Timeline 1958
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1958 Jan 1, Treaties establishing the European Economic Community went into effect.
(AP, 1/1/98)
1958 Jan 1, Dr. Douglas Kelley (45), psychiatrist, committed suicide using potassium cyanide. He was one of the psychiatrist used by the US Army to interview Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and authored the book “22 Cells in Nuremberg."
(SSFC, 2/6/05, p.A17)
1958 Jan 1, Photographer Edward Weston (b.1886) died. A 1973 biography was titled "Edward Weston: Fifty Years." In 1998 his model Charis Wilson published "Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston."
(SFEM, 6/30/96, p.23)(SFC, 5/18/98, p.D1)(SFC, 9/2/06, p.E3)
1958 Jan 3, The first six members of the newly formed US Commission on Civil Rights held their first meeting at the White House after they were sworn in by President Eisenhower.
(AP, 1/3/08)
1958 Jan 3, Edmund Hillary reached the South Pole (Antarctica) overland. Hillary was part of a joint New Zealand-British ice trek that drove farm tractors on the Skelton Glacier to the South Pole. He beat Vivian Fuchs to the South Pole by 17 days.
(SFC, 1/14/99, p.C2)(MC, 1/3/02)
1958 Jan 3, The British created the West Indies Federation with Lord Hailes as governor general. The federation lasted to 1962. It included Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago and the Windward and Leeward Islands.
(HN, 1/3/99)(WUD, 1994, p.1623)
1958 Jan 6, Moscow announced a reduction in its armed forces by 300,000.
(HN, 1/6/99)
1958 Jan 7, USSR shrank its army to 300,000.
(MC, 1/7/02)
1958 Jan 7, Petru Groza (74), premier and president (Romania, 1945-58), died.
(MC, 1/7/02)
1958 Jan 8, Bobby Fisher won the United States Chess Championship for the first time at 14 years of age.
(MC, 1/8/02)
1958 Jan 9, President Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address to Congress, warned of the threat of Communist imperialism.
(AP, 1/9/08)
1958 Jan 10, Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" reached #1.
(MC, 1/10/02)
1958 Jan 13, 9,000 scientists of 43 nations petitioned the UN for a nuclear test ban.
(MC, 1/13/02)
1958 Jan 21, Charles Starkweather, 19, killed the mother, stepfather and half-sister of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, at her family's home in Lincoln, Neb. Starkweather, who had also killed a gas station attendant the previous November, and Fugate went on a road trip which resulted in seven more slayings. Starkweather was executed in 1959; Fugate, who maintained she had been Starkweather's hostage, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life; she was paroled in 1976. His slaying spree inspired the 1973 film “Badlands" starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.
(SFEM, 2/8/98, p.8)(AP, 1/21/08)
1958 Jan 21, James Grover Tarver (b.1885), Texas-born giant, died in Arkansas. He had grown to be 8 feet 4 inches tall and traveled with the Ringling Bros. and other circuses. In 1917 he played the giant in the film “Jack and the Beanstalk."
(SFC, 3/5/08, p.G5)(www.forensicgenealogy.info/contest_80_results.html)
1958 Jan 21, The Soviet Union called for a ban on nuclear arms in Baghdad Pact countries.
(HN, 1/21/99)
1958 Jan 23, Venezuela gained liberties with the overthrow of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, its last dictator. The social democrats' Democratic Action (AD) and the Christian Democrats (Copei) began alternating power and then entered into the power-sharing agreement called "Pacto de Punto Fijo." Rafael Antonio Caldera (1916-2009) was one of the three signers of the Punto Fijo pact, which organized democratic elections after the fall of Jimenez.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.A15)(SSFC, 6/24/01, p.T6)(AP, 1/23/04)(AP, 12/24/09)
1958 Jan 24, After warming to 100,000,000 degrees, 2 light atoms were bashed together to create a heavier atom, resulting in the 1st man-made nuclear fusion.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1958 Jan 28, Roy Campanella, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was paralyzed in a car crash. In 1959 Topps Chewing Gum Company issued a baseball card in his honor featuring Campanella in a wheelchair with the phrase “Symbol of Courage."
(AH, 6/03, p.56)(http://tinyurl.com/ry7spx)
1958 Jan 29, Actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married in Las Vegas.
(AP, 1/29/08)
1958 Jan 30, The play "Sunrise at Campobello," by Dore Schary about Franklin D. Roosevelt's struggle against polio, opened on Broadway with Ralph Bellamy as FDR.
(AP, 1/30/08)
1958 Jan 31, Explorer 1, the first successful US satellite, was launched by a Jupiter-C rocket and the United States entered the Space Age. It discovered the "Van Allen radiation belts" around Earth named after James Van Allen. Radio signals from the transmitter aboard the 30.8 pound satellite were picked up in California within a few minutes after the launch. Two months earlier, the first attempt to launch a satellite had failed.
(SFEC, 9/28/97, p.A14)(AP, 1/31/98)(SFC, 8/10/06, p.B7)
1958 Feb 1, Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic. Most Syrians resented the merger, which was led by the radical Baath (Arab Socialist Resurrection) party. The union of Syria and Egypt was dissolved in 1961 following a coup in Syria. Egypt kept the name United Arab Republic until 1971.
(WUD, 1994, p.1555)(HNQ, 6/5/98)(AP, 2/1/08)
1958 Feb 5, A B-47 accidentally dropped an unarmed thermonuclear bomb at the mouth of Georgia’s Savannah River. It was never found.
(SFEC, 11/22/98, Par p.22)
1958 Feb 5, Gamel Abdel Nasser was formally nominated to become the first president of the new United Arab Republic. Egypt used the UAR name from 1961-1971.
(AP, 2/5/97)(WUD, 1994, p.1555)
1958 Feb 7, The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team became the LA Dodgers, Inc.
(SFEC, 9/15/96, Par p.14)
1958 Feb 13, Georges Rouault (86), French painter (Christ aux outrages), died.
(MC, 2/13/02)
1958 Feb 14, The Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan formed under Iraq’s Faisal II. King Hussein forged a federation with Iraq, which was led by his cousin, Faisal II. The federation failed when Faisal was killed during a revolution in Iraq.
(HNQ, 8/20/00)(MC, 2/14/02)
1958 Feb 15, Sjafroeddin Prawiranegara formed the anti-government of Middle Sumatra.
(MC, 2/15/02)
1958 Feb 17, The comic strip "B.C.", created by Johnny Hart (1931-2007), 1st appeared.
(http://www.toonopedia.com/bc.htm)
1958 Feb 19, Rebecca ("Becky") Hoppe, founder of Soccer Moms of US, was born.
(MC, 2/19/02)
1958 Feb 19, Hail the size of baseballs was reported with flash lightning over parts of Minneapolis.
(MC, 2/19/02)
1958 Feb 20, The Broadway play “The Day the Money Stopped" opened at the Belasco Theater. It featured the debut of actress Collin Wilcox-Paxton (d.2009 at 74).
(SFC, 10/23/09, p.D5)
1958 Feb 21, Egypt-Syria as UAR elected Gamel Nasser president with a 99.9% vote.
(MC, 2/21/02)
1958 Feb 27, Harry Cohn, CEO of Columbia Pictures, died of a heart attack.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1958 Mar 1, Doctors declared that President Eisenhower had fully recovered from his stroke.
(HN, 3/1/98)
1958 Mar 1, Giacomo Balla (b.1871), Italian composer and painter, died. He was a signatory to the 1910 Futurist Manifesto, and designed and painting Futurist furniture. He also created Futurist "antineutral" clothing.
(Econ, 2/22/14, p.71)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Balla)
1958 Mar 2, Chart Toppers: Sweet Little Sixteen, Chuck Berry; At the Hop, Danny & the Juniors; Oh Julie, Crescendos; Don't, Elvis Presley.
(HC, Internet, 2/3/98)
1958 Mar 2, A multinational expedition led by British geologist and explorer Vivian Fuchs (d.1999 at 91) completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica by way of the South Pole in 99 days.
(SFC, 11/13/99, p.A22)(AP, 3/2/08)
1958 Mar 2, Yemen announced it will join the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria).
(SC, 3/2/02)
1958 Mar 3, Nuri ash Said became premier of Iraq.
(SC, 3/3/02)
1958 Mar 6, Form letters from Pres. Eisenhower to 6 civilians appointees provided for them to take office in the event of a national emergency. The group met in 1960 with the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization to discuss staffing for their agencies. Pres. Kennedy relieved the group of its duties in 1961.
