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October 1979

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The following events occurred in October 1979:

October 26, 1979: South Korean President Park Chung Hee assassinated

October 1, 1979 (Monday)

 
Nigeria's President Shagari
  • Nigeria terminated military rule, and the Second Nigerian Republic was established, ending 13 years of military rule. Shehu Shagari, a former Finance Minister who had won a presidential election in 1978, succeeded Nigerian General Olusegun Obasanjo. After being sworn in, Shagari surprised observers by asking his political opponents to submit nominations for his Cabinet. On the same day, an "American-style" Senate and House of Representatives was inaugurated, and a federal system of governors for the African nation's 19 states took office.
  • The Panama Canal Zone ceased to exist as a United States territory and reverted to control of the Republic of Panama after more than 75 years. From its creation on May 4, 1904, until its termination, the territory of 553 square miles (1,430 km2) was part of the U.S.
  • Pope John Paul II arrived in Boston, described by one reporter as the "keystone city of American Roman Catholicism" for his first visit to the United States as part of an eight-day tour of the U.S., and held a Mass at Boston Common before 100,000 worshipers.
  • U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced in a televised speech that he would order a moderate response to the discovery of a presence of Soviet Union troops in Cuba, backing away from a previous statement that the presence of Red Army soldiers in the Western Hemisphere was unacceptable. "My fellow Americans," Carter said, "the greatest danger to American security tonight is certainly not the two or three thousand Soviet troops in Cuba. The greatest danger to all nations of the world... is the breakdown of a common effort to preserve the peace and the ultimate threat of nuclear war." Carter stated that the U.S. response would be to increase surveillance of Cuba, establish a "Caribbean Task Force" in Key West, Florida, and conduct a landing exercise of 1,500 U.S. Marines at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba that had been under a perpetual lease for decades.
  • The MTR, the rapid transit railway system in Hong Kong, opened.
  • The new United States Bankruptcy Code went to effect, superseding the first Code that had been created in 1898.
  • Market Daily, the official economic newspaper of the People's Republic of China, published its first issue after having received approval from the Chinese Communist Party.
  • James Eppolito, a gangster in the Gambino crime family, was murdered along with his son, shot and killed by Gambino enforcers Roy DeMeo and Anthony Gaggi with the approval of Gambino boss Paul Castellano. Gaggi was wounded and then arrested, while fleeing the scene, by an off-duty NYPD officer who had been alerted to the killings by a witness.
  • Died:

October 2, 1979 (Tuesday)

  • The use of home video recorders to record television broadcasts was ruled lawful by U.S. District Judge Warren J. Ferguson in Los Angeles, who declared that the "such recording is permissible under the copyright acts of 1909 and 1976" and rejected a request by Universal Studios and Walt Disney Productions seeking to stop the Sony and RCA corporations to stop selling VCRs. Ferguson's ruling would be reversed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its ruling in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. on January 17, 1984.
 
The Pope at Yankee Stadium

October 3, 1979 (Wednesday)

  • Dith Pran, whose experience during the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia would be dramatized in the film The Killing Fields, was able to escape to Thailand and reunite with his colleague Sydney Schanberg, whom he served as a translator.
  • Pope John Paul II concluded his tour of New York City with a Mass at Shea Stadium and at Madison Square Garden, then traveled to Philadelphia.
  • The Cardenal Caro Province was created in central Chile from the southern portion of the San Antonio Province.
  • A ban against serving alcohol in airplanes flying over the U.S. state of Kansas was reversed after six years by the state's Attorney General, Robert Stephan. The ban had been in place since 1973 based on an opinion by Stephan's predecessor, Vern Miller, that the sale of alcohol on flights taking off from or landing in the state of Kansas violated state liquor laws if the sale took place in Kansas airspace. The ban did not affect airliners flying over Kansas from one state to another. Stephan concluded that federal aviation laws pre-empted Kansas state regulation of navigable airspace.
  • The National Stoolball Association was founded in the town of Haywards Heath, West Sussex England to oversee the game of stoolball a cricket-like sport.
  • Born:

October 4, 1979 (Thursday)

 
Kim Young-sam

October 5, 1979 (Friday)

October 6, 1979 (Saturday)

