September 1980

September 1, 1980 (Monday)

• Chun Doo Hwan was inaugurated as the new President of South Korea.
• Terry Fox, an amputee who had started a transcontinental run across Canada on April 12, to raise money for cancer research, was forced to end after having run of the nearly journey. Having started from St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador on the Atlantic coast with a goal of reaching the Pacific Ocean port of Victoria, British Columbia, Fox had raised US$1.7 million before suffering shortness of breath and nausea outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he was taken to the Port Arthur General Hospital, originally for stomach flu. The next day, Fox announced that the cancer that had taken his leg had returned and had spread to his lungs.
• Francisco Villagrán Kramer resigned from his position as Vice President of Guatemala in a protest against the increased repression of human rights by President Romeo Lucas García.

  September 2, 1980 (Tuesday)

• Joseph Bonanno, a New York mobster known as "Joe Bananas", was convicted of a felony for the first time in a criminal career that dated back more than 50 years, when he began as a gun runner for Al Capone. Born in Sicily, Bonanno, aged 75, had avoided conviction for other charges during his time as a crime boss but was finally proven guilty of conspiracy to interfere with a federal grand jury investigation of his son.
• Announcements were made in both Tripoli and Damascus that the nations of Libya and Syria would merge into a single republic, but details of the union were not disclosed. President Muammar Gaddafi of Libya urged the parliament of the north African nation to approve the merger, adding "Either Libya turns into a unionist state and merges with Syria and bears the losses of the Arab nation, or I shall go to Upper Galilee" "as a commando myself with my rifle." Syria's President Hafez al-Assad sent a cable to Gaddafi agreeing to the merger, which would never actually take place. The formal merger agreement was signed on September 10.

  September 3, 1980 (Wednesday)

• The third of three major concessions by Poland's Communist government to end a labor strike took place as the Jastrzębie agreement was signed in the coal mining town of Jastrzębie-Zdrój. In addition to raising wages and permitting miners to organize their own union, the government brought an end to mining on Saturday and Sunday.
• Zimbabwe broke diplomatic and consular relations with South Africa, closing its missions in Pretoria and in Cape Town that had been established by Rhodesia's white-minority government and recalling the staffs. Zimbabwe's Prime Minister Robert Mugabe asked South Africa to close its diplomatic mission in the Zimbabwean capital, Salisbury. At the same time, the Foreign Ministry noted that Zimbabwe would maintain its trade mission office at Johannesburg and that South Africa would retain its trade section in Salisbury.
• Born: Jennie Finch, American women's softball pitcher; in La Mirada, California
• Died:
• *Dirch Passer, 54, Danish comedian, and film and stage actor, died from heart failure. He collapsed, while in costume, as he was preparing to go onstage in the opening act of the Tivoli Revue at the Glassalen theater in Copenhagen.
• *Duncan Renaldo, 76, Romanian-born American TV actor known of portraying The Cisco Kid in the U.S. television western of the same name.
• *Barbara O'Neil, 70, American film actress known for portraying the role of mother to lead characters, notably as Scarlett O'Hara's mother in the 1939 production of ''Gone with the Wind''

  September 4, 1980 (Thursday)

• U.S. anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman, a fugitive for the past six years after going into hiding while out on bail for a 1974 indictment for allegedly selling cocaine to undercover agents, voluntarily surrendered to the federal authorities at the U.S. District Court in New York City. The court allowed him to be released without bond on Hoffman's pledge to return for a later hearing on the narcotics and bail-jumping charges. Hoffman, founder of the Youth International Party whose members called themselves "Yippies", had undergone plastic surgery while a fugitive and had been living openly under the alias of "Barry Freed", even testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1979.
• Born: Max Greenfield, American TV actor, in Dobbs Ferry, New York
• Died: Pepe Abad, 48, Spanish-born Chilean journalist and anchorman for the Televisión Nacional de Chile network

  September 5, 1980 (Friday)

• Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded by Candy Lightner of Fair Oaks, California,, four months after her daughter had been killed by a drunk driver on May 3. An author would note 35 years later that "By the late 1990s MADD had achieved its goal of lowering the BAC in most states to.08... Remarkably, in less than 20 years the modest efforts of a grieving mother and a few American citizens had evolved into a sophisticated organization that defined an emerging social issue... powerful enough to shape national legislation and see it through into law.".
• The Gotthard Road Tunnel opened in Switzerland as the world's longest highway tunnel at, stretching from Göschenen to Airolo beneath the Swiss Alps' Saint-Gotthard mountain range. At the opening ceremony, a school bus was the first vehicle to traverse the tunnel, which had taken 10 years to build and had cost US$486,000,000 and the lives of 19 workers. In that the tunnel was toll-free, detractors joked that "The Italians built it, the Germans use it and the Swiss pay for it."
• In Spain, the first hypermarket, Hipercor, was inaugurated on September 5, 1980, opening in Seville.