(SSFC, 3/21/04, p.A2)
1958 Mar 8, William Faulkner said US schools had degenerated to become babysitters.
(MC, 3/8/02)
1958 Mar 11, A B-47 out of Hunter AFB in Savannah, Georgia, had just leveled off at 15,000 feet, when a bomb lock failed and dropped a nuclear bomb on the suburban neighborhood of Florence, South Carolina. The bomb's high explosives exploded on impact, wrecking a house and injuring several people on the ground. The extent of radioactive contamination was never revealed. The device had fallen after Captain Bruce Kulka accidentally grabbed a lever opening the bomb bay -- almost falling out himself. It was not fully armed with a fissile core.
(www.willthomasonline.net/willthomasonline/Broken_Arrows.html)(AFP, 12/10/14)
1958 Mar 14, RIAA certified its 1st gold record: Perry Como's Catch A Falling Star.
(MC, 3/14/02)
1958 Mar 17, The U.S. Navy launched the Vanguard 1 satellite.
(AP, 3/17/02)
1958 Mar 19, The film "South Pacific," adapted from the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, was released.
(AP, 3/19/08)
1958 Mar 21, Gary Oldman, actor (Sid and Nancy, Criminal Law, State of Grace), was born.
(MC, 3/21/02)
1958 Mar 22, Movie producer Mike Todd (56) and three other people were killed in the crash of Todd's private plane near Grants, N.M.
(AP, 3/22/08)
1958 Mar 24, Rock 'n' roll singer Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army in Memphis, Tenn. After nearly six months of basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, Presley was posted to Friedberg, West Germany; he was honorably discharged in 1960.
(AP, 3/23/08)
1958 Mar 25, Canada’s era of supersonic flight began when pilot Jan Zurakowski took off from Malton Airport near Toronto in an Avro CF-105 Arrow for a 35-minute maiden flight. Less than a month later, Zurakowski flew the Arrow at Mach 1.5 at an altitude of 50,000 feet. In spite of the aircraft’s early promise, the Canadian government scrapped the project before the Arrow could be put into production.
(HN, 3/21/99)
1958 Mar 26, In the 30th Academy Awards "The Bridge on the River Kwai" won 7 Awards, including best picture of 1957; its director, David Lean, and star Alec Guinness also received Oscars. Joanne Woodward was named best actress for "The Three Faces of Eve."
(AP, 3/26/08)
1958 Mar 26, The U.S. Army launched America’s third successful satellite, Explorer 3.
(AP, 3/26/97)
1958 Mar 27, The U.S. announced a plan to explore space near the moon.
(HN, 3/27/98)
1958 Mar 27, CBS Labs announced new stereophonic records.
(MC, 3/27/02)
1958 Mar 27, The Havana Hilton opened.
(MC, 3/27/02)
1958 Mar 27, Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier in addition to First Secretary of the Communist Party.
(AP, 3/27/97)(HN, 3/27/98)
1958 Mar 28, W.C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues," died in New York at age 84.
(AP, 3/28/08)
1958 Mar 29, Aerial circus star Clyde Pangborn died. He and playboy Hugh Herndon, Jr. complete the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean in 1931.
(HN, 10/2/99)(ON, 1/03, p.10)
1958 Mar 31, US Navy formed the atomic sub division.
(MC, 3/31/02)
1958 Mar 31, Moscow declared a halt on all atomic tests and asked other nations to follow.
(HN, 3/31/98)
1958 Mar, KTVU-Channel 2 went on the air in the SF Bay Area. Bob March (1927-2020) began hosting the Captain Satellite TV show on the Oakland-based station. The show continued to 1972.
(SFC, 8/13/20, p.B3)
1958 Mar, Charles D. Keeling (1928-2005) installed a gas analyzer on the slopes of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. It gave a reading of 314 ppm for carbon dioxide. It was part of the International Geophysical Year project and the carbon dioxide research was under Keeling. The atmospheric chemist had begun monitoring the pure air at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the South Pole. Subsequent CO2 readings indicated climbed steadily and became known as the Keeling Curve. After one year of gathering data it was clear that the whole planet has an annual cycle for photosynthesis and respiration that is visible by measuring carbon dioxide concentration. [See 1988]. 50 years later the CO2 reading was about 387 parts per million.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_David_Keeling)(WSJ, 12/14/07, p.B1)(Econ, 9/17/11, p.89)
1958 Apr 1, President Eisenhower signed a $1.85 billion emergency housing measure.
(AP, 4/1/08)
1958 Apr 2, National Advisory Council on Aeronautics was renamed NASA.
(HN, 4/2/98)
1958 Apr 3, "Say, Darling" opened at ANTA Theater NYC for 332 performances.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1958 Apr 3, Fidel Castro's rebels attacked Havana.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1958 Apr 4, The 1st march against nuclear weapons began in London with a 4-day to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment close to Aldermaston, England.
(Econ, 8/16/08, p.56)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldermaston_Marches)
1958 Apr 9, A Cuban general strike was called but failed. Urban militias in Havana and Santiago were put down by the police.
(WSJ, 7/10/02, p.D8)
1958 Apr 13, In the 12th Tony Awards: Sunrise at Campobello and Music Man won.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1958 Apr 13, Van Cliburn became the first American to win the Tchaikovsky International Piano Contest in Moscow. Lev Vlasenko (1929-1996) took 2nd place. Liu Chi Kung came in 2nd. [see China 1959] In 2016 Nigel Cliff authored “Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story – How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War."
(SFC, 7/6/96, p.E3)(TMC, 1994, p.1958)(SFC, 8/27/96, p.A17)(AP, 4/13/97)(SFEC, 10/22/00, Z1 p.1)(Econ, 10/15/16, p.80)
1958 Apr 14, Sputnik 2 (with dog Laika) burned up in the atmosphere.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1958 Apr 14, A crowd of some 200,000 swarmed Market St. to welcome the Giants baseball team translocated to San Francisco from New York by owner Horace Stoneham (d.1990).
(SFEC,12/797, Z1 p.6)(SSFC, 1/4/15, DB p.42)
1958 Apr 15, In the 10th Emmy Awards: Gunsmoke, Robert Young and Jane Wyatt won.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1958 Apr 15, The Giants baseball team of Horace Stoneham, brought from New York to San Francisco, opened at Seal Stadium against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants won 8-0.
(SFC, 10/8/97, p.A20)(SFEC,12/797, Z1 p.4,5)
1958 Apr 16, Arnold Palmer won his first Masters golf tournament.
(HN, 4/16/98)
1958 Apr 16, Rosalind Franklin (b.1920), English chemist and one of the four scientists who discovered the structure of DNA, died in London of ovarian cancer. She made the 1st x-ray image that revealed the double helix structure of DNA (1953). In 2002 Brenda Maddox authored "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin)(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.M2)
1958 Apr 17, A World Fair opened in Brussels, Belgium. The 335-foot Atomium, representing a large-scale metal molecule, was built to celebrate the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. It became one of Belgium's most famous landmarks and in 2005 was restored to its shiny splendor, the faded aluminum sheets on the nine balls fully replaced with hardy stainless steel.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_'58)(AP, 9/16/05)
1958 Apr 19, The last Key System train left Oakland for SF. Ferry service from the Ferry Building ended the next day when the Southern Pacific "Eureka" made its last crossing from SF to Oakland.
(SFC, 8/10/98, p.A5)(SFC, 9/4/98, p.A25)(SFC, 8/7/07, p.A6)(SFC, 4/18/08, p.B1)
1958 Apr 20, The last Key System train left San Francisco for Oakland. Ferry service from the SF Ferry Building ended when the Southern Pacific "Eureka" made its last crossing to Oakland. Train tracks were taken off the lower deck of the Bay Bridge and the lanes were paved in for car traffic.
(SFC, 8/10/98, p.A5)(SFC, 9/4/98, p.A25)(SFC, 8/7/07, p.A6)(SFC, 4/18/08, p.B1)
1958 Apr 23, The film noir thriller "Touch of Evil," starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Orson Welles, who also directed, was released.
(AP, 4/23/08)
1958 Apr 25, The Xunhua Incident, an uprising of Tibetan and Salar people, ended in suppression and a massacre by the People's Liberation Army. 435 people were killed within four hours, most of whom were unarmed civilians.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunhua_Incident)
1958 Apr 27, Billy Graham began a 6-week Bay Area crusade at the Cow Palace in Daly City, Ca. Some 18,000 crowded inside as another 5,000 stood in the parking lot. Graham began a 3-day revival crusade at the Cow Palace that drew nearly 700,000 people.