  • The Federal Reserve System changed from an interest rate target policy to a money supply target policy. The announcement was made in a news conference by Fed Chairman Paul A. Volcker and came in conjunction with a statement that the Federal Reserve Board had voted, 7 to 0, to raise the "discount rate" (the interest rate for banks to borrow from the Fed) from 11% to a record-high of 12%. In addition, banks would be required to maintain a reserve of 8% on future borrowings from the Fed by requiring the banks to purchase certificates of deposit.
  • The constitution of the Muscogee Nation (also known as the Creek Nation), located on the American Indian reservation in east central Oklahoma, was ratified by Muscogee tribal citizens in 12 Oklahoma counties, with a capital at Okmulgee, Oklahoma.
  • Pope John Paul II was received as a guest of U.S. President Jimmy Carter at the White House on the last day of his first visit to the United States.
  • Died:

October 7, 1979 (Sunday)

 
Premier Ohira
  • Elections were held in Japan for the 511 seats of the Shūgiin, Japan's House of Representatives and lower house of its national parliament, the Kokkai. The Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira again failed to achieve a majority but maintained control after winning 248 seats
  • A column of 64 soldiers and officers of Iran's Revolutionary Guards was "almost wiped out" by Kurdish rebels near Iran's border with Iraq, with 22 confirmed dead and the other 42 listed as missing in action. The incident was disclosed by the Guards Chief of Staff, Major General Hossein Shaker, in a radio interview.
  • Swissair Flight 316 from Geneva caught fire after a hard landing at Athens, killing 14 of the 142 passengers on board when it overran the runway.
 
Former KCIA Director Kim

October 8, 1979 (Monday)

October 9, 1979 (Tuesday)

October 10, 1979 (Wednesday)

 
French President Giscard

October 11, 1979 (Thursday)

  • The U.S. Senate voted, 81 to 15, to censure longtime incumbent Senator Herman Talmadge (D.-Georgia) for improper financial conduct for more than five years before he had been caught. The vote took place after an investigation by the Senate of allegations that he had diverted more than $43,000 of campaign funds to his personal use for reimbursement of expenses that he had never incurred. Talmadge, in his fourth six-year term in the Senate, was defeated for re-election in 1980.
  • The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to British electronics engineer Godfrey Hounsfield and South African-born physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack of the United States for their invention (each independently of the other) of computed axial tomography, the basis for the CT scan. The award by the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute was described as "one of the most unusual in the 78-year history of the prizes" because neither Hounsfield or Cormack had "a doctoral degree in medicine or any field of science."
  • Sclerocactus wrightiae, known as Wright's fishhook cactus, was added to the federal endangered species list.

October 12, 1979 (Friday)

  • Near Guam, Typhoon Tip, also known as Typhoon Warling became the most powerful tropical cyclone in recorded history as measured by the lowest barometric pressure ever noted, 870 millibars (hPa) (25.69 inches mercury or inHg). Tip was also the largest cyclone on record, with a diameter of 1,380 miles (2,220 km) at its greatest size, and its winds reached 190 miles per hour (310 km/h). It caused 99 deaths as it swept over Japan.
 
Sweden's PM Fälldin
 
  • After 26 years of construction, Interstate 5 of the United States interstate highway system was completed with the opening of the final section of the 1,380 mi (2,220 km) long four-lane road that runs from the U.S. border with Canada to the U.S. border with Mexico. The final 4.6 mile span of highway, north of Stockton, California, was opened in ceremonies and described by California's Transportation Secretary Adriana Gianturco as "comparable to the driving of the golden spike in the Transcontinental Railway." Gianturco and the consuls of Canada and Mexico cut a gold-colored chain to signal the opening of I-5.
  • Died: Katharine Burr Blodgett, 81, American physicist and chemist known for her invention of non-reflective "invisible" glass and the color gauge

October 13, 1979 (Saturday)

  • In the wake of the expulsion of Kim Young-sam from South Korea's National Assembly, all 66 members of Kim's New Democratic Party, and three members of the other opposition party, resigned in protest, marking the first time in the history of South Korea that all members of the opposition had resigned from the nation's parliament.
  • Born: Mamadou Niang, Senegalese professional soccer football striker; in Matam
  • Died: Archibald Roosevelt, 85, U.S. stockbroker, conservative activist and author, son of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, and founder of the Veritas Foundation.

