The following events occurred in October 1966:
October 1, 1966 (Saturday)
Former Nazi leaders Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released from Spandau Prison in Berlin, shortly after midnight, after 20 years of incarceration for war crimes."From the archive, 1 October 1966: Nazi leaders freed after 20 years", The Guardian, 1 October 2014. Accessed 28 November 2014"Crowd Jeers as Nazis Freed", Ottawa Journal, October 1, 1966, p1 The Soviet Union vetoed the release of the last remaining prisoner in Spandau, former Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess."Russ Bar Freedom for Rudolf Hess", Chicago Tribune, October 2, 1966, p1 West Coast Airlines Flight 956, a DC-9 jet, crashed south of Wemme, Oregon, United States, while flying the last leg of its flight from San Francisco to Portland, through a heavy rainstorm. All 18 people on board were killed. The accident marked the first loss of a DC-9."Hunt Missing Jet with 20 in Mountains", Chicago Tribune, October 2, 1966, p1Aircraft Accident Report. West Coast Airlines, Inc DC-9 N9101. Near Wemme, Oregon , Adopted: 11 December 1967 Born: George Weah, Liberian soccer player and winner of FIFA World Player of the Year award in 1995; in Monrovia Died: "Trigger Mike" Coppola, 66, New York mobster; from nephritis
October 2, 1966 (Sunday)
The 1966 Major League Baseball regular season came to a close as Sandy Koufax pitched the Los Angeles Dodgers to a 6–3 win over the Philadelphia Phillies to clinch the National League pennant and the right to face the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. In the American League, the perennial pennant-winners, the New York Yankees, finished in last place for the first time since 1913. With 70 wins and 89 losses, they were half a game behind the Boston Red Sox, and 26 games out of first place, despite a 2–0 win over the Chicago White Sox on the last day. Forty-three refugees from Cuba, along with a crew member, drowned after waves caused by the winds of Hurricane Inez swamped the twin-engine cruiser operated by Enrique "El Falco" Gonzalez. The craft broke apart in shark-infested waters while bringing the passengers to Florida. Gonzalez and one refugee, Jorge Garcia, clung to a raft for four days before being rescued by a freighter, but Garcia died shortly after being flown to a hospital at Homestead. Relatives of the victims had paid Gonzalez $1,000 apiece for each refugee for the chance to escape Cuba, and Gonzalez and first mate Enrique Oliva had departed while the hurricane was still in progress, risking the safety of their passengers because the Cuban patrol boats were tied up by the storm as well. Of ten people who were able to make it into a life raft, eight were swept off it by powerful waves. Two young women in the U.S. state of Florida, Nancy Elaine Leichner, 21, and Pamela Ann Nater, 20, hiking through the Alexander Springs Wilderness recreation area of the Ocala National Forest while their friends were skin diving, were kidnapped and then found dead, the apparent victims of drowning. They were the first victims of serial killer Gerard John Schaefer, who would confess to their murders. In all, Schaefer would be suspected of 28 murders, mostly of young women, between 1966 and his arrest in 1972. The first in a series of four plays in the Theatre 625 anthology strand, titled "Talking to a Stranger", was broadcast on BBC2 in the UK. Hailed by critics as one of the most important television dramas of the 1960s, it would go on to be placed seventy-eighth in a 2000 poll of industry professionals conducted by the British Film Institute to determine the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century. The Soviet military newspaper Red Star published an article that officially confirmed suspicions that military advisers from the USSR were aiding the North Vietnamese. According to the article, rocket specialists had been sent to train the Vietnamese on how to fire surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles and had been forced to dodge bombing runs made by the United States. The once-thriving U.S. town of Quandahl, Iowa, located in Allamakee County, was sold at a public auction for $15,300. Founded by immigrants from Norway in the 19th century, the unincorporated village had had a bank, post office, dry goods and hardware stores, a grocery store and other businesses only 30 years earlier before a steady decline in the economy. Jim Clark won the 1966 United States Grand Prix, held at Watkins Glen Grand Prix Race Course. Born: Thor Gjermund Eriksen, Norwegian journalist and Director-General of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation from 2013 to 2022; in Oslo Died: Luis Augusto Turcios Lima, 24, Guatemalan rebel leader, was killed in a car accident in Guatemala City when his car overturned and caught fire.Ariel Batres Villagrán, "Somos los jóvenes rebeldes; memorias de un guerrillero" (We are the young rebels: Memories of a guerrilla), Monografías (2013)
October 3, 1966 (Monday) The Congress of Brazil voted to select Artur da Costa e Silva as the nation's 23rd President. Costa e Silva, a former General of the Brazilian Army and the hand-picked selection of President Humberto Castelo Branco, was unopposed, and received 295 votes from the majority party in Congress, the ARENA (Aliança REnovadora NAcional, or National Renewal Alliance). The opposing party, the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB), had only one-third of the seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, and did not nominate a candidate, so Costa e Silva received 295 votes of the 472 electors. Only one month before the general election, U.S. Representative Charles Weltner of Georgia removed his name from the ballot, because he could not uphold his signed oath to support the nominees of the state Democratic Party. "I cannot compromise with hate... I cannot vote for Lester Maddox," he said, referring to the segregationist who had won the Democratic nomination primary. In the United Kingdom, the Morpeth to Reedsmouth line of the Great North Eastern Railway was closed. Tunisia severed diplomatic relations with the United Arab Republic.
