October 1976

October 1, 1976 (Friday)

• Hurricane Liza killed more than 600 people in Mexico's Baja California Peninsula, striking the resort city of La Paz, Baja California Sur where 350 people died, and another 280 in the surrounding area.
• The U.S. state of California became the first in the United States to grant terminally ill hospital patients the right to the "living will", where they could opt to withdraw life-sustaining procedures if there was no hope of recovery. Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law after it had passed both houses of the California state legislature.
• U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz was reprimanded by President Gerald Ford, after racist jokes and remarks that Butz had made against African-American people, were printed in the magazine New Times. Ford summoned Butz to the White House for "a rare public upbraiding of a Cabinet official" and Butz apologized to the lone black U.S. Senator, Edward Brooke. While most newspapers avoided quoting the joke directly, the statement was described as saying that black people wanted "only three things" and that "The things were listed, in order, in obscene, derogatory and scatological terms."
• The alcohol industry in the United States switched to the metric system in identifying the volume of liquor. Notably, the fifth,, was replaced by the 750 mL bottle and the pint bottle was replaced by the 500 mL bottle.
• Born: Nasir al-Wuhayshi, Yemen-born terrorist and leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula

  October 2, 1976 (Saturday)

• Argentina's President Jorge Rafael Videla narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by guerrillas who had planted a time-bomb beneath the reviewing stand at the heavily guarded Campo de Mayo Army Base near Buenos Aires. Videla reviewed a parade of the base's troops and made a speech to mark "Army Communications Day", then left the area to inspect a display at a nearby building. Five minutes after the ceremonies ended and the reviewing stand had emptied, the bomb exploded, destroying the stand and the area on which the president had been standing. General Videla, who had continued living on the base after being installed as president, had preceded a speech by the base commander, General Jose Catan, who told the assembled soldiers that the Argentine armed forces were winning the battle against left-wing opponents and said that "the guerrillas have given up trying to attack military bases," a few minutes before the bomb exploded.
• Danny Thompson, a shortstop for baseball's Texas Rangers, played his final game, after having played for four seasons with leukemia. He died on December 10.
• Born:
• *Anita Kulcsár, Hungarian women's handball national team line player; in Szerencs
• *Alexander Sevastian, Russian-born Canadian accordionist; in Minsk, Byelorussian SSR, Soviet Union
• Died:
• *Mary Poonen Lukose, 90, Indian gynecologist and former Surgeon General of the Kingdom of Thiruvithamkoor
• *Gladys Leslie, 81, American silent film actress
• *R. C. Anderson, 93, English historian

  October 3, 1976 (Sunday)

• Voting was held in West Germany for the 496-seat Bundestag. Although Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Social Democratic Party lost 16 seats and its coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party lost two, the coalition retained a 253 to 243 majority over Helmut Kohl's CDU/CSU.
• Baseball's career home run champion at the time, Hank Aaron, appeared in his 3,298th and final major league baseball game, finishing with a hit that drove in one run for the Milwaukee Brewers in a 5 to 2 loss to the Detroit Tigers. The game took place at Milwaukee County Stadium where Aaron had spent most of his career for the Milwaukee Braves.
• Born: Seann William Scott, American film and TV actor; in Cottage Grove, Minnesota

  October 4, 1976 (Monday)

• The InterCity 125 high-speed train, so-called because it had an average speed of, was introduced in the United Kingdom as the fastest railroad service in the UK up to that time. The inaugural high-speed trip from London's Paddington station departed at 8:05 in the morning to Bristol.
• Barbara Walters began work as the first evening national news anchor in the U.S., working with Harry Reasoner as the co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight, still referred to at the time as ABC Evening News.
• A group of three gunmen from the Basque terrorist organization ETA carried out the assassination of Juan María de Araluce Villar, his chauffeur, and three policemen in an escort vehicle, as he was departing his home in San Sebastián. Araluce, a 59-year-old Basque economist and one of the 17 "Counselors of the Realm", was killed along with the others by submachine gun fire.
• Earl Butz resigned as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture after both Democrat and Republican politicians called for his departure over racist remarks that he had made.
• The U.S. Supreme Court voted not to reconsider its July 2 decision in Gregg v. Georgia, clearing the way for individual states to carry out death sentences imposed since the original ruling.
• U.S. President Gerald Ford signed the Tax Reform Act of 1976, a bipartisan bill that lowered taxes on corporations and extended payroll tax reductions that had already been in place. The Act reduced the overall tax burden in the U.S. by $18 billion. In addition, it made assignment of social security number mandatory for U.S. citizens for identification for state and federal services.
• Born:
• *Alicia Silverstone, American film and TV actress; in San Francisco
• *Mauro Camoranesi, Argentine-born Italian soccer football midfielder; in Tandil
• *Ueli Steck, Swiss mountain climber; in Langnau im Emmental

