September 1975

September 1, 1975 (Monday)

• The Republic of the North Solomons was declared on Bougainville Island, two weeks before Papua New Guinea was to become independent from Australia. District Commissioner Alexis Sarei was named as President. After failing to get recognition from any other nation, the North Solomons would agree to return to Papuan control on August 7, 1976, with some autonomy for Bougainville.
• The Turnhalle Constitutional Conference began in Windhoek between white, black and coloured residents to discuss the future of South West Africa.
• During an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government of Ecuador, 30 people were killed and at least 80 wounded. The Armed Forces Chief of Staff, General Raul Gonzalez Alvear, and his brother-in-law General Alejandros Solis, led the early morning uprising against President Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, attacking the Presidential Palace in Quito with 10 tanks. Rodríguez Lara had been able to escape his residence before the attackers arrived, fled to Riobamba and rallied the Air Force and Navy to make a counterattack at midday. Rodríguez Lara would be forced out of office four months later, on January 11, 1976.
• USAF Lieutenant General Daniel "Chappie" James was promoted, becoming the first African-American four-star general. General James, who was named the commander of NORAD, and would retire on February 2, 1978. Sadly, he died 24 days after his retirement.
• Space: 1999, a syndicated science fiction program, produced in the United Kingdom by ITC Entertainment and the Italian company RAI, made its first appearance worldwide. Authorized for release worldwide in the month of September, the show was broadcast on some television stations on the first day of the month, including WGAN, channel 13 in Portland, Maine, which premiered it at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time. According to ITC, the show was distributed to 101 nations and was syndicated to 148 U.S. television markets alone. In most of the United Kingdom, Space: 1999 debuted on September 4 at 7:00 p.m. on some of the regions in the ITV network.
• The crash of an East German Interflug Airlines TU-134 jetliner killed 26 of 34 people on board, most of them West German businessmen who were on their way to Leipzig for a trade show.
• The Concorde became the first airplane to cross the Atlantic Ocean four times in a single day. The supersonic aircraft flew the 2,375 miles from London to Gander, Newfoundland in 2 hours, 19 minutes, refueled and received maintenance, and flew back. The double crossing was completed 13 hours and 59 minutes after it began.
• The "Sinai II" agreement was initialed by Egypt's President Sadat, the day after it had been initialed by Israel's Prime Minister Rabin.
• Ursus arctos horribilis, the North American brown bear, more commonly known at the grizzly bear, was placed on the U.S. Endangered Species List as a "threatened species".
• Frank Zeidler who had served as Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1949 to 1961, was nominated as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party USA.
• Born: Natalie Bassingthwaighte, Australian actress and singer, in Wollongong

  September 2, 1975 (Tuesday)

• The Finnish opera Viimeiset kiusaukset, authored by Joonas Kokkonen and one of Finland's most distinguished national operas, was given its first performance.
• The aircraft units of the Canadian Armed Forces were merged into one national air force, referred to as the Canadian Forces Air Command and more commonly called AIRCOM. On August 16, 2011, AIRCOM would be renamed the Royal Canadian Air Force to reflect the branch of the services that had existed before the 1986 merger.
• The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum was opened in Hanoi so that the Vietnamese public could see the embalmed body of North Vietnam's founder, Ho Chi Minh, who had died in 1969.
• The World Football League owners voted 10–1 to revoke the franchise of the Chicago Winds, after two of the team's investors withdrew deposits of $350,000. The struggling American pro football league was left with ten teams, and would survive only until October 22.

  September 3, 1975 (Wednesday)

• Baseball player Steve Garvey began a streak of appearing in 1,207 consecutive MLB games, still a National League record. Garvey would go until July 28, 1983, when a thumb injury took him out of the lineup.
• Born: Redfoo, American musician and part of duo LMFAO, in Los Angeles
• Died: Wolfgang Gans zu Putlitz, 76, German-born spy who defected from Nazi Germany to the United Kingdom during World War II, and then from the U.K. to East Germany during the Cold War.