(SFC, 10/1/96, p.D1)(SSFC, 4/27/08, DB p.58)
1958 Apr 28, Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, began a goodwill tour of Latin America that was marred by hostile mobs in Lima, Peru, and Caracas, Venezuela.
(AP, 4/28/99)
1958 Apr 28, The United States conducted the first of 35 nuclear test explosions in the Pacific Proving Ground as part of Operation Hardtack I.
(AP, 4/28/08)(http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Hardtack1.html)
1958 Apr 29, Daniel Day-Lewis, actor (Last of the Mohicans, My Left Foot), was born in England.
(MC, 4/29/02)
1958 Apr 29, Michelle Pfeiffer, actress, was born in Midway City, Calif.
(MC, 4/29/02)
1958 Apr 30, Britain's Life Peerages Act 1958 allowed women to become members of the House of Lords.
(AP, 4/30/08)
1958 May 3, Ismael Valenzuela (1935-2009) rode Tim Tam to victory in the Kentucky Derby.
(SFC, 9/4/09, p.D6)(www.kentuckyderby.com/2009/history/statistics/1951-1975)
1958 May 5, The Arkansas Gazette received the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis; James Agee was posthumously honored for his novel "A Death in the Family."
(AP, 5/5/08)
1958 May 6, The US "Cactus" bomb test was relatively small, but it left a lasting legacy for the Marshall Islands in a dome-shaped radioactive dump. It was built two decades after the blast in the Pacific Ocean region. The US military filled the bomb crater on Runit island with radioactive waste, capped it with concrete, and told displaced residents of the Pacific's remote Enewetak atoll they could safely return home. The 45-cm (18-inch) thick concrete dome later developed cracks.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hardtack_I)(AFP, 5/26/19)
1958 May 7, Howard Johnson set an aircraft altitude record in F-104.
(HN, 5/7/98)
1958 May 8, Vice President Nixon was shoved, stoned, booed and spat upon by anti-American protesters in Lima, Peru. Vice President Richard Nixon’s eight-nation South America goodwill tour in May 1958 encountered violent demonstrations, particularly in Peru and Venezuela, spurring President Dwight Eisenhower to order the movement of U.S. forces into Caribbean bases.
(AP, 5/8/97)(HNQ, 6/14/99)
1958 May 9, The film "Vertigo" with James Stewart and Kim Novak was released. It was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and had been shot in the SF Bay Area. "Vertigo" premiered in San Francisco.
(SFEC, 8/11/96, DB, p.39)(AP, 5/9/08)
1958 May 12, The United States and Canada signed an agreement to create the North American Air Defense Command (later the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD for short).
(AP, 5/12/08)
1958 May 13, Stan Musial made hit # 3000.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1958 May 13, Vice President Nixon's limousine was battered by rocks thrown by anti-U.S. demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela. Nixon’s eight-nation South America goodwill tour encountered violent demonstrations, particularly in Peru and Venezuela, spurring President Dwight Eisenhower to order the movement of US forces into Caribbean bases.
(AP, 5/13/97)(HNQ, 6/14/99)
1958 May 13, French troops took control of Algiers as French settlers rioted against the French army.
(HN, 5/13/98)(MC, 5/13/02)
1958 May 15, The MGM movie musical "Gigi," starring Leslie Caron as a young French courtesan-in-training, was released.
(AP, 5/15/08)
1958 May 15, Vice President Richard Nixon received a hero's welcome on his return from a violence-marred tour of Latin America.
(AP, 5/15/08)
1958 May 15, In South Korea the Yoido Full Gospel Church was founded by David Yonggi Cho and his mother-in-law, Choi Ja-shil, both Assemblies of God pastors. Their first worship service was held in the home of Choi Ja-shil. Apart from the two pastors, only Choi Ja-shil's three daughters and one elderly woman, who had come in to escape from the rain, attended the first service. By 2007 Yoido counted some 830,000 members and its church in Seoul was the largest in the world.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Yonggi_Cho)
1958 May 15, Sputnik III, the first space laboratory, was launched in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 5/15/99)
1958 May 16, A man endured a record 82.6 G for .04 seconds on a water-braked rocket sled at Holloman Air Force Base. He was hospitalized for 3 days for recovery.
(SFEC, 7/2/00, Z1 p.2)
1958 May 18, Chairman Mao Tse Tung spoke at the Second Session of the Eight Party Congress and called for schoolchildren to assist in the elimination of the four pests, which included sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes. A massive 3-day campaign soon began to exterminate sparrows, which were thought harmful because they ate the peasant's grain. Numerous other birds were killed in the process and the following year a plague of locusts became a problem. In 2001 Judith Shapiro, Donald Worster and Alfred W. Crosby authored “Mao's War Against Nature: Politics & the Environment in Revolutionary China."
(http://tinyurl.com/8gbhg)(Econ, 12/20/08, p.65)(http://tinyurl.com/7m9egc)
1958 May 19, The movie "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" was released in the movie theaters in USA.
(DTnet, 5/19/97)
1958 May 19, The United States and Canada formally established the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).
(AP, 5/19/97)(Econ, 3/5/05, p.38)
1958 May 19, British actor Ronald Colman died in Santa Barbara, Calif., at age 67.
(AP, 5/19/08)
1958 May 23, Mao Tse Tung started his "Great leap forward" movement in China. China tried to modernize its economy in "The Great Leap Forward" and urged factories and farms to meet impossible production targets. Farmers were forced to pool their possessions and devote all land to grain cultivation. Rather than concede failure, local officials misled central planners about output. The result: a famine that may have killed as many as 30 million people by the end of 1960. The story is told by Jasper Becker in his 1997 book "Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine."
(WSJ 12/10/93)(SFEC, 10/7/96, A12)(WSJ, 2/7/97, p.A14)(MC, 5/23/02)
1958 May 24, United Press International (UPI) was formed through a merger of the United Press and the International News Service.
(AP, 5/24/97)
1958 May 24, Pres Batista opened an offensive against Fidel Castro's rebellion.
(MC, 5/24/02)
1958 May 25, Paul Weller, guitar (Jam-This is the Modern World, Style Council), was born.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1958 May 26, Janice Kulsar was born in Manhattan, N.Y. She later established renown as a denizen of the Cafe Babar in SF, and went on to sail the world as an adventuress and healer.
(CB, 12/28/97)
1958 May 26, Union Square in San Francisco became a state historical landmark.
(HN, 5/26/98)
1958 May 27, Ernest Green and 600 whites graduated from Little Rock's Central High School. Green became the first black Central High graduate.
(http://tinyurl.com/qyjp4)(www.centralhigh57.org/1957-58.htm)
1958 May 28, Mikulas Schneider-Trvavsky (77), composer, died.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1958 May 29, Annette Bening, actress (American Beauty, Grifters, Bugsy, Valmont), was born in Topeka, KS.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1958 May 29, Juan Ramón Jimenez (76), Spanish poet (Nobel 1956), died.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1958 May 30, Unidentified soldiers killed in World War II and the Korean conflict were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
(AP, 5/30/97)
1958 Jun 1, "Youth Wants To Know", TV Public Affairs; last aired on NBC. Apparently, they didn’t want to know.
(DT, 6/1/97)
1958 Jun 1, Charles de Gaulle became premier of France, marking the beginning of the end of the Fourth Republic and the beginning of the Fifth Republic. France, on the verge of civil war over Algeria, called De Gaulle out of retirement.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)(AP, 6/1/08)(Econ., 3/21/15, p.44)
1958 Jun 4, French premier De Gaulle arrived in Algiers.
(MC, 6/4/02)
1958 Jun 6, Premier Charles de Gaulle said Algeria will always be French.
(MC, 6/6/02)
1958 Jun 7, Prince Rogers Nelson, rock star later known as Prince, was born in Minneapolis, Minn.
(WSJ, 3/30/04, p.B1)
1958 Jun 15, Greece severed military ties to Turkey because of the Cyprus issue.
(HN, 6/15/98)
1958 Jun 16, The US Supreme Court, in Kent v. Dulles, ruled that artist Rockwell Kent could not be denied a passport because of his communist affiliations.
(AP, 6/16/08)
1958 Jun 16, Imre Nagy (b.1896), former Hungarian premier (1956) and symbol of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule, was hanged by the Communist government of Janos Kadar.
(www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/nagy/)(Econ, 10/21/06, p.95)
1958 Jun 17, Radio Moscow reported the execution of Hungarian ex-premier Imre Nagy by hanging.
(MC, 6/17/02)
1958 Jun 18, President Eisenhower expressed support for his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, who was accused of improperly accepting gifts from a businessman. Adams resigned in September 1958.
