October 1980


The following events happened in October 1980:

October 1, 1980 (Wednesday)


  • Michael "Ozzie" Myers, U.S. representative from Pennsylvania, was expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 376 to 30, becoming the first U.S. Congressman to be expelled since 1861. In 1861, U.S. Congressmen John B. Clark and John W. Reid of Missouri, and Henry C. Burnett of Kentucky, had been expelled by the House in absentia after joining the Confederate Army. The move came after surveillance showed him accepting a $50,000 bribe in the Abscam operation. The videotape also showed Myers telling the offerer of the bribe, "Money talks and bullshit walks!".
  • Former foreign minister Arnaldo Forlani agreed to attempt to form a new coalition government as the new prime minister of Italy, after a meeting with President Sandro Pertini.
  • Died:
  • *John Kotelawala, 85, Prime Minister of Ceylon, from 1953 to 1956
  • *Eric Hass, 75, U.S. activist and the presidential nominee of the Socialist Labor Party of America in the presidential elections of 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1964.

    October 3, 1980 (Friday)

  • Roberto Viola, the former Argentine Army commander, was selected as the new President of Argentina by the South American nation's ruling three-member military junta.
  • A terrorist bomb injured 50 people, four fatally, in a Jewish synagogue in Paris, shortly after the Sabbath started at sunset. Outrage over the attack and against other acts of anti-Semitism brought more than 100,000 protest marchers in Paris four days later.
  • The Housing Act 1980 was given royal assent, wherein the five million English and Welsh residents of public housing council houses were eligible to purchase their homes under a "Right to Buy" program. Families that had rented a government-built house or a flat for at least three years were eligible to buy the homes, many of which had been defective, at a discount of at least one-third of fair market value for a house and 44% for a flat. The discount for 20-year tenants was 50 percent.
  • Died: Gustav Wagner, 69, Austrian-born Nazi German officer and deputy commander of the Sobibor extermination camp, committed suicide in Brazil, two years after efforts began to have him extradited.

    October 4, 1980 (Saturday)

  • The ocean liner MS Prinsendam was sailing through the Gulf of Alaska and was away from the nearest rescue base, located in the Alaskan airstrip at Yakutat, when a fire broke out in the engine room. Despite the distance that rescuers had to travel to reach the Dutch cruise ship, all 520 passengers and crew were rescued without a loss of life or serious injury. The supertanker Williamsburgh brought 380 evacuees and paramedics to safety, while U.S. and Canadian coast guard cutters were able to bring in other passengers, including 20 who had been missing after their lifeboat had been drifting during the night in the Gulf of Alaska. The safe evacuation of everyone on Prinsendam "brought to a close one of the most dramatic air and sea rescues in modern times."
  • With one month left before the November 4 U.S. presidential election, a survey of politicians and opinion pollsters in the 50 U.S. states was released, concluding that Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan had a clear lead in enough states to garner 314 electoral votes, far more than the 270 needed to win, and that the incumbent, Democrat and U.S. president Jimmy Carter would get only 136. There were nine "swing states" where the race was too close to call. third party challenger John B. Anderson did not have a lead in any of the states.
  • Born:
  • *Tomáš Rosický, Czech footballer and captain of the Czech Republic national team; in Prague, Czechoslovakia
  • *Joe Kennedy III, U.S. Congressman since 2013; in Boston
  • *Jason Samuels Smith, American choreographer, in Shreveport, Louisiana
  • Died: Pyotr Masherov, 62, Belarusian Soviet politician and the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Byelorussian SSR, was killed in an automobile accident in Minsk. Masherov, the de facto leader of the Byelorussians as Communist Party leader and a non-voting member of the Soviet Communist Party's Politburo, was being driven with a police escort when his GAZ-13 Chaika limousine was struck by a truck. He was succeeded by Tikhon Kiselyov. Reportedly, he "had been regarded as one of the relatively younger members" of the Communist Party "likely to be chosen when the time came for a new Prime Minister or Communist Party Chief."

    October 5, 1980 (Sunday)

  • Voting took place for West Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. With 224 seats, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands party combined with 54 seats of its coalition partner, the Freie Demokratische Partei to continue the exiting majority, with 278 of the 519 seats.
  • Voting took place for Portugal's parliament, the Assembleia da República. Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro's Partido Social Democrata increased its majority to 134 of the 250 seats.
  • At the age of 54, Cuban-born U.S. baseball star Minnie Miñoso appeared at bat for a second and final game as a pinch hitter for the Chicago White Sox, becoming the second major leaguer to play in five different decades.
  • The Elisabeth blast furnace was demolished at Bilston Steelworks marking the end of iron and steel production in the Black Country of England.
  • Gail Tate, a woman in the United States Air Force, survived a fall of after her parachute and reserve chute became tangled. Despite striking the ground at, Tate sustained non-life-threatening injuries and later returned to work at Fort Fisher.
  • Born:
  • *James Toseland, English motorcycle racer and 2007 World Superbike Champion, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire
  • *Ti West, American horror film director, in Wilmington, Delaware
  • Died: Tobin Sorenson, 25, American rock climber who had made the first ascents on vertical walls of several mountains around the world, fell to his death while trying to climb the North Face of Mount Alberta.