October 14, 1979 (Sunday)

October 15, 1979 (Monday)

October 16, 1979 (Tuesday)

October 17, 1979 (Wednesday)

 
Mother Teresa

October 18, 1979 (Thursday)

 
An early home satellite dish

October 19, 1979 (Friday)

  • A tripartite agreement on the Itaipu Dam was signed between representatives of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and established the allowed river levels and how much they could change as a result of the various hydroelectrical undertakings in the watershed that was shared by the three countries.
  • A fire at the U.S. Marine Corps' Camp Fuji in Japan killed 13 servicemen after a 5,000 gallon storage tank of gasoline "inexplicably ruptured and ignited". The flames were spread quickly by winds from Typhoon Tip. Another 29 injured survivors were transferred to the burn center at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

October 20, 1979 (Saturday)

  • The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum was dedicated in Boston almost 16 years after President Kennedy's assassination.
  • An urgent diplomatic cable was sent by the U.S. Department of State to Bruce Laingen, the chargé d'affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Iran and the acting ambassador to the Islamic Republic. Laingen was informed that U.S. President Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had decided to allow the Shah of Iran to enter the U.S. for emergency treatment for gallstones and cancer. Laingen met the next day with Iran's Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and Foreign Minister Ebrahim Yazdi, who gave assurances that the Iranian government would protect the U.S. Embassy but "expressed astonishment and misgivings over the American decision."
  • John Tate of the United States defeated Gerrie Coetzee of South Africa to win the World Boxing Association (WBA) heavyweight boxing title that had been vacated by Muhammad Ali. Tate, a black American from Knoxville, Tennessee, outpointed Coetzee, a white South African in 15 rounds. The fight took place outdoors at Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria before a crowd of 81,000, the largest attendance at a boxing bout since the Dempsey and Tunney fight of 1927. Despite the apartheid laws of South Africa, racial segregation of the spectators was not allowed by agreement of the promoters of the bout.
  • The first McDonald's in Singapore opened, with a restaurant at Liat Towers in Orchard Road.
  • Parliamentary elections were held in the southern African nation of Botswana, with the Botswana Democratic Party of President Seretse Khama continuing its majority. The Reuters news agency noted that "No other party has put up enough candidates to form a majority in Parliament."
  • Twenty-one people were killed and 32 injured in France when the bus they were traveling in was struck by a train near the city of Tarbes. The group from Spain had been on its way back to the city of Bilbao after making the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes when the bus became stuck on the railroad tracks.
  • Born:

October 21, 1979 (Sunday)

  • Elections were held in Switzerland for the 200 seats of the National Council and the 46 seats of the Council of States.
  • Huber Matos, who had fought alongside Fidel Castro in 1959 but was imprisoned later in the year on charges of sedition, was released from prison after completing the entirety of his 20-year sentence. He was then allowed to leave and moved to Costa Rica, then to the United States.
  • Norway's soccer football championship, the Norgesmesterskapet i fotball, was won in Oslo by Viking FK of Stavanger, which beat SK Haugar of Haugesund, 2 to 1.
  • In an effort to minimize black market trading and to nullify the effect of bank notes taken by its former dictator and his followers, the government of Uganda announced that it would require the exchange of the African nation's currency (the Ugandan shilling with newly minted shillings. Uganda closed its borders with its five neighbors, restricted entry and exit, and declared that after October 27, the old shillings (which bore the image of deposed president Idi Amin) would no longer be legal tender if not exchanged for new versions before the deadline. When Amin and other members of the old regime had fled in April, they had taken millions of old shilling notes with them, all of which were made worthless by the changeover.

October 22, 1979 (Monday)

  • U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Department of State permitted the deposed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to enter the United States for treatment for suspected cancer at Cornell Medical Center in New York City. The Shah arrived at LaGuardia Airport at 10:00 p.m. after a flight from Mexico., a decision which would outrage Iran and prompt the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the taking of its employees as hostages.
  • Died: Jesse Bishop, 46, became the first U.S. prison inmate to be put to death in the gas chamber in the U.S. since 1967, and only the third person to be legally executed in the U.S. since 1976. Bishop, who had shot and killed David Ballard in 1977 during the robbery of a Las Vegas casino, died at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. Before being put to death, Bishop told detectives that he had committed 18 "murders for hire".

October 23, 1979 (Tuesday)

October 24, 1979 (Wednesday)

  • The long-running BBC sitcom Terry and June, starring the English comedy team of Terry Scott and June Whitfield as a husband and wife, Terry and June Medford, broadcast its first episode. The series, which would run until 1987, came after their sitcom Happy Ever After (in which they played a husband and wife, Terry and June Fletcher) had gone off the air on April 25 after five years.
  • Died: Eleanor Robson Belmont, 99, English-born American actress and philanthropist

October 25, 1979 (Thursday)

 
Catalonian flag
 
Basque flag

October 26, 1979 (Friday)