  October 5, 1976 (Tuesday)

• The United Auto Workers entered into a new labor contract with the Ford Motor Company, three weeks after the UAW's 163,000 Ford Motor employees had gone on strike, in what was called "a 'toe in the door' to a four-day workweek in American industry" by labor analyst Arvid Jouppi, in that it provided for 11 of 52 weeks to have paid holidays in 1978 and 13 weeks by 1979.
• Born:
• *Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechen rebel and leader of the breakaway Chechen Republic; in Tsentaroy, Chenceno-Ingush ASSR, Soviet Union
• *Mauro Colagreco, Argentine-born French chef; in La Plata
• *Matt Hamill, deaf American college wrestling and later mixed martial arts champion; in Loveland, Ohio
• *Alessandra Sublet, French television host; in Lyon
• Died:
• *Lars Onsager, 72, Norwegian-born American chemist and 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate
• *Barbara Nichols, 47, American character actress on stage, film and TV; from liver failure related to earlier auto accidents. She had been in a coma for more than a year.
• *Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar, 64, Indian mathematician for whom the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook operator is named

  October 6, 1976 (Wednesday)

• One month after the death of Mao Zedong, the new Communist leadership placed "the Gang of Four" — Mao's widow Jiang Qing, Communist Party Deputy Chairman Wang Hongwen, Deputy Prime Minister Zhang Chunqiao, and the party's chief propaganda leader, Yao Wenyuan — under arrest, effectively bringing an end to the Cultural Revolution that had started ten years earlier in the People’s Republic of China. After two weeks without comment on rumors, the Chinese government confirmed the arrest of the group in the newspaper Jenmin Jih Pao. Confirmation of the arrest was not disclosed until the next day when the newspapers first quoted Chairman Hua Guofeng first referred to them as the Gang of Four. The cause of arrest was described in posters placed on walls in Beijing, which related that a gunman had shot at a convoy of cars earlier in the day in an attempt to assassinate Communist Party Chairman Hua Guofeng, and the gunman confessed that he had been hired by the widow of Chairman Mao.
• All 73 people on Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 were killed when a bomb, placed by anti-Fidel Castro terrorists, exploded after the plane took off from Bridgetown in Barbados. The DC-8 had been loaned to Cubana Airlines by Air Canada and was flying from Guyana to Cuba, with stops at Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica. At 2:30 in the afternoon, the pilot reported to the control tower that there had been an explosion on the plane and that he was attempting to return to Bridgetown, but plunged into the Caribbean Sea short of the return. Two men were arrested in Trinidad the next day after it was found that they had boarded Flight 455 at Trinidad, then got off the flight without luggage and flew back the same day. Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo were both employees of a company in Venezuela, "Commercial Industrial Investigations", that was staffed by Cuban exiles. The Venezuelan government then arrested five of that company's staff on October 15.
• In Thailand, student protesters were killed by right-wing paramilitary troops and government forces at Thammasat University in Bangkok, while protesting the return of the nation’s former dictator, General Thanom Kittikachorn. The massacre led to the return of the military government.
• In San Francisco, during his second televised debate with Jimmy Carter, U.S. President Gerald Ford made a key error on national television when he declared that "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration." At the time, the nations between West Germany and the Soviet Union were occupied by Soviet troops and under control of Communist regimes that followed the guidance of the U.S.S.R.'s Communist Party.
• Born:
• *Freddy García, Venezuelan baseball pitcher in the U.S. major leagues, 2001 American League ERA leader; in Caracas
• *Karen Dokhoyan, Armenian soccer football centre back with 48 appearances for the men's national team; in Yerevan, Armenian SSR, Soviet Union
• Died: Gilbert Ryle, 76, English philosopher, author of the 1949 book ''The Concept of Mind''