The following events occurred in March 1964:
March 1, 1964 (Sunday) All 85 people on Paradise Airlines Flight 901 were killed when the Lockheed Constellation crashed into a mountain while on its way to Tahoe Valley, California, a ski resort town across the border from casinos in Nevada. Wreckage of the plane was located the next day on an ridge in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where it had impacted after running into a sudden snowstorm while on its approach to Tahoe Valley. The plane had taken off from Salinas with 20 people and another 61 passengers boarded at San Jose. Another 15 in San Jose had wanted to board Flight 901 but were told that they would have to catch a later plane.Aviation Safety Network. Accessed 27 August 2013 The American premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Momente, performed by Martina Arroyo (soprano), the Crane Collegiate Singers of SUNY Potsdam (Brock McElheran, chorus master), and members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (Lukas Foss, music director), conducted by the composer, took place in Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York. The Liberian tanker Amphialos broke in two and sank southeast of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada. HMCS Athabaskan of the Royal Canadian Navy rescued 34 of her 36 crew. Anti-government demonstrations began in Gabon, with protesters shouting "Léon M'ba, président des Français!" ("Léon M'ba, President of the French!") and calling for the end of the "dictatorship". Born: Florencio Randazzo, Argentine politician; in Chivilcoy Died: Richard Welsh, a professional skydiver celebrating his 29th birthday, was killed by an accident blamed on his habit of screaming while pretending to fall off of an airplane and on the fact that he had no pocket on his outfit. Lacking a pocket, Welsh had clinched the handle of his parachute's ripcord between his teeth, but when he opened his mouth as he fell, the cord flew over his shoulder. As he fell to his death, Welsh was seen "groping desperately all the way down" trying to grab the cord to open the chute; his body, along with his unopened parachute, was found in the backyard of a home in Delhi Township, Michigan.
March 2, 1964 (Monday) After modifications, a U-2 spyplane was able to successfully land on an aircraft carrier, as pilot Bob Schumacher brought the high-altitude jet down onto the USS Ranger. Previously, the plane's use had been limited to sites within a radius of a U.S. base, and some areas of the globe were beyond its reach until it could operate from a mobile airstrip. President Joseph Kasavubu of the Congo suspended the parliament indefinitely, after more than half of the 137 deputies of the Central Assembly failed to appear in Léopoldville, whether out of fear of arrest or because of joining a rebellion against the Congolese government. The sudden eruption of the volcano Mount Villarrica killed 22 people in Chile, and left 35 others missing, after triggering an avalanche that buried the village of Coñaripe. Twenty-two people were reported killed and 35 others missing. Born: Laird Hamilton, American big-wave surfer and co-inventor of tow-in surfing; in San Francisco
March 3, 1964 (Tuesday) The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic resumed diplomatic relations after six years, following a meeting between Prince Faisal and President Nasser at the Arab Summit in Cairo.Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Cornell University Press, 1988) p101 The Tsurugisan Quasi-National Park was founded in Japan.
March 4, 1964 (Wednesday)
Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa was found guilty by a federal jury in Chattanooga, Tennessee on two counts of jury tampering that had happened in 1962. The conviction was the first after four previous trials on other federal charges had ended in an acquittal. Hoffa was released after posting a new bail bond for $75,000 pending the appeal of the verdict and his 8-year prison sentence."JURY FINDS HOFFA GUILTY", Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1964, p1 His appeals would finally be exhausted three years later, and he would begin his sentence on March 7, 1967. Mark Lane, an attorney from New York City, asked for and was granted the opportunity to appear before the Warren Commission for the stated purpose of representing the interests of the late Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been charged with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964) p297 Lane, who would write the bestselling book Rush to Judgment and who would become the most well-known proponent of JFK conspiracy theories, showed the group news photographs from the assassination scene which he believed had been altered. Commission member and future U.S. President Gerald Ford told reporters later that Lane "was given a fair hearing. He put his ideas in the record, and all will be checked out.""Lawyer Who 'Represents' Oswald Heard", Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1964, p2 The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 186, providing for a multinational peacekeeping force for Cyprus.Farid Mirbagheri, Cyprus and International Peacemaking 1964–1986 (Routledge, 2014) p37 UNFICYP would become operational on March 27. Teressa Belissimo invented the Buffalo wing (officially called the "Buffalo Chicken Wing" on the menu) at The Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York.An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken WingThe New Yorker, accessed December 27, 2009
March 5, 1964 (Thursday) The Republic of Zanzibar prohibited the use of the pulled rickshaw on its streets, banning the human-pulled taxi as a symbol of feudal exploitation. British Army troops engaged in combat in Cyprus for the first time, when two soldiers fired back at Turkish Cypriot combatants in the predominantly Turkish village of Karmi. The gunfire began after an army unit was sent to protect Greek Cypriot schoolchildren. Following an attempted coup in Gabon, some Gabonese mistakenly accused the United States of being a co-conspirator in the recent coup attempt that had temporarily overthrown President Leon M'Ba, and bombed the U.S. Embassy in Libreville. The explosion, which occurred at a time when the building was closed and locked, "cracked two windows, partially demolished the embassy sign and splattered mud over the front of the building." Gemini launch vehicle (GLV) 1 and Gemini spacecraft No. 1 were mechanically mated at complex 19.