 
KCIA Director and assassin Kim Jae-gyu
  • South Korea's President Park Chung Hee was assassinated at a dinner party by the Director of his Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Jae-gyu. At 7:35 in the evening in Seoul, Kim Jae-gyu's first shot killed Park's bodyguard, Cha Chi-choi, because of Cha's reputation as "a superb marksman" and "a tough former paratrooper detested by a section of the military and by top men in the K.C.I.A." Park, who had been President of an oppressive government since 1961, was shot to death along with four of his bodyguards and his chauffeur during an argument that started after Park had berated Kim for being ineffective in suppressing student uprisings. In an emergency meeting three hours after the incident, the Cabinet of Ministers named Prime Minister Choi Kyu Hah as the acting president and imposed martial law over most of the nation and closed all airports under its jurisdiction.

October 27, 1979 (Saturday)

 
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines flag
  • The Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was granted independence from the United Kingdom after 352 years of British rule. Milton Cato continued as Prime Minister of the nation
  • An explosion in a coal mine in Mungyeong in South Korea killed 43 miners.
  • Died: Father Charles Coughlin, 88, controversial American Roman Catholic priest known for his conservative political radio program during the 1930s.

October 28, 1979 (Sunday)

  • Ten people were killed during a prisoner exchange program when a Mexican government plane, a twin-engine Otter turboprop, crashed in the United States as it approached the airport in San Diego. The dead include four American prisoners who were being transported back to the U.S. under a 1977 agreement between the U.S. and Mexico.
  • The first annual "Tbilisoba", an October festival to celebrate the history of the Eastern European nation of Georgia, was held it Tbilisi, capital of the Soviet Union's Georgian SSR, at the initiative of Eduard Shevardnadze, the First Secretary of the Georgian SSR's Communist Party.
  • Allegheny Airlines, originally a regional airline in the eastern United States from Pittsburgh, changed its name to USAir and expanded its itinerary. Rebranded in 1997 as US Airways, it would be acquired by American Airlines in 2013.
  • Born:

October 29, 1979 (Monday)

  • Robert Boulin, 59, French Minister of Labor, disappeared after having had lunch with his son. Boulin, who had recently been accused of corruption, was found dead the next day in a pond near the forest of Rambouillet, and an empty bottle of barbiturates was found in his car, along with several suicide notes.

October 30, 1979 (Tuesday)

  • Fifty people were killed and 30 injured in the derailment of a train that was traveling to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia from Djibouti (in the northeast African nation of the same name). The accident occurred as the train was approaching Djibouti's second largest city, Ali Sabieh.
  • An Air France Concorde jetliner came within 10 feet (3.0 m) of colliding with a formation of five United States Air Force F-15 fighters at an altitude of 28,000 feet (8,500 m) after F-15 jets had descended into its path. The Concorde had taken off from Washington's Dulles International Airport with 16 passengers and a crew of five and was over the Atlantic Ocean about 50 miles (80 km) southeast of New Jersey when the near-collision happened at 2:30 in the afternoon. Information about the close call was not publicly released until five weeks later on December 7.
  • Magsat, the Magnetic Field Satellite, was launched by the United States from Vandenberg Air Force base in California in order to map Earth's magnetic field.
  • A mob of 300 leftist protesters in San Salvador attacked the U.S. Embassy to El Salvador, firing guns and attempting to break into the building before being turned back by guards of the U.S. Marines, who were supplemented shortly afterward by the Salvadoran Army.
  • The U.S. city of Birmingham, Alabama, at one time newsworthy for its racial segregation, elected its first African-American Mayor, as Richard Arrington defeated white challenger Frank Parsons.
  • Born: Yukie Nakama, Japanese idol and actress; in Urasoe, Okinawa
  • Died:

October 31, 1979 (Wednesday)

  • Western Airlines Flight 2605 crashed when the DC-10 landed on a closed runway at Mexico City at the end of its flight from Los Angeles, killing 72 of the 89 people on board, along with one person on the ground.
  • Midway Airlines, created to draw flights to Chicago's Midway International Airport, began its first flight, with three Douglas DC-9 jets making low-cost flights from Midway to Cleveland, Kansas City and Detroit. It would go bankrupt in 1991.
  • The government of the Philippines created the Gintong Alay ("Golden Harvest") program for the Ministry of Youth and Sports Development to increase Philippine success in track and field athletics.
  • Died: Eddie Bentz, 85, American bank robber who was incarcerated at Alcatraz federal prison from 1936 to 1948.
  • Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris kidnap and murder Shirley Lynette Ledford, their 5th and final victim.

References

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