  September 6, 1980 (Saturday)

• Edward Gierek, the de facto leader of Poland for almost a decade since becoming the First Secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party, was removed from office by the Party's Central Committee after the concessions made by the government to the Solidarność trade union. The day before, the government reported that Gierek had been admitted to a hospital for a heart ailment, and followed at 1:30 in the morning with the announcement. In a fashion similar to the 1970 dismissal of Gierek's predecessor in 1970, the official statement said that Gierek had asked to be relieved of his responsibilities for health reasons. Gierek would live until 2001. The Party named Stanisław Kania, a member of the PZPA Politburo, as Gierek's successor.
• Born:
• *Samuel Peter, Nigerian professional boxer, billed as "The Nigerian Nightmare"; WBC world heavyweight champion for seven months in 2008; in the Akwa Ibom State
• *Joseph Yobo, Nigerian soccer football center and national team member from 2001 to 2014; in Kono, Rivers State

  September 7, 1980 (Sunday)

• Hua Guofeng resigned from the position as Premier of the People's Republic of China, which he had held since 1976, in what one reporter described as "China's most orderly transfer of administrative authority in this century." In his resignation speech, made at the meeting of the National People's Congress in Beijing, Hua, asked the delegates to approve Zhao Ziyang as his replacement.
• In his speech, Chairman Hua also announced that the experimental one-child policy, used by individual cities since 1979, would be mandated nationwide "so that the rate of population growth may be brought under control as soon as possible", implementing what one reporter described as "the most ambitious population-control policy ever adopted by a major power."
• The 32nd Primetime Emmy Awards were held in Pasadena, California, but 51 of the 52 nominated actors did not show up for the U.S. television awards. The boycott by celebrities came during the ongoing strike by members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The only exception to the actors' boycott was Powers Boothe, who won the award for "Outstanding Actor in a Dramatic Special". Booth, who received a standing ovation, said in his acceptance speech, "This is either the most courageous moment of my career or the stupidest."
• John McEnroe, who had lost to Björn Borg in July in a close match at Wimbledon, defeated Borg in the finals of the U.S. Open of tennis in another close match that came down to the final set. McEnroe had won the first two sets, 7-6 and 6–1, and Borg tied by winning the next two sets, 7-6 and 7–5. McEnroe defended his 1979 U.S. Open championship in the final set, winning 6 games to 4.
• Born:
• *Nikki Jamal, Azerbaijani-born English pop music singer for the duo Ell & Nikki; as Nigar Mutallibzadeh in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, Soviet Union.
• *Gabriel Milito, Argentine soccer football defender; in Bernal

  September 8, 1980 (Monday)

• In the largest troop maneuvers on German soil since the end of World War II, both the United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies commenced war games in West Germany while the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies did the same in East Germany. NATO's "Autumn Forge" exercise involved more than 250,000 troops from 11 nations in land, air and sea operations and was coordinated from RAF Gütersloh. Approximately away in Potsdam, at least 40,000 troops from 7 nations conducted similar operations as part of the Warsaw Pact's "Brothers in Arms 80" maneuvers.
• The United States and China reached an agreement to begin regular commercial airline flights between the two nations for the first time since 1949, when the People's Republic of China was proclaimed. On December 7, Pan American World Airways would become the first U.S. airline to land in China under the new agreement, with the arrival of Pan Am Flight 10, a Boeing 747, in Beijing.
• The Sun, at the time Britain's highest circulating newspaper, became the first to reveal the romance of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, with the headline "HE'S IN LOVE AGAIN! LADY DI IS THE NEW GIRL FOR CHARLES?"
• Died:
• *Willard Libby, 71, American chemist who perfected the development of radiocarbon dating that determined the approximate age of archaeological and palaeontological finds; 1960 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• *Keith Muckelroy, 29, British maritime archaeologist, from a diving accident