Died: Rolf Sievert, 70, Swedish physicist who pioneered the measurement of safe doses of radiation for medical treatment. The "sievert", abbreviated as "Sv" is the name that the International Committee for Weights and Measures would create in 1979 for a 100 roentgen unit of radiation dosage, and 1 Sv is the maximum cumulative radiation that a NASA astronaut is allowed during a career. Other units named for Sievert are the millisievert (mSv) and the microsievert (μSv).
October 4, 1966 (Tuesday)
Basutoland, a British colony surrounded completely by South Africa, was granted independence after midnight as the Kingdom of Lesotho, in a flag raising ceremony at Maseru. The new nation was governed by a constitutional monarchy, with a bicameral Parliament consisting of a Senate and an elected National Assembly. The paramount chief of the Sotho people, Constantine Bereng Seeiso, was crowned as King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho."Lesotho Now New Nation in Africa", Tucson (AZ) Daily Citizen, October 4, 1966, p17 Israel applied for a treaty of association (though not a membership) in the European Economic Community (EEC), commonly referred to at the time as the "Common Market"."Israel Asks to Have Common Market Tie", Bridgeport Telegram, October 5, 1966, p18 Died: Sherman Billingsley, 70, American nightclub owner who founded and owned the prestigious Stork Club in New York City
October 5, 1966 (Wednesday) The experimental Fermi 1 reactor at the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, located near Detroit in Frenchtown Charter Township, Michigan, suffered a partial meltdown when its cooling system failed. The incident would later become the subject of a 1975 bestselling book, We Almost Lost Detroit, by John G. Fuller. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the 1964 murder conviction and death sentence of Jack Ruby on grounds that the trial judge should have granted a motion for a change of venue to somewhere other than Dallas. "Jack Ruby was forced to trial under the most adverse, unusual, and extraordinary circumstances that this member of this court has yet to consider," Judge W.T. McDonald wrote in a concurring opinion. The Court remanded the case with instructions for a change of venue and a new trial. More people had witnessed Ruby's fatal shooting of accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald than any murder in history, as millions of people had watched the crime take place on live television on November 24, 1963. Although a new trial would be scheduled for February in Wichita Falls, Texas, Ruby would become sick with pneumonia on December 9, and would die of a pulmonary embolism on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald had both been pronounced dead. North Korea's leader Kim Il Sung delivered a speech to the Korean Workers' Party that would later serve as "a rare instance... in which the United States was able to eventually look back and realize that later actions could be traced back to this specific threatening signal." Specifically, Kim called on his followers to "wage a positive struggle against U.S. imperialism", in the form of limited warfare against the American military presence in South Korea. Almost immediately, there was a surge of provocations at the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and the most aggressive action of all, the 1968 seizure of the and its crew. What would be described later as "the first successful, condemnatory burning of the Australian flag in recent memory" took place in Canberra outside The Lodge, the official residence of the prime minister, as a group of 30 students protested against Australia's continued involvement in the Vietnam War. A prior attempt, on September 9, had been stopped by angry bystanders. UNESCO signed the Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers. This event is now celebrated as World Teachers' Day. Born: Inessa Kravets, Ukrainian Olympic champion athlete and holder of the women's world record for the triple jump for more than 20 years; in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union Sean M. Carroll, American theoretical physicist; in Philadelphia
October 6, 1966 (Thursday) The hallucinogenic drug LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) became illegal in the state of California as a new law went into effect at 12:01 a.m."Many New California Laws Go Onto Books", Daily Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA), October 6, 1966, p1 California became the first state in the U.S. to ban LSD, and in 1970, LSD would be reclassified as a Schedule I drug nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act.Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson, Biopolicy: The Life Sciences and Public Policy (Emerald Group Publishing, 2012) p232 The bill, sponsored by California state Senator Donald L. Grunsky, had been signed into law on May 30, 1966."LSD Bill Signed by Brown", Independent (Long Beach CA), May 31, 1966, p1 The Love Pageant Rally took place in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, a narrower section that projected into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.Michael J. Kramer, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013) p59 Born: Niall Quinn, Irish soccer football player with 92 appearances for the Republic of Ireland national team; in Perrystown Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury, the first female Speaker of the House for Bangladesh; in Noakhali Died: Mitchell Fields (born Mendel Feldman), 65, Romanian-American sculptor
October 7, 1966 (Friday)