(AP, 6/18/08)
1958 Jun 19, "The Lux Show Starring Rosemary Clooney", TV Variety; last aired on NBC.
(DT, 6/19/97)
1958 Jun 19, In Washington, D.C. nine entertainers refused to answer a congressional committee’s questions on communism.
(HN, 6/19/98)
1958 Jun 19, Entrepreneurs Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin sought a trademark for a plastic cylinder based on a similar toy in Australia. Wham-O began selling the Hula Hoop following a demonstration of a rattan hoop imported from Australia. After one year teenagers in the US purchased some 100 million hoops at a suggested retail price of $1.98.
(SFC, 7/1/02, p.B5)(SFC, 6/19/08, p.C3)
1958 Jun 20, FBI headquarters learned of Ronald Reagan’s desire to star in the film "The FBI Story." The bureau rejected the idea because of Reagan’s association with Communist front organizations in the 1940s.
(SSFC, 6/9/02, p.F3)
1958 Jun 21, A federal judge allowed Little Rock Arkansas to delay school integration.
(HN, 6/21/98)
1958 Jun 23, Dr. John Jay Osborn (d.2014) and cardiac surgeon Frank Gerbode used their heart-lung machine to operate on a boy (8) at Stanford Hospital before a Bay Area televisioon audience of some 1.2 million.
(SFC, 5/1/14, p.D6)
1958 Jun 23, In the Netherlands the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation was founded by Prince Bernhard. It awarded the annual Erasmus Prize to individuals or institutions that have made notable contributions to European culture, society, or social science.
(www.123exp-culture.com/t/03604490053/)
1958 Jun 24, Victor M. Gerena, security guard who robbed $7 million (FBI wanted), was born in NYC.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1958 Jun 25, A four-day dedication of the Mackinac Bridge linking Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas began, even though the bridge had been open to traffic since November 1957.
(AP, 6/25/08)
1958 Jun 27, Rebel forces kidnapped 29 US sailors and Marines and held them until Jul 18.
(SSFC, 1/20/02, p.A7)
1958 Jun 28, Alfred Noyes (77), British poet, essayist (Robin Hood, The Highwayman), died.
(MC, 6/28/02)
1958 Jun 29, A bomb exploded at the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.; there were no injuries.
(AP, 6/29/08)
1958 Jun 29, Brazil won its first World Cup in thrilling fashion, defeating host Sweden 5-2 in the final and in the process becoming the first team to win the tournament outside its continent. The tournament is largely remembered for the emergence of 17-year-old Edson Arantes do Nascimento, aka Pele.
(AP, 6/2/18)
1958 Jun 30, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (Giro), was born in Helsinki, Finland.
(MC, 6/30/02)
1958 Jun 30, Congress passed a law authorizing the admission of Alaska as the 49th state in the Union, the first new state since 1912. The Senate passed the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.
(HN, 6/30/98)(AP, 6/30/08)
1958 Jun, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, of African American and American Indian ancestry, traveled from Caroline County, Va., to marry in Washington, DC. Upon returning home they were arrested for violating the state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Their one year sentenced was suspended on condition that they leave the state.
(SFC, 2/14/12, p.E4)
1958 Jun, In Japan Mount Aso erupted and left 12 people dead.
(SFEC, 4/2/00, p.A17)
1958 Jul 7, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska statehood bill. Alaska became the 49th state in January 1959.
(AP, 7/7/07)
1958 Jul 8, President Eisenhower began a visit to Canada, where he conferred with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and addressed the Canadian Parliament.
(AP, 7/8/08)
1958 Jul 10, A largest tsunami on record was caused by the fall of 90 million tons of rock and ice into Lituya Bay, Alaska, following a local earthquake. The wave washed 500 meters up a mountain on the opposite shore.
(CW, Spring ‘99, p.30)
1958 Jul 11, Monument Valley, straddling the Arizona-Utah border, became the 1st Navajo Tribal Park.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.C15)
1958 Jul 14, In Iraq Gen. Abdel Karim al-Kassem (Qassim) assassinated Faisal II with his son and premier. Karim proclaimed a republic. Jordan’s King Hussein succeeded Faisal. Faisal II, Hashemite King of Iraq (1939-58), was assassinated at Baghdad and Noeri el-Said, premier of Iraq, was murdered. Mohammed Hadid (d.1999 at 92) served as the first finance minister under the government of Abdel Karim Qassem.
(PC, 1992 ed, p.963)(AP, 7/14/97)(USAT, 3/24/99, p.18A)(SFC, 8/6/99, p.D4)
1958 Jul 15, President Eisenhower ordered 5,000 US Marines to Lebanon, at the request of that country’s president, Camille Chamoun, in the face of a perceived threat by Muslim rebels, to help end a short-lived civil war. Eisenhower justified his decision to send troops to the region on the basis that it was the "birthplace of three great religions," as well as having "two-thirds of the presently known oil deposits."
(SFEC, 4/13/97, p.T8)(AP, 7/15/98)(HN, 7/15/98)(Econ, 4/25/20, p.22)
1958 Jul 16, Michael Flatley, Irish choreographer (Lord of Dance), was born in Chicago, Ill.
(MC, 7/16/02)
1958 Jul 16, The science-fiction film "The Fly" opened in San Francisco.
(AP, 7/16/08)
1958 Jul 20, King Hussein of Jordan broke off diplomatic relations with UAR.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1958 Jul 23, Queen Elizabeth named four women to peerages, the 1st women to it in Britain's House of Lords.
(AP, 7/23/97)
1958 Jul 24, Jack Kilby (1923-2005) of Texas Instruments came up with the idea for creating the 1st integrated circuit on a piece of silicon. By September 12 he made a working prototype.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 6/22/05, p.A5)(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1958 Jul 26, Britain's Prince Charles (9), was made the Prince of Wales by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, although his investiture did not take place until the following year.
(AP, 7/26/08)
1958 Jul 27, Claire Chennault (b.1893), renowned leader of the Flying Tigers in China and Burma during WW II, died in New Orleans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Lee_Chennault)
1958 Jul 29, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which created NASA.
(AP, 7/29/97)
1958 Jul, Mildred Loving (1940-2008), a woman of American Indian and black heritage, and her white husband, Richard (d.1975), were arrested in Virginia within weeks of arriving from Washington DC and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife. In 1967 the US Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.105)
1958 Jul, Soviet fighter planes shot down an RB-50G US reconnaissance plane over the east coast of the USSR. In 2002 William E. Burrows authored "by Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in the Cold War."
(AH, 6/02, p.70)
1958 Aug 1, US atomic sub USS Nautilus 1st dove under the North Pole.
(MC, 8/1/02)
1958 Aug 1, Jordan’s King Hussein dissolved the Arab Federation of Jordan and Iraq.
(PCh, 1992, p.963)
1958 Aug 3, The nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater. The Nautilus was decommissioned in 1980 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982.
(PCh, 1992, p.965)(AP, 8/3/97)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_%28SSN-571%29)
1958 Aug 4, Mary Decker Stanley, winner of seven track and field records, was born.
(HN, 8/4/98)
1958 Aug 4, Billboard, founded in 1894, premiered its all-genre singles Hot 100 chart.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Hot_100)
1958 Aug 7, Alberto Lleras Camargo (1906-1990) began serving as President of Colombia and continued to August 7, 1962.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Lleras_Camargo)
1958 Aug 14, Gladys Love Smith Presley (48), Elvis Presley's mother, died in Memphis, Tenn.
(AP, 8/14/08)
1958 Aug 14, KLM Superconstellation crashed west of Ireland, killing 99.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1958 Aug 14, Frederic Joliot-Curie, French nuclear physicist (Nobel 1936), died.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1958 Aug 16, Madonna [Ciccone], entertainer and singer whose biggest record was "Like a Virgin," was born.
(HN, 8/16/98)
1958 Aug 17, Belinda Carlisle, (GoGos lead singer, Heaven on Earth), was born in Hollywood.
(SC, 8/17/02)
1958 Aug 17, World's 1st Moon probe, US's Thor-Able, exploded at T +77 sec.
(SC, 8/17/02)
1958 Aug 18, The 1st US edition of the novel "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov was published by Putnam. The 1st French edition was in 1955.
(WSJ, 3/20/97, p.A14)(www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=9§ion=notes)
1958 Aug 18, A TV game show scandal investigation started.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1958 Aug 18, Fidel Castro made a speech on Cuban pirate radio Rebelde.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1958 Aug 21, Walter Schumann (44), choral director (Ford Show), died.
