viet Cong agent Nguyen Van Troi. Troi, who would be celebrated as a martyr in North Vietnam after his October 15 execution, had planned to detonate a bomb as McNamara was being driven across the Cong Ly Bridge in Saigon on May 12.
• South Korean President Park Chung Hee reshuffled his Cabinet, after a series of student demonstrations against his efforts to restore diplomatic and trade relations with Japan. Choi Tu-son, the publisher of South Korea's largest newspaper, resigned as prime minister and was replaced two days later by Foreign Minister Chung Il-kwon.
• Great Western Railway steam locomotive 7029 Clun Castle ran from Plymouth to Bristol Temple Meads non-stop in a record time of 133 minutes and 9 seconds. Had it not been restricted to down Whiteball Bank near Wellington, it could have improved on the time.
• Died: Ngo Dinh Can, 53, South Vietnamese politician who had brutally governed the area around the city of Huế as the appointee of his older brother, the late president Ngo Dinh Diem, was executed by a firing squad. Convicted by the military government of murder, extortion and illegal arrests, Can had been refused asylum by the United States embassy after the assassination of Diem and another brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Because he was severely ill with diabetes and heart trouble, Can was taken on a stretcher to a sporting field in Saigon, tied to a wooden stake. Earlier in the day, Phan Quang Dong, the former chief of Can's secret police force, was executed at the municipal stadium in Huế before a crowd of 40,000 people.