October 1964

[October 1], 1964 (Thursday)

• The wreckage of the American submarine was located, almost a year and a half after it sank during sea trials east of Cape Cod, killing all 129 people on board. U.S. Secretary of the Navy Paul H. Nitze disclosed later in the day that the bathyscape Trieste II had positively identified the lost vessel by its identifying number, 593, found on five different parts of the sub, which had broken up as it descended. The Thresher had sunk on April 10, 1963, with its entire crew and 17 civilians.
• At the University of California, Berkeley, police attempted to arrest Jack Weinberg, a Congress of Racial Equality volunteer who had violated a university ban on activism at the Sather Gate and who had refused to show his student identification. Hundreds of protesters then blocked the police car, and 21-year-old UC-Berkeley junior Mario Savio stood on the car's roof to address his fellow demonstrators, inaugurating the Free Speech Movement that would spread to other campuses.
• On the first day they could apply for passes to visit relatives in East Germany, 32,156 residents of West Berlin applied at the 17 different offices in the city that issued the permits. Each pass entitled the bearer to one visit between October 30 and November 12, and two visits during Christmas and New Year.
• The Shinkansen high-speed rail system was inaugurated in Japan, beginning a trip on the line's first section between Tokyo and Osaka. The initial speed for the trip was slower than expected, at.
• Born: Harry Hill, English comedian; as Matthew Keith Hall in Woking
• Died: Ernst Toch, 76, Austrian composer

  [October 2], 1964 (Friday)

• All 80 people on board a Union de Transports Aériens flight were killed when the plane crashed into a mountain peak after taking off from Palma on the island of Majorca. The DC-6 had made several stops en route from Paris to Nouakchott in Mauritania, and departed from Palma at 4:14 a.m. and made its last contact with the Barcelona control tower at 5:10, giving no indication of trouble. Early accounts erroneously reported that the plane had fallen into the Mediterranean, roughly from Cartagena and the error would be repeated in reference books, including one account that "Although the crash area was searched by Spanish, French, British and Italian ships, neither survivors nor even wreckage of the doomed plane was ever discovered." The day after its disappearance, however, the missing French plane was located on the side of Mount Alcazaba, where it had impacted at on the mountain.
• A Communist Chinese musical, The East Is Red, was performed for the first time on a stage in Beijing and would gain widespread circulation the following year as a government-approved film about the Communist Revolution. People's Daily would report the next day that the musical, using "our people's favorite form of expression— singing and dancing— vividly portrayed the Chinese people, under the leadership of the Chinese Communists and Chairman Mao, engaged in their glorious journey of revolutionary battle and development."
• An American tourist in Paris was killed by a French woman who was committing suicide while both were visiting the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Veronica McConnell, a 24-year-old hospital technician, was fatally injured when 37-year-old Denise Rey-Herne climbed over the balustrade of the high north tower and jumped, killing both of them.
• The collapse of a four-story apartment building in Cairo killed 45 people in Egypt. The dead were residents of the slums of the capital city's Deir el Malak district.
• The Kinks, created by English brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies, released their first album. The self-titled album, Kinks, included their first hit song, "You Really Got Me".
• Died: James Cobb Burke, 49, American photographer who worked for Life magazine, was killed when he fell from a mountain in the Assam state in India, while taking pictures for as part of a reporting assignment.

  [October 3], 1964 (Saturday)

• Operation Sea Orbit, the first round-the-world voyage by nuclear-powered ships, came to an end as the aircraft carrier and the missile cruiser arrived in Norfolk, Virginia after a 64-day, trip made without refueling; the cruise marked "the first around-the-world showing of the American flag" since the voyage of the Great White Fleet between 1907 and 1909.
• Algemene Bank Nederland was created by the merger of two Netherlands banks, Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij and De Twentsche Bank . In the same year, Amsterdamsche Bank and Rotterdamsche Bank merged to create AMRO Bank. The two conglomerates would then merge in 1991 to become ABN AMRO.
• The New York Yankees clinched the American League pennant for the 29th time in 64 seasons, beating the Cleveland Indians, 8 to 3 and putting them two games ahead of the Chicago White Sox with only one game left in the season. At season's end the next day, the Yankees had a 99–63 win–loss record, the White Sox were 98-64 and the Baltimore Orioles were 97–65.
• The American TV series, Underdog, about an anthropomorphic shoeshine dog who turns into a superhero whenever trouble calls, is first broadcast on NBC. The show, which was created by Total Television, is one of the earliest known Saturday morning cartoons on U.S. television.
• A tornado killed 21 people when it swept through the predominantly Cajun French town of Larose, Louisiana, during storms hatched by the approach of Hurricane Hilda.
• Born: Clive Owen, English actor; in Coventry

  [October 4], 1964 (Sunday)