March 6, 1964 (Friday) Five members of the crew of the tanker Bunker Hill, including the ship's captain, were killed when the vessel exploded and sank in deep water in Puget Sound near the coast of Anacortes, Washington. The U.S. Coast Guard was able to rescue 25 others from icy water. The ship, which was empty at the time and would normally have carried a crew of 44, had departed and was on its way to pick up a cargo of gasoline at Portland. As a result of the accident, the National Maritime Union (NMU) would successfully lobby for inflatable life rafts to be placed on all ships owned by companies that had contracts with NMU members. The original version of the Soviet Union's MiG-25 supersonic jet fighter, referred to in the West as the "Foxbat", was flown for the first time. "These amazing aircraft", an author would note, "were to sustain the biggest development programme in history, leading to forty-nine versions, of which thirty-three flew and more than twenty entered service." The literacy test for Mississippi voters was upheld as a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Jackson ruled, 2–1, that the state law did not violate the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Department of Justice had brought suit to challenge a requirement that voters had to be, within the judgment of a county official, of good moral character and that they had to be able to read and write, and to be able to interpret selected sections of law. Historically, the literacy test had more often disenfranchised African Americans than white residents. The tests would be outlawed for federal elections by the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Died: King Paul of Greece, 62, died of post-operative complications following surgery for stomach cancer. His 23-year-old son became King Constantine II.
March 7, 1964 (Saturday) The government of the People's Republic of China issued the new list of simplified Chinese characters, following up on the first reform of 1956, with a complete list of 2,236 revisions of traditional Chinese characters. The Jianhuazi Zongbiao required fewer strokes and were easier to write."Fifty Years of Script and Written Language Reform in the PRC: The Genesis of the Language Law of 2001", by John S. Rohsenow, in Language Policy in the People’s Republic of China: Theory and Practice Since 1949 (Springer, 2004) p26 Asadollah Alam resigned as Prime Minister of Iran to take the job of minister of the Shah's imperial court, and was replaced two hours later by Hassan Ali Mansur."Pro-Westerner Named Iran Premier", The Courier-Journal (Louisville KY), March 8, 1964, p2 Mansur would be assassinated less than a year later, dying on January 26, 1965."Iran, Islamic Republic of", in Heads of States and Governments: A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Over 2,300 Leaders, 1945 through 1992, by Harris M. Lentz (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1994) p404 Born: Vladimir Smirnov, Kazakhstani cross-country skiing world champion; in Shuchinsk, Kazakh SSR, Soviet Union Wanda Sykes, African-American comedienne; in Portsmouth, Virginia
March 8, 1964 (Sunday) Malcolm X, who had been suspended from the Nation of Islam, announced in New York City that he was forming a black nationalist party. "I remain a Muslim," he told reporters, "but the main emphasis of the new movement will be black nationalism as a political concept and form of social action against the white oppressors.""Malcolm X Plans a New Negro Group", Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1964, p3 Three days later, he incorporated his new organization as Muslim Mosque, Inc.Robert E. Terrill, The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X (Cambridge University Press, 2010) p102 and established a headquarters at the Hotel Theresa in the Harlem section of New York City, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue.Clifton E. Marsh, The Lost-found Nation of Islam in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) p60 Karol Wojtyla was enthroned as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kraków at the Wawel Cathedral in Poland's city of Kraków.George Weigel, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (Basic Books, 2014) pp118 In 1978, Archbishop Wojtyla would become Pope John Paul II. All 30 people on a Taxader Air Lines DC-3 were killed when the airliner crashed in Colombia while flying from Pereira to Bogotá, killing the 25 passengers and five crew."Colombian Air Liner Crashes; 30 Are Killed", Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1964, p1 Died: Franz Alexander, 73, Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician and pioneer of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology.
March 9, 1964 (Monday) The first Ford Mustang rolled off the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Dearborn, Michigan. A researcher would note later that what he believed to have been the first Mustang marked for shipment (based on having the lowest vehicle identification number that had been found to exist, 100211) was sent to fill an order by the Hull-Dobbs Ford dealership in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but added that "no record... has been discovered that indicates the VIN number of the first Mustang to roll off the line on that Monday", and that any promotional photo of the first car "typically... would picture a pre-production car purposely placed at the head of the line".Robert A. Fria, Mustang Genesis: The Creation of the Pony Car (McFarland, 2010) p160