November 1969

[November 1], 1969 (Saturday)

• TWA Flight 85 landed safely at Rome's Fiumicino Airport at 5:07 in the morning local time, 18 hours after it had been hijacked during a scheduled flight between two California cities. The Boeing 707 had departed Los Angeles for San Francisco when one of its passengers, Italian-born U.S. Marine Lance Corporal Raphael Minichiello, entered the cockpit with a carbine rifle and directed the six-member crew to travel eastward. With the crew held at gunpoint, Flight 85 had made stops in Denver; New York; Bangor, Maine; and Shannon, Ireland, before Minichiello landed in Rome and was transported out of the Italian capital by the chief of Rome's police, Pietro Guli. Minichiello then escaped into the Italian countryside, then made his way back to the city. Hours later, the native of Italy was captured by Rome police "who found him shivering in his underwear near the ancient Appian Way". Italian courts declined requests to extradite Minichiello and convicted him on a firearms charge, for which he served 18 months in prison. Afterwards, Minichiello, facing charges that carried a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison, remained in Italy.
• Died: Pauline Bush, 83, American silent film actress

  [November 2], 1969 (Sunday)

• Elections were held in Tunisia for the 101-member Chamber of Deputies and for the presidency, and no choices were available to the reported 1,443,347 eligible citizens who participated. Habib Bourguiba, who had overthrown the monarchy in 1957, was unopposed and was re-elected to another five year term as President of Tunisia, and the legislators were from the only legal political organization in the North African nation, the Socialist Destourian Party.
• Born: Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu, American musician, bassist for the metal band Korn; in Bakersfield, California

  [November 3], 1969 (Monday)

• U.S. President Richard Nixon addressed the nation on television and radio at 9:30 p.m., Washington time, to announce his plans to end American involvement in the Vietnam War. Nixon gave his reasons for rejecting immediately removing all troops, framing that option as the "first defeat in our Nation's history" that "would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world." Nixon instead reiterated his plan for Vietnamization, "the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable" but added that he did not intend to announce details of the timetable. In closing, he described the people who would support his plan for a drawdown as "the great silent majority of my fellow Americans", in contrast to a "vocal minority" of protesters which, if their will prevailed "over reason and the will of the majority", would mean that the United States would have "no future as a free society."

  [November 4], 1969 (Tuesday)

• The Public Broadcasting Service was incorporated in the United States.
• Born:
• *Tony Burke, Australian politician, Leader of the House, in Sydney
• *Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs, American hip hop recording artist and three time Grammy winner; in New York City
• *Matthew McConaughey, American film and TV actor, 2014 Oscar winner; in Uvalde, Texas
• Died:
• *Frank G. Clement, 49, three time Governor of Tennessee; in an auto accident
• *Ikbal Ali Shah, 75, Indian-born British author; in an auto accident
• *Carlos Marighella, 57, Brazilian politician; from police ambush

  [November 5], 1969 (Wednesday)

• Thirty-six crewmen on board the Liberian-registered oil tanker Keo were killed after the vessel was cut in half and sank about from Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. The Keo had departed Marion, Massachusetts with a cargo of of fuel oil, en route to Bermuda, when it encountered a storm in the Atlantic Ocean. The U.S. Coast Guard was able to rescue all seven people from a sinking yacht in the same area.
• Three American prisoners of war walked into a South Vietnamese militia outpost near Tam Ky, a week after they had been freed from captivity by the Viet Cong. The three, all from the southeastern United States, had walked for a week through the jungle after being set free.
• Died: Lloyd Corrigan, 69, American film director

  [November 6], 1969 (Thursday)

• At least 65 gold miners near Klerksdorp, South Africa, were killed by an underground dynamite explosion at the Buffelsfontein mine. The blast happened a few minutes before their shift had been scheduled to end, and about half an hour after their employer had lowered 11 cases of dynamite into the mine shaft where they were working. Most of the dead were black Africans from the neighboring kingdom of Lesotho.
• Died: Susan Taubes, 41, Hungarian-born American novelist; by suicide only a month after the release of her bestselling book Divorcing, by walking into the Atlantic Ocean after taking a taxi to the beach at East Hampton, New York.

  [November 7], 1969 (Friday)

• Australia's Prime Minister, John Gorton, survived a challenge to his leadership of the Liberal Party, waged by two of his fellow MPs among the 66 Liberal Party members in the Australian House of Representatives. A win by either of the challengers, Treasurer and Deputy Party Leader William McMahon or National Development Minister David Fairbairn, would have removed Gorton from office as Prime Minister. The results of the vote were not made public, and the official report was only that Gorton had received at least 33 of the 66 votes on the first ballot, enough for a majority over his challengers.
• The first German orbiting satellite, AZUR, was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 5:52 p.m. local time and inserted into a polar orbit. The spacecraft, made to study cosmic radiation, solar particles and the Van Allen belts, made West Germany the ninth nation to enter outer space, and would transmit data until June 29, 1970.
• Sister Catherine Cesnik, a Roman Catholic nun and schoolteacher in Baltimore, disappeared after leaving her apartment to go shopping in Catonsville, Maryland. Her abandoned car would be found a block away the next morning, but her body would not be located until January 3, 1970. The case, which remains unsolved, would be the subject 47 years later in a Netflix documentary television series, The Keepers.
• Born:
• *Hélène Grimaud, French classical pianist and conservationist; in Aix-en-Provence
• *Michelle Clunie, American TV actress; in Portland, Oregon