• The St. Louis Cardinals clinched the National League pennant on the last day of the season with a combination of their 11 to 5 win over the New York Mets and the Cincinnati Reds' 10 to 0 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies. Going into the final day, St. Louis and Cincinnati both had records of 92 wins and 69 losses and both were playing at home; the Reds' loss came in the afternoon, and would have played a one-game playoff if the Cardinals had lost their evening game against the last place Mets.
• Graham Hill of England won the U.S. Grand Prix motor race for the second consecutive year, at Watkins Glen, New York, giving him the lead over fellow Englishman John Surtees and Scotland's Jim Clark with one race left in the 1964 Grand Prix series for the World Driving Championship. The tenth and last race would take place in Mexico City on October 25.
• Ahmad Shukeiri began the daily operation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with offices at the Orient House in East Jerusalem, at that time a part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The creation of the PLO had been authorized by a June 2 resolution of the Palestinian National Congress.
• The 1964 Armstrong 500 motor race was held at the Mount Panorama Circuit in New South Wales, Australia, and was won by Spencer Martin and Bill Brown.
• Died: Earnest Elmo Calkins, 96, American ad executive who pioneered the use of artwork, the "soft sell", and fictional characters in advertising. E. E. Calkins, known as "The Dean of Advertising Men" and co-founder of the Calkins and Holden agency, became one of the industry's most successful people despite being profoundly deaf since childhood.

  [October 5], 1964 (Monday)

• China's Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong received a delegation of officials from North Vietnam, including its prime minister, Phạm Văn Đồng, and predicted that the U.S. effort could be defeated in the Vietnam War. Noting that the U.S. had 18 army divisions and that it could only spare three in Asia, Mao concluded that it was "impossible for the United States to send many troops to South Vietnam." Historian Michael Lind would write nearly 50 years later, "The significance of these conversations can hardly be exaggerated. We now know that the nightmare of American strategists had come true in the summer and fall of 1964."
• A narrow tunnel under the Berlin Wall was shut down, but not before 23 men and 31 women had escaped to West Berlin during the previous 48 hours. One border guard, East German Army Corporal Egon Schultz, was killed by gunfire, either by a stray bullet fired by his fellow guardsmen, or by someone on the western side. The tunnel began beneath a building on East Berlin's Streilitzer Strasse, running 35 feet beneath the wall and then another 450 feet "to the cellar of an abandoned bakery at 97 Bernauerstrasse in the Wedding district" in the French zone of East Berlin.
• The conference of Non-Aligned Nations began in Cairo, with representatives from 47 nations that considered themselves to be unaligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union. Congolese rebel Moise Tshombe arrived in Cairo, uninvited, after his charter jet was diverted to Athens and after he had returned to Cairo as the passenger on an Ethiopian Airlines, creating a diplomatic crisis.
• Trans-Canada Air Lines began a nationwide campaign with full-page newspaper advertisements headlined "TAKE A LOOK AT AIR CANADA", to announce a new name that would work equally well in English or French. The first airplane with the Air Canada logo would fly Queen Elizabeth back to the United Kingdom on October 13.
• Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and her consort The Duke of Edinburgh began an 8-day visit to Canada, starting with their landing at RCAF Station Summerside in Prince Edward Island on a chartered Boeing 707. The couple spent the night on board the royal yacht, HMY Britannia.
• The West African nation of Gambia issued its own, distinct national currency, the Gambian pound, in preparation for its independence on February 18, 1965; the new notes replaced the existing colonial currency, the British West African pound.

  [October 6], 1964 (Tuesday)

• The Soviet Union launched Kosmos 47, an uncrewed test-flight of a prototype Soviet Voskhod spacecraft, a week before the actual Voskhod 1 crewed mission. According to one historian, the timetable for putting the three-man Voskhod capsule into space was hastened in order to move ahead of the two-man Gemini capsule being developed by the United States, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev "placed so high a priority on space spectaculars that he felt it essential to fly a multimanned spacecraft before Gemini"; a three-man mission, by necessity, had to be very short because extra seats could only be accommodated by having less life support.
• The bishops of the Vatican Ecumenical Council approved measures for unity with non-Catholic Christians. Among items passed were a resolution of the Roman Catholic Church's need for "an examination of conscience" ; an acknowledgment that the Church also had responsibility for the disunity with their "separated brethren" ; to allow Catholics and other Christians to participate in common prayer in certain circumstances ; and to take steps "to further Christian unity and inter-faith understanding".
• Queen Elizabeth II began "her most guarded day in history" with unprecedented security measures as she visited Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in Canada in the centennial celebration of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference. Because of fears of an attack on the British monarch, members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police patrolled the streets and stood on the roofs of buildings, and four Royal Canadian Navy destroyers and a minesweeper escorted the royal yacht. The Queen addressed the crowd in both English and French.
• Walter Ulbricht, the Communist Party leader of East Germany, announced an amnesty for 10,000 political prisoners who were to be released before December 20. Ulbricht said that his government would "pardon those who by their conduct in prison had shown that they had learned their lesson".