    October 6, 1980 (Monday)

  • U.S. representative John B. Anderson of Illinois achieved his goal as a third-party candidate for President of the United States of being on the election ballots in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to abate a district court decision to require that Anderson's name be placed on all ballots in the state of Georgia, clearing the way for ballots to be sent to the printers the next day.
  • Forbes Burnham, Prime Minister of Guyana and head of the nation's government since before the 1966 independence of British Guiana, became the South American nation's second president, replacing President Arthur Chung, who had served as a ceremonial head of state since 1970, when Burnham had proclaimed the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. The new constitution had taken effect, confirming the nation's status as a "co-operative republic" and giving the president the powers formerly exercised by Burnham as prime minister.
  • Sweden's armed forces ended their 19-day search for an elusive foreign submarine that had sailed into the Scandinavian kingdom's territorial waters on September 19. The sub, believed to be from the Soviet Union navy, had apparently navigated to safety in international waters.
  • After the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros both finished regular play with 92 wins and 70 losses, the two teams played a tiebreaker game, only the seventh in MLB history. The Astros won, 7 to 1, to finish 93-70 and the National League West pennant. They lost the best-of-five National League championship series to the Philadelphia Phillies.
  • Died: Hattie Jacques, 58, English comedian and film actress

    October 7, 1980 (Tuesday)

  • Iraq announced the territorial waters of Iran were a "prohibited war zone" and that any vessel inside the zone was subject to destruction—including the ships of other countries besides Iran. The next day, Iranian troops defending Khurramshahr fired shells that sank three foreign cargo ships and set two others on fire, killing at least 20 crewmen.
  • U.S. representative John Jenrette became the second member of Congress to be convicted of accepting an offer of a bribe in the FBI's Abscam investigation. He was defeated for re-election four weeks later and resigned his seat on December 10, 24 days before the expiration of his term.

    October 8, 1980 (Wednesday)

  • Archaeologists with the Greek Ministry of Transport and Communications reported that shipwrecks from the Battle of Actium had been located off of the coast of Actium near the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf. The battle had been fought more than 2,000 years earlier, on September 2, 31 BCE, during the civil war in the Roman Republic as two rival members of the Second Triumvirate engaged the fleets under their command in combat. The forces under the command of Gaius Octavianus defeated those of Marcus Antonius Creticus, supplemented by Egyptian Queen Cleopatra.
  • More than 150 people were killed in Iran in the city of Dizful by three Frog-7 missiles fired by Iraq. The Soviet made missiles, long, were part of an arsenal of 26 such missiles, referred to by NATO as FROG for "Free Rocket Over Ground". In another attack on Dizful on October 26, another 100 people were killed when Iraq used three more of the Frog-7 weapons.
  • Nine passers-by were killed and 28 others injured in Ecatepec de Morelos, a suburb of Mexico City, after of liquefied ammonia spilled from a ruptured pipe while the toxic liquid was being pumped into a pressurized railroad car. At 6:30 in the morning local time, the vapor from the liquid spread in a cloud across the San Pedro Xalostoc, an industrial district at Ecatepec. Three of the dead were passengers on a bus and four others died when they drove their cars through the cloud, while two pedestrians were killed as they walked through the street.
  • Syria and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Moscow during the visit of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad as the guest of Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev. Though not a defense pact, the 20-year treaty of friendship provided for the Soviets to provide weapons to Syria.
  • The new military government of Turkey carried out the first executions in that republic since 1972 in a move "evidently meant to show the determination of the country's new military rulers to act severely against political terrorism, which was one of the factors in bringing about the military coup." Necdet Adali, a leftist convicted of the 1977 murder of two opponents in 1977, and Mustafa Pehlivangolu, a right wing extremist who had killed five people in 1978, were both hanged at 4:00 in the morning at the prison in Ankara.
  • Pope John Paul II told his weekly general audience that "even if a man looks at woman who is his own wife" with lust, he was committing the sin of adultery. The Pontiff based his reasoning on the New Testament statement that Jesus was speaking of looking at any woman with lustful desire, with no exception for marriage.
  • Stuntman Jaromir Wagner of West Germany set a record in the sport of wing walking as he became "the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean on the outside of an airplane." Wagner, who spent his entire time in the air standing and walking on top of the wing of a twin-engine biplane, had departed Giessen, in West Germany on September 27 and made stops along the way in Scotland, the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland before reaching North America, then stopped at the Canadian province of Newfoundland and the U.S. state of Vermont before touching down in Fairfield, New Jersey.
  • An attempt by the Jordache clothing company to fly a dirigible, as part of a promotional campaign for its fashion designer jeans, ended when the airship crashed on its maiden flight after takeoff from Lakehurst, New Jersey, half a mile from the site of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. The long blimp took off at 8:15 with a destination of a fashion show at New York City's Battery Park, but after traveling, it split a seam and began deflating. Pilot James Boza was uninjured after making a controlled descent.
  • Born:
  • *Nick Cannon, American comedian and TV host; in San Diego
  • *The Miz, American professional wrestler; in Parma, Ohio
  • Died: Dr. Pearl Kendrick, 90, American bacteriologist known for her co-development for the vaccine against pertussis