  [November 8], 1969 (Saturday)

• Paul Roitsch of Pan American World Airways became the first commercial pilot to fly the supersonic Concorde airliner, although Pan Am would never add the Concorde to its fleet of aircraft.
• Died:
• *Dave O'Brien, 57, American film actor; from a heart attack during a yachting race
• *Ricardo Aguirre, 30, Venezuelan folk singer who popularized the gaita zuliana style of music; in an auto accident
• *Vesto Slipher, 93, American astronomer who discovered the redshift variation in measuring galactic data

  [November 9], 1969 (Sunday)

• A group of American Indians, led by Richard Oakes, seized Alcatraz Island for 19 months, inspiring a wave of renewed Indian pride and government reform. Oakes, a Mohawk Indian and a student at San Francisco State College, organized a gathering at San Francisco and began reading a proclamation reclaiming the former site of the federal prison "by right of discovery", and made an offer to compensate the United States government with "24 dollars in glass beads and red cloth", based on an apocryphal story that Dutch West India Company had paid 60 Dutch guilders to a group of Delaware Indians for their rights to Manhattan Island. After telling reporters that the offer followed "a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago", Oakes then accepted an offer by Canadian yacht owner Ronald Craig to sail over to Alcatraz at no charge, and 50 boarded the Monte Cristo. Oakes and Chippewa businessman Adam Fortunate Eagle swam to the island along with two other men. The group stayed for 15 minutes, and then was escorted back in a small boat, but Oakes and 13 others returned that evening and spent the night before being returned to the mainland on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. After the symbolic taking of the island, a much longer siege would begin 11 days later on November 20, and would last until June 11, 1971.
• The end of the daily rum ration, enjoyed by sailors of Britain's Royal Navy for more than two centuries, was announced by the Ministry of Defence. The "tot", consisting of of 95.5 proof rum, was given at mid-day as a morale-booster for the men at sea and had been a practice introduced in 1731. The serving of the rum would formally end on August 1, 1970.

  [November 10], 1969 (Monday)

• The eight-team International Boxing League, a venture of Chicago sportscaster Jack Drees, made its debut at 8:00 in the evening before about 200 people at the Memorial Auditorium in Louisville, Kentucky. The Kentucky Pacers defeated the Milwaukee Bombers, 50 to 20, in the inaugural meet. An IBL card consisted of seven bouts in weight classes ranging from bantamweight to heavyweight. For each bout, a team would be credited with one point for each round that was a draw, two points for winning a round, and four points for winning the bout. Drees had proposed the idea of teams of amateur boxers to compete against each other in advance of an eventual professional boxing team league. With the approval of the Amateur Athletic Union for the idea, the other six teams in the IBL were the Detroit Dukes, Miami Barracudas and New York Jolts in the Eastern Division and the Chicago Clippers, Denver Rocks and St. Louis Saints in the Western Division. The New York Jolts would win the first IBL title, 46–24, over the Chicago Clippers on June 19, 1970.
• Sesame Street aired its first episode on the National Educational Television network, the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting System, starting after school at various times. As one critic noted in informing parents that the new show for preschool children presented the alphabet and numerals in the form of commercials, "The first edition of Sesame Street comes to you today... through the courtesy of the numbers 2 and 3, and the letters E, S and W." The AP's TV critic, Cynthia Lowry, praised the show as "a delight" that "is bound to have many post-school fans" as well and noted that new characters introduced were "a huge creature called Big Bird and another called Kermit the Frog" while Rick DuBrow of UPI said that "This gentle, witty series... has the sound and feel of people who know and love children— not those whose idea is to exploit them."
• The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency tested the first supersonic drone aircraft, the D-21 TAGBOARD, on a secret reconnaissance mission over China. Flying at an altitude of and a speed of Mach 3.27, the drone deviated from its planned route because of programming errors in its inertial navigation system, and self-destructed a pre-set altitude after exhausting its fuel supply, and no data was recovered.
• Born:
• *Jens Lehmann, German soccer football goalkeeper for Borussia Dortmund, Arsenal, and the German national team; in Essen, West Germany
• *Faustino Asprilla, Colombian soccer football forward and national team member; in Tuluá
• *Ellen Pompeo, American TV and film actress; in Everett, Massachusetts
• Died: Sir David Rose, 46, 2nd Governor-General of Guyana since 1966, was killed in a freak accident while visiting London, as a nine-story tall scaffolding collapsed on his limousine while he was in front of Britain's Parliament Square.