(SC, 8/21/02)
1958 Aug 23, China resumed fire on Quemoi and Matsu.
(MC, 8/23/02)
1958 Aug 24, Leo Blech (87), German conductor and composer, died.
(MC, 8/24/02)
1958 Aug 25, The game show "Concentration" premiered on NBC-TV.
(AP, 8/25/08)
1958 Aug 25, President Eisenhower signed a measure providing pensions for former U.S. presidents and their widows.
(AP, 8/25/08)
1958 Aug 25, Momofuku Ando (48), head of Japan’s Nissin Food Products, announced that he had finally perfected his flash-frying method and therefore invented the instant noodle.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momofuku_Ando)
1958 Aug 26, Alaskans went to the polls to overwhelmingly vote in favor of statehood.
(AP, 8/26/08)
1958 Aug 26, Ralph Vaughan Williams (85), English composer (Fantasia on Themes of Thomas Tallis), died.
(MC, 8/26/02)
1958 Aug 27, The Arkansas Legislature voted 94-1 to pass a law allowing Gov. Orval E. Faubus to close public schools in the face of forced integration. Ray S. Smith (1924-2007) was the only dissenting legislator.
(SFC, 11/13/07, p.D9)
1958 Aug 27, USSR launched Sputnik 3 with 2 dogs aboard.
(MC, 8/27/01)
1958 Aug 28, Ernest Orlando Lawrence (b.1901), US physicist, Nobel Prize winner (1939), died.
(RTH, 8/28/99)
1958 Aug 29, Michael Jackson (d.2009), pop singer, entertainer, was born in Gary, Ind., the 7th of nine children.
(SFC, 6/14/05, p.D6)(SFC, 6/26/09, p.A1)
1958 Aug 29, Air Force Academy, established in 1954, opened its doors near Colorado Springs, Colo.
(www.cdphe.state.co.us/hm/academy.htm)
1958 Aug 29, Britain’s Notting Hill Riots began when a gang of white youths attacked a Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison. The youths had seen her the previous night arguing with her Jamaican husband Raymond at Latimer Road tube station. This led to a series of violent demonstrations against non-white West Indians in the ethnically diverse northwest London neighborhood of Notting Hill. This event first drew public attention to the growing problem of racial tension in Britain.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Notting_Hill_race_riots)(Econ, 6/30/12, SR p.5)
1958 Aug 31, Edwin Moses, track star, was born. Olympic Gold Medalist [1976, 1984] & Hall of Famer: 400-meter hurdles: the first athlete to use 13 strides between hurdles; 1983 winner of Sullivan Award: the U.S. outstanding amateur athlete.
(MC, 8/31/01)
1958 Aug, The CBS TV game show “Dotto," hosted by Jack Narz (1922-2008), was cancelled following allegations that the show was rigged.
(SFC, 10/17/08, p.B8)
1958 Sep 2, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, which provided aid to public and private education to promote learning in such fields as math and science.
(AP, 9/2/08)
1958 Sep 5, The novel "Doctor Zhivago" by Russian author Boris Pasternak was published in the United States for the first time.
(AP, 9/5/98)
1958 Sep 5, Martin Luther King was arrested in an Alabama protest for loitering and fined $14 for refusing to obey police.
(HN, 9/5/98)
1958 Sep 5, The 1st color video recording on magnetic tape was presented in Charlotte, NC.
(MC, 9/5/01)
1958 Sep 6, Miss Mississippi Mary Ann Mobley was crowned Miss America 1959 in Atlantic City, N.J.
(AP, 9/6/08)
1958 Sep 11, Responding to Communist China's artillery attacks on the Taiwan-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, President Eisenhower said in a broadcast address the US had to be prepared to fight to prevent a communist takeover of the islands.
(AP, 9/11/08)
1958 Sep 11, India passed its Armed Forces Special Powers Act. It conferred special powers upon armed forces in what the language of the act calls "disturbed areas" in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. It allowed soldiers to search houses without warrants and shoot anyone suspected of being a terrorist.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_%28Special_Powers%29_Act,_1958)
1958 Sep 12, The US Supreme Court, in Cooper v. Aaron, unanimously ruled that Arkansas officials who were resisting public school desegregation orders could not disregard the high court's rulings.
(AP, 9/12/08)
1958 Sep 15, A commuter train crashed through a drawbridge, killing 48 in Newark, NJ.
(http://www.emergency-management.net/traincrash.htm)
1958 Sep 20, Rev. Martin Luther King was stabbed by Izola Curry, a deranged woman, during a book signing on 125th St. in Harlem. Dr. Aubre De Lambert Maynard (d.1999 at 97) performed a successful operation on King who had a knife embedded in his sternum. Curry was later found mentally incompetent.
(SFC, 3/25/99, p.C3)(AP, 9/20/08)
1958 Sep 22, The detective TV show "Peter Gunn" premiered on NBC with Craig Stevens (d.2000 at 81) as the private eye. The show was created by Blake Edwards (1922-2010) and marked this collaboration with composer Henry Mancini.
(SFC, 5/13/00, p.A19)(AP, 9/22/08)(SFC, 12/17/10, p.D5)
1958 Sep 22, Sherman Adams, assistant to President Eisenhower, resigned amid charges of improperly using his influence to help an industrialist. Critics of the Eisenhower Administration called Chief Presidential Adviser Sherman Adams the "Assistant President" because they considered him to be too powerful. Adams was the former governor of New Hampshire. Adams resigned after it was revealed that a Boston industrialist had given him gifts in exchange for preferential treatment before the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
(AP, 9/22/97)(HNQ, 6/13/98)
1958 Sep 22, The nuclear submarine USS Skate remained a record 31 days under the North Pole.
(MC, 9/22/01)
1958 Sep 24, "The Donna Reed Show" premiered on ABC-TV.
(AP, 9/24/08)
1958 Sep 25, John B Watson, US psychologist and behaviorist, died.
(MC, 9/25/01)
1958 Sep 28, Voters in the African country of Guinea overwhelmingly favored independence from France.
(AP, 9/28/08)
1958 Sep 30, The police drama "Naked City" debuted on ABC-TV.
(AP, 9/30/08)
1958 Sep, Orval Faubus (1910-1994), governor of Arkansas, shut Little Rock’s schools to prevent any more black children from attending white schools.
(Econ, 9/22/07, p.44)(www.africanamericans.com/LittleRock.htm)
1958 Sep, A Navy plane crashed during a training mission in Washington’s Puget Sound. The plane carried an unarmed nuclear weapon that was never found.
(SFEC, 11/22/98, Par p.22)
1958 Oct 1, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was inaugurated [See Apr 2, Jul 29].
(SFC, 10/2/07, p.A6)
1958 Oct 1, American Express launched its first credit card.
(www.bostonapartments.com/loans/american_express_credit_card.html)
1958 Oct 1, Britain transferred Christmas Island (south of Java) to Australia.
(MC, 10/1/01)
1958 Oct 2, Marie Stopes, birth control pioneer, died.
(MC, 10/2/01)
1958 Oct 2, The former French colony of Guinea in West Africa proclaimed its independence from France under the leadership of Sekou Toure.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A15)(AP, 10/2/97)
1958 Oct 4, The first trans-Atlantic passenger jetliner service was begun by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with flights between London and New York.
(AP, 10/4/97)
1958 Oct 4, In Minnesota a single engine military Cessna L-19 crashed into Green Lake and took the life of Captain Richard P. Carey, 36, who was returning to the Willmar airfield from Rochester. The pane was recovered in 2005.
(AP, 8/14/05)
1958 Oct 5, Racially desegregated Clinton High School in Clinton, Tenn., was mostly leveled by an early morning bombing.
(AP, 10/5/08)
1958 Oct 6, The US nuclear submarine Seawolf surfaced after spending 60 days submerged.
(AP, 10/6/08)
1958 Oct 7, In Pakistan President Iskander Mirza abrogated the Constitution and declared Martial Law in the country. Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan was named chief martial law administrator.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayub_Khan)
1958 Oct 8, Dr. Ake Senning installed the 1st fully implantable pacemaker in Stockholm. Arne Larsson (43) received the pacemaker, which was built Dr. Rune Elmqvist. Larsson died in 2001 after receiving 26 different pacemakers.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker)(Econ, 3/7/09, TQ p.25)
1958 Oct 9, Pope Pius XII died, 19 years after he was elevated to the papacy. He was succeeded by Pope John the 23rd. In 1999 John Cornwell published "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII."