  September 4, 1975 (Thursday)

• The Sinai Interim Agreement was signed in Geneva by Major General Taha Magdoub for Egypt, and Major General Herzl Shafir for Israel, along with the ambassadors to Switzerland from the two nations, after having been initialed earlier in the week by Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Egypt's President Anwar Sadat. Under the agreement, a 25 kilometer wide buffer zone was created in the Sinai Peninsula, to be patrolled by United Nations Emergency Force troops, and separating the armies of the two nations.
• Died: Walter Tetley, 60, American actor whose "perennially adolescent voice" allowed him to portray children on radio shows and in cartoons, most notably as "Sherman" on ''The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show''

  September 5, 1975 (Friday)

• In Sacramento, California, Lynette Fromme, a follower of jailed cult leader Charles Manson, attempted to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford, but was thwarted by United States Secret Service agent Larry M. Buendorf. Fromme was three feet away from the President as he walked through a crowd near the California State Capitol building at 10:00 am local time, pointed a.45 caliber automatic pistol at his chest and pulled the trigger, but had failed to operate the slide mechanism to put a cartridge into the firing chamber. Buendorf would report later that Fromme, realizing her mistake, said, "Oh, shit, it didn't go off; it didn't go off." Fromme would serve 34 years in prison, and would be released, at age 60, on August 14, 2009.
• The London Hilton hotel was bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, killing 2 people and injuring 63.
• Died:
• *Georg Ots, 55, Soviet-Estonian opera singer
• *Alice C. Evans, 94, American microbiologist

  September 6, 1975 (Saturday)

• A 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Eastern Turkey at 12:20 pm local time, killing 2,385 people in the Diyarbakır province, mostly in the town of Lice.
• Born: Ryoko Tani, Japanese judoka, winner of 7 women's world championships, Olympic gold medalist 2000, 2004, in Fukuoka
• Died: Shelton Brooks, 89, Canadian-American popular music composer

  September 7, 1975 (Sunday)

• Number One Observatory Circle was dedicated as the official residence of the Vice-President of the United States. Previously, American vice-presidents either already had homes near Washington, D.C., or rented temporary lodging. The first residents were Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller and his wife Happy Rockefeller.
• Niki Lauda clinched the World Driving Championship by finishing in sixth place in the 1975 Italian Grand Prix, with only two races left for the season.
• Four American women became the last improperly ordained priests of the Episcopal Church, as Lee McGee, Alison Palmer, Betty Rosenberg and Diane Tickell brought to 15 the number of females to receive authority "to preach the word of God and to administer His holy sacraments". These women would become known as the "Washington Four". On July 29, 1974, a group of women known as the "Philadelphia Eleven" had been the first to be ordained. At the 1976 General Convention of the church, all fifteen women were approved as priests.
• The Timorese Democratic Union, which had been fighting against Fretilin for control of the colony of Portuguese Timor, issued a proclamation in favor of integration of the area into neighboring Indonesia after having been promised by the Indonesian government that the Timorese people would have an autonomous government.

  September 8, 1975 (Monday)

• On a cover captioned "I Am a Homosexual", U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich became the first openly gay cover subject of Time magazine after being discharged from the service for admitting his sexual orientation. Author Randy Shilts would comment later that "It marked the first time the young gay movement had made the cover of a major newsweekly. To a movement still struggling for legitimacy, the event was a major turning point." Matlovich, a Vietnam War veteran with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, would eventually settle his lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force for $160,000 and continue his work as a spokesman for gay rights. He would die from complications of AIDS in 1988.
• Two gunmen took control of a Paris bank, taking seven hostages, then escaping with $1,360,000 in ransom money.
• After California passed the first law in the United States to permit farm workers to organize labor unions, hundreds of vegetable workers for Bruce Church, Inc. voted in the first election on the choice of whether to join the United Farm Workers, the Teamsters, or no union at all. The UFW won the voting.
• For the first time since 1961, the United States authorized merchant ships from Cuba to enter American ports for refueling, as well as to no longer raise objections if other nations permitted port access to Cuban vessels.
• Officials in the intelligence agencies of Israel and West Germany met secretly to discuss a joint effort to conduct a new type of electronic eavesdropping by Mossad on foreign offices in Germany.

  September 9, 1975 (Tuesday)

• The Communist nation of Albania issued a decree ordering a change of names for "all Albanian citizens who have inappropriate names in view of the political, ideological and moral standards", apparently to require non-Muslim minorities to take on less "Western-sounding" names. The decree was published in the official journal Buletinit të Njoftimeve Zyrtare and would not be noticed in the West until February 25. Among those whose names would be changed in the decree were 11-year-old Edvin Kristaq Rama who, as Edi Rama, would become Prime Minister of Albania in 2013.
• Welcome Back, Kotter premiered on the ABC television network in the U.S.. Starring Gabe Kaplan, the comedy introduced actor John Travolta, who played the role of student "Vinnie Barbarino".
• Riverfront Coliseum opened in Cincinnati.
• Two British commercial divers, Roger Baldwin and Peter Holmes, died from hyperthermia while in saturation in the British Sector of the North Sea.
• Born: Michael Bublé, Canadian musician, in Burnaby, British Columbia
• Died:
• *Minta Durfee, 85, American film actress
• *Ethel Griffies, 97, English film actress
• *John McGiver, 61, American TV character actor