(WSJ, 4/25/97, p.A18)(AP, 10/9/00)(SFC, 9/7/99, p.A4)
1958 Oct 10, The private-eye series "77 Sunset Strip" premiered on ABC-TV. The hour-length American television private detective series, created by Roy Huggins, starred Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Roger Smith, and Edd Byrnes.
(AP, 10/10/08)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77_Sunset_Strip)
1958 Oct 11, The lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched; it failed to go as far as planned, fell back to Earth, and burned up in the atmosphere.
(AP, 10/11/97)
1958 Oct 14, Paul Osborn's "World of Suzie Wong," premiered in NYC.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1958 Oct 14, Brendan Behan's "Hostage," premiered in London.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1958 Oct 16, Tim Robbins, West Covina, Ca., actor (Bull Durham, Shawshank Redemption), was born.
(MC, 10/16/01)
1958 Oct 17, The special "An Evening with Fred Astaire," the first major TV program produced on color videotape, aired on NBC.
(AP, 10/17/08)
1958 Oct 19, John Bloom, [Joe Bob Briggs], drive-in movie critic, was born.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1958 Oct 23, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature. However, Soviet authorities pressured Pasternak into relinquishing the award.
(SFC,11/27/97, p.B3)(AP, 10/23/99)
1958 Oct 23, De Gaulle offered Algerian defiance "peace of the brave."
(MC, 10/23/01)
1958 Oct 23, USSR lent money to UAR to build Aswan High Dam.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1958 Oct 25, The last U.S. troops left Beirut
(HN, 10/25/98)
1958 Oct 26, Pan American Airways pilot Samuel H. Miller (d.2001 at 84) flew the first Boeing 707 passenger service jetliner from New York’s Idlewild Airport (later JFK) to Paris; the trip took eight hours and 41 minutes. 111 passengers flew aboard the Clipper America and a ticket cost $489.60. The plane was christened a week earlier by Mamie Eisenhower. The first New York London transatlantic jet passenger service was inaugurated by BOAC. [see Oct 4]
(AP, 10/26/97)(WSJ, 10/23/98, p.W6)(HN, 10/26/98)(SFC, 9/12/01, p.A21)
1958 Oct 27, In Pakistan Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan carried out the country’s first military coup. He announced that "our ultimate aim is to restore democracy but of the type that people can understand." Corruption had become so widespread within the national and civic systems of administration that Ayub Khan was welcomed as a national hero by the people. This launched more than a decade of military rule.
(www.storyofpakistan.com/articletext.asp?artid=A065)(SFEC, 8/3/97, p.A15)(SFEC, 11/21/99, p.A22)
1958 Oct 28, The Samuel Beckett play "Krapp's Last Tape" premiered in London.
(AP, 10/28/08)(SFEC, 10/15/00, DB p.50)
1958 Oct 28, The Roman Catholic patriarch of Venice, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was elected Pope, taking the name John XXIII.
(AP, 10/28/97)
1958 Oct 29, Boris Pasternak refused the Nobel prize for literature. Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago" was on the best seller list in the west.
(WSJ, 10/10/95, p.A-14)(MC, 10/29/01)
1958 Oct 29, Dr. F. Mason Sones became the 1st doctor to perform a coronary angiogram.
(MC, 10/29/01)
1958 Oct, The Kingston Trio released the "Ballad of Tom Dooley."
(SFC, 7/10/96, p.E5)(SFEC, 8/11/96, DB, p.52)
1958 Nov 1, Jack Dobbins (30) was murdered in Charleston, S.C., for having allegedly made sexual advances. John Mahon (18), the confessed killer, used a brass candlestick and was later acquitted after using a gay panic defense.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_murder)
1958 Nov 4, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown was elected as democratic governor of California.
(SSFC, 1/30/05, p.C1)
1958 Nov 4, Alan Cranston was elected California state controller, the 1st Democrat to hold the post since 1890.
(SFC, 1/1/01, p.A5)
1958 Nov 4, Glenn Anderson won the election for lieut. gov. of California.
(SFC, 10/17/96, C2)
1958 Nov 4, Angelo G. Roncalli was crowned as Pope John XXIII.
(MC, 11/4/01)
1958 Nov 12, Warren Harding (d.2002 at 77), Wayne Merry and George Whitmore scaled the "nose" of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite Valley. They had spent 47 days of climbing over 16 months to reach the top of the 2,900 foot cliff. In 1970 Harding and Dean Caldwell spent 27 days climbing another route up El Capitan. Harding later authored "Downward Bound."
(SFC, 3/9/02, p.A24)(SSFC, 11/9/08, p.B6)
1958 Nov 15, Tyrone Power (44), actor, died of a heart attack in Madrid, Spain, while filming "Solomon and Sheba."
(AP, 11/15/08)
1958 Nov 18, The cargo freighter SS Carl D. Bradley sank during a storm in Lake Michigan, claiming 33 of the 35 lives on board.
(AP, 11/18/08)
1958 Nov 18, The 1st true reservoir in Jerusalem opened.
(MC, 11/18/01)
1958 Nov 21, Mel Ott (49), Baseball Hall-of-Famer, died in New Orleans.
(AP, 11/21/08)
1958 Nov 21, A Soviet-East German commission met in East Berlin to discuss the transfer to East German control of Soviet functions and end its occupation status in Berlin.
(AP, 11/21/02)
1958 Nov 25, Charles F. Kettering (82), inventor of the auto self-starter, died.
(MC, 11/25/01)
1958 Nov 27, Artur Rodzinski (66), Polish conductor and composer, died.
(MC, 11/27/01)
1958 Nov 28, The U.S. reported the first full-range firing of an ICBM
(DT, 11/28/97)
1958 Nov 28, The Middle Congo province of French Equatorial Africa voted to proclaim itself independent as the Congo Republic (Brazzaville). French Equatorial Africa, was a federation of French territories in Central Africa that included Chad, Gabon, Middle Congo and Ubanga-Shari. Each became autonomous in 1958.
(WUD, 1994, p.567)(DT, 11/28/97)
1958 Nov 28, The African nation of Chad became an autonomous republic within the French community.
(AP, 11/28/97)
1958 Nov 30, Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins (70) died. In 1959 the USS Skate became the 1st submarine to surface at the North Pole and the ships crew held a funeral service and scattered the ashes of Wilkins (d.1958), who had attempted the feat in 1931.
(ON, 1/02, p.9)
1958 Dec 1, The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Flower Drum Song" opened on Broadway.
(AP, 12/1/97)
1958 Dec 1, In Chicago Our Lady of Angels School burned. 92 students and 3 nuns were killed.
(MC, 12/1/01)
1958 Dec 9, Robert H.W. Welch Jr. and 11 other men met in Indianapolis to form the anti-Communist John Birch Society.
(AP, 12/9/97)
1958 Dec 10, The first domestic passenger jet flight took place in the United States as a National Airlines Boeing 707 flew 111 passengers from New York City to Miami.
(AP, 12/10/97)
1958 Dec 13, Ahmed Mukhtar Baban, premier of Iraq, was executed along with Burhanuddin Bashajan, Iraqi minister of Foreign Affairs and Rafiq Aref, Iraqi chief-staff Arabs Statenbond.
(MC, 12/13/01)
1958 Dec 14, The United States, Britain and France rejected Soviet demands that they withdraw their troops from West Berlin and agreed to liquidate the Allied occupation in West Berlin.
(AP, 12/14/02)
1958 Dec 17, Howard Hickey (41) was named coach of the SF 49ers to replaced Frank Albert, who had retired unexpectedly.
(SSFC, 12/14/08, p.54)
1958 Dec 19, An Eisenhower White House memo gave authority to senior military commanders to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the president could not be reached or was unable to respond to a nuclear attack against the US in a policy known as "pre-delegation authority."
(SFC, 3/21/98, p.A2)(SFC, 9/2/98, p.A5)
1958 Dec 21, Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), having come out of retirement, was elected to a seven-year term as the first president of the Fifth Republic of France. De Gaulle selected Maurice Couve de Murville (d.1999 at 92) as his foreign minister.
(AP, 12/21/98)(SFC, 12/25/99, p.B4)(Econ, 10/04/08, p.56)
1958 Dec 28, At Yankee Stadium the Baltimore Colts beat the NY Giants in the NFL championship game 23-17, after the game went into overtime for the first time. In 2008 Mark Bowden authored “The Best Game Ever: The Birth of the Modern NFL."
(WSJ, 6/9/08, p.A15)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_NFL_Championship_Game)
1958 Dec 28, A Chipmunks song (Alvin, Simon & Theodore with David Seville) hit #1. "The Chipmunk Song" went on to win 3 statues in the Grammys.
(SFEC, 2/21/99, DB p.38)(SFC, 12/24/99, p.C3)(MC, 12/28/01)
1958 Dec 31, Cuba’s dictator Juan Batista fled the country taking most of the Central Bank’s reserves of dollars and gold as rebels under Fidel Castro marched into Havana.
(Econ, 12/3/16, p.18)
1958 Dec, Julen Madariaga helped found ETA. EKIN (engage), a Basque nationalist group, transformed into Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A., Basque Homeland and Freedom). ETA was the only armed group that emerged in the Spanish state during Francoism [see July 31, 1959].
(www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/westeurope/sources/birtheta.html)(Econ, 9/11/10, p.62)
1958 H.C. Westermann (1922-1981), sculptor, created "Memorial to the Idea of Man if He Was an Idea." His work was laced with dark humor.
(WSJ, 4/18/02, p.D7)
1958 John Diebenkorn, California figurative painter, made his " Woman and Mirror."
(SFEC, 3/16/97, DB p.33)
1958 Jasper Johns had his debut show at the Castelli Gallery in New York and became an overnight success. This year he painted his work "Tennyson."
(WSJ, 10/17/96, p.A20)
1958 Georgia O'Keeffe created her oil on canvas painting "Ladder to the Moon."
(SFEC, 8/10/97, p.T7)(SSFC, 6/22/03, p.C8)
1958 David Park, American artist, painted: "Man in a T-Shirt" and "Untitled".
(SFEC, 12/1/96, DB p.21)(SFC, 8/23/97, p.A20)
1958 Picasso made his sketch "Femme Nue Assise."
(SFC, 7/5/96, DB, p.36)
1958 Stanley Spencer, English artist, painted "The Crucifixion."
(SFC, 10/14/97, p.B1)(SFC, 6/5/98, p.C1)
1958 Allan Kaprow, inventor of the events known as Happenings, wrote an influential article that described the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock as pivotal in the way the artist’s action was converted directly into art content.
(SFC, 2/10/98, p.E4)
1958 Jorge Amado (d.2001 at 88), Brazilian writer, published his novel "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon."
(SFC, 8/9/01, p.D2)(www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9182926)
1958 Jean Anouilh wrote his play "Becket."
(SFC, 9/27/96, p.C6)
1958 Roger Brown authored “Words and Things," a look at the influence of language on thought and the evolution of speech.
(WSJ, 2/23/08, p.W8)
1958 Max Frisch, Swiss dramatist, wrote his expressionistic drama "The Firebugs." It was about a businessman lured into complicity with a band of terrorists.
(SFC, 2/17/00, p.B3)
1958 "The Magic-Maker: E.E. Cummings" by Charles Norman, poet and biographer, was published.
(SFC, 9/16/96, p.A15)
1958 Chinua Achebe of Nigeria authored the novel "Things Fall Apart." It was about the Igbo tribe's efforts to guard its way of life against English colonialism and was made into a theater production in 1997. It sold millions of copies worldwide and was voted Africa's best book of the century. In 2004 Achebe rejected a Nigerian national honors award, protesting conditions in the West African nation and saying renegades were trying to turn his home state into "a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom."
(WSJ, 2/09/99, p.A20)(SFEC, 8/6/00, BR p.4)(P, 10/18/04)
1958 E. Digby Baltzell (1916-1996) published "Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class."
(SFC, 8/20/96, p.A18)
1958 Edward Banfield, American sociologist, authored “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society." It was about poverty in southern Italy.
(Econ, 6/11/11, SR p.12)
1958 William Carrol Bark (1909-1996), professor emeritus of history at Stanford, published "Origins of the Medieval World."
(SFC, 10/18/96, A23)
1958 Wernher von Braun, German-born rocket scientist, authored “First Men to the Moon."
(Econ, 7/2/11, p.7)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun)
1958 Algis Budrys published his sci-fi novel "Who," in which was described an artificial heart, 5-years before a working version was developed.
(SFEC, 11/24/96, Z1 p.2)
1958 New York papers reported that San Francisco writer and bon vivant Barnaby Conrad was dying due to a goring wound received in a Spanish bullfight. Conrad survived and later opened the Matador nightclub in SF.
(SSFC, 11/16/03, p.E3)
1958 Cliffs Notes, created by Cliff Hillegass (d.2001 at age 83), began publishing condensed studies of literary works in Lincoln, Nebraska.
(WSJ, 7/5/00, p.B1)(SSFC, 5/6/01, p.A27)
1958 Edwin Dale Jr. (d.1999 at 75), NY Times journalist, co-authored "Inflation and Recession?" with Richard E. Mooney.
(SFC, 5/11/99, p.A19)
1958 Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), expatriate British writer, authored “Balthazar," the second volume his 4-part Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Durrell)
1958 Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), expatriate British writer, authored “Mountolive," the third volume his 4-part Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Durrell)
1958 Sirs Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary published "The Crossing of Antarctica."
(SFC, 11/13/99, p.A22)
1958 Economist John Kenneth Galbraith authored “The Affluent Society." He described a country increasingly riven by economic divisions but too selfish to care.
(Econ, 1/10/09, p.76)(Econ, 12/17/11, p.123)
1958 Graham Greene published his novel “Our Man in Havana." It captured Cuba on the cusp of sweeping change.
(WSJ, 8/25/06, p.A1)
1958 Nora Johnson (1933-2017) published her novel “The World of Henry Orient." A 1964 film version starred Peter Sellers and was directed by George Roy Hill. Her father was filmmaker Nunally Johnson.
(WSJ, 8/6/04, p.W8)(SFC, 10/11/17, p.D6)
1958 Louis Kelso collaborated with the philosopher Mortimer Adler to write “The Capitalist Manifesto." It is considered the primary source of Kelso’s economic theories.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso)
1958 US Senator John F. Kennedy authored “A Nation of Immigrants." It was written as part of the Anti-Defamation League's series entitled the One Nation Library.
(Econ., 3/14/15, SR p.16)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_of_Immigrants)
1958 Prince Lampedusa authored the novel "The Leopard" which portrayed a decadent Sicilian aristocracy that made changes only in order to ensure that everything remained the same.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.A15)
1958 Robert Lewis wrote "Method—or Madness?," a book on his theories of acting that extended the system of acting developed by Konstantin Stanislovsky. It combined an emotional truth from the actor’s past that was relived in performance—with technique.
(SFC,11/25/97, p.A22)
1958 Forrest McDonald, historian, authored “We the People," an argument against Charles A. Beard’s 1913 book “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States."
(WSJ, 8/12/04, p.D8)
1958 Sir Lawrence van der Post (1906-1996) wrote "The Lost World of the Kalahari."
(SFC, 12/17/96, p.B4)
1958 Myra Cohn Livingston (1926-1996), children’s poet and anthologist, wrote her first book of poems "Whispers and Other Poems." She later wrote "The Child as Poet; Myth of Reality."
(SFC, 8/27/96, p.A17)
1958 William Manchester (d.2004), US historian and biographer, authored “The Arms of Krupp," a history of the German steel and munitions makers.
(SFC, 6/2/04, B7)
1958 James Michener (d.1997 at 90) wrote "The Hokusai Sketchbook."
(SFC,10/17/97, p.A17)
1958 Dennis Murphy (1932-2005) authored “The Sergeant." In 1971 he wrote the script for film version.
(SFC, 10/11/05, p.B9)
1958 Boris Pasternak’s novel "Dr. Zhivago" was on the best seller list.
(WSJ, 10/10/95, p.A-14)
1958 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Polish-born Holocaust survivor, defected to West Germany. He was soon drawn into "Gruppe 47," the literary circle of Walter Jens and Heinrich Boll. In 1960 he joined Die Zeit as a literary critic.
(SFC, 9/2/02, p.D5)
1958 Paul Robeson, singer and actor, wrote his autobiography "Here I Stand."
(WSJ, 4/9/98, p.A21)
1958 Huston Smith (b.1919) authored “The Religions of Man."
(SSFC, 5/17/09, Books p.H1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huston_Smith)
1958 Girodias published "Candy," authored by Terry Southern.
(SSFC, 3/11/01, BR p.7)
1958 Telford Taylor published "The March of Conquest." He helped write the rules for Nuremberg Trials.
(SFC, 5/26/98, p.B2)
1958 Leon Uris authored his best-seller "Exodus."
(AP, 6/24/03)(SFC, 6/25/03, p.A25)
1958 T.H. White (1906-1964), English writer, authored the Arthurian novel “The Once and Future King."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._H._White)
1958 Michael Young (1915-2002), British sociologist, authored “The Rise of Meritocracy." It was Lord Young's ideas that inspired the shake up of secondary education in the 1960s, leading to the rise of comprehensive schools, where children of all abilities and backgrounds are brought together under one roof.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4035181.stm)
1958 The "Film Quarterly" began publishing from UC Berkeley under editor Ernest Callenbach. In 1999 Brian Henderson and Ann Martin edited "Film Quarterly: Forty Years A Selection."
(SFEC, 3/7/99, BR p.3)(SFEC, 8/22/99, BR p.5)
1958 William Gibson's play "Two for the Seesaw," premiered in NYC with Anne Bancroft and Henry Fonda.
(SFC, 5/23/02, p.D9)
1958 Miyoshi Umeki starred in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "The Flower Drum Song." It based on the 1957 novel by C.Y. Lee and was made into a film in 1961.
(SFC, 10/9/97, p.C3)(SFC, 9/12/07, p.A17)
1958 Ludmilla Chiriaeff (1924-1996), Latvian-born dance pioneer, founded the Les Grandes Ballets Canadiens.
(SFC, 9/24/96, p.B2)
1958 George Ballanchine premiered his ballet "Stars and Stripes."
(SFC, 11/7/96, p.E3)
1958 Hans Werner Henze wrote his ballet "Undine."
(SFEC, 1/17/99, DB p.29)
1958 Vito Scotti (1918-1996) played Rama from India in "Gunga Ram" on Andy Devine’s TV show "Andy’s Gang."
(SFC, 6/12/96, p.C2)
1958 The TV program "The Ann Sothern Show" starred Don Porter and Ann Sothern and ran to 1961.
(SFC, 2/21/97, p.A26)
1958 The NBC TV series “Bat Masterson" featured Gene Barry (1919-2009) as Masterson. The show continued to 1961.
(SFC, 12/15/09, p.C5)
1958 The "Peter Gunn" detective show premiered with Craig Stevens (d.2000 at 81) as the private eye.
(SFC, 5/13/00, p.A19)
1958 The Chordettes made it to No. 2 on the Billboard chart with their recording "Lollipop." The group split up in 1964.
(SSFC, 3/1/20, p.B9)
1958 Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney recorded "Fancy Meeting You Here." It was reissued in 2001.
(WSJ, 11/28/01, p.A16)
1958 Freeman (1940-2017) wrote and sang “Do You Want to Dance". It reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles chart. The song later became known as “Do You Wanna Dance" and was performed by a number of other musicians including the Beach Boys.
(SFC, 2/15/17, p.D4)
1958 Don Gibson wrote his songs "I Can't Stop Loving You," and "Oh, Lonesome Me." Both songs made No. 1.
(SFC, 3/13/99, p.E6)
1958 Pop singer Eydie Gorme (1928-2013) appeared with her husband on TV in “The Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme Show."
(http://tinyurl.com/k2s24c4)
1958 Peggy Lee (1920-2002) made a hit with her rendition of the rhythm-and-blues hit “Fever."
(SFC, 5/18/10, p.E5)
1958 Domenico Modugno made a hit with "Volare."
(SFC, 11/30/02, p.D1)
1958 Johnny Otis, R&B writer and producer, wrote "Willie and the Hand Jive." In 2000 the 3-CD boxed set: The Johnny Otis Rhythm and Blues Caravan: The Complete Savoy Recordings" was produced.
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.B2)
1958 The song “Endless Sleep," by Rockabilly singer and songwriter Ralph Joseph Reynolds, (d.2008 at 75) sold over a million copies and kicked in the melodramatic teen tragedy genre.
(SFC, 11/19/08, p.B7)
1958 Sharon Sheeley (1950-2002) wrote the song "Poor Little Fool" and Ricky Nelson turned it into a hit.
(SFC, 5/25/02, p.A27)
1958 Ed Townsend (1929-2003) wrote his hit song "For Your Love."
(SSFC, 8/17/03, p.A27)
1958 Sheb Wooley (d.2003 at 82) recorded the hit song "Purple People Eater." He starred in a movie of the same name in 1988.
(SFC, 9/18/03, p.A21)
1958 Link Wray recorded "Rumble," and showed the way for the "power cord," and the conception of the electric guitar as a weapon.
(SFC, 7/7/97, p.E1)
1958 Faron Young sang his country hit "Alone With You."
(SFC, 12/12/96, p.C8)
1958 Jimmy Lyons directed the first Monterey Jazz Festival and featured Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan, Turk Murphy, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Dizzie Gillespie. Radio host Jimmy Lyons and Chronicle jazz critic Ralph Gleason came up with the idea. In 1997 William Minor and Bill Wishner wrote: "Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years."
(SFC, 6/30/96, B9)(SFEM, 9/15/96, p.6)(SFEC,12/14/97, BR p.7)
1958 The first "greatest hits" album was produced: "Johnny’s Greatest Hits" featured the songs of Johnny Mathis. It was on Billboard’s Top 100 chart for 9 years.
(SFC, 7/7/96, DB p.40)
1958 Mercury Records released a recording of the 1812 Overture that featured the antique canon of West Point. It became a standard for testing stereo sound equipment.
(WSJ, 2/3/97, p.A12)
1958 Benjamin Britten composed his Nocturne for Tenor and Chamber Orchestra.
(SFC, 3/5/99, p.C5)
1958 The Harry Simeone Chorale recorded the Fred Waring song: "Little Drummer Boy."
(SFC, 12/24/99, p.C8)
1958 The Country Music Association (CMA) was founded in Nashville.
(SFEC,10/19/97, Par p.2)
1958 Paul Krassner (b.1932) founded The Realist, a satirical political journal. It continued to 2001.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.D6)
1958 Rex Humbard (1919-2007), televangelist, built the 5,400 seat, marble-and-glass Cathedral of Tomorrow in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. It was specially built to handle televised services.
(SSFC, 9/23/07, p.B5)
1958 The Lafayette Pavilion Apartments, a part of the Lafayette Park development in Detroit, Mich., was completed. The 78-acre urban renewal project, planned by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell, was originally called the Gratiot Park Development. It was built over the old neighborhood called Black Bottom. Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald (d.1959) assembled the team to demolish the build the project, which was completed in 1965. In 1966 the US national Park Service listed Lafayette Park on the national Register of Historic Places.
(WSJ, 12/22/07, p.W12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_Park,_Detroit)
1958 The renegade Whip Jones started the ski area Aspen Highlands.
(Hem, Dec. 94, p.78)
1958 The Historic Charleston’s Revolving Fund was established to buy endangered buildings and hold them until a sensitive buyer could be found.
(Hem. 1/95, p. 70)
1958 Harry Winston, a noted New York Jeweler, donated the blue Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institute.
(Smith., 5/95, p.18-20)(THC, 12/3/97)
1958 Avalon Hill in Maryland published its war strategy game titled Tactics.
(WSJ, 7/2/10, p.W9)(www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1574/tactics-ii)
1958 Al Lapin Jr. (d.2004) and younger brother Jerry Lapin founded the Int’l. House of Pancakes (IHOP) with a single outlet at Toluca Lake in LA County. Lapin left IHOP in 1973.
(SFC, 6/21/04, p.B4)
1958 A rattlesnake roundup began in Seetwater, Texas, for ranchers concerned about rattlesnakes biting their cattle. It grew to become the world’s largest such event.
(Econ, 3/21/09, p.36)
1958 Robert Welch, candy baron, founded the John Birch Society. The society was named after an Army intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communists a week after World War II ended. The organization is a conservative group that believes a powerful group of "insiders" is manipulating global events in an attempt to create a totalitarian, atheistic one-world government.
(SFC, 8/5/96, p.A5)
1958 Audrey Hepburn in the film "How to Steal a Million" wore a Hubert de Givenchy suit that was auctioned in 1997 for $10,350. The suit was part of Saint Laurent’s first collection as the successor to Christian Dior.
(SFC,10/31/97, p.C2)
1958 Abram Games (1914-1996), master of graphic arts, received the Order of the British Empire for his WW II posters. His parents were Latvian immigrants from 1904.
(SFC, 9/27/96, p.A24)
1958 Gregory Stout (d.1999 at 83) helped found the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
(SFC, 3/16/99, p.A17)
1958 The American Association of Retire Persons (AARP) was founded.
(SFEC,11/23/97, Par p.4)
1958 Horace Stoneham brought the New York Giants to San Francisco.
(SFC, 10/8/97, p.A20)
1958 Pavel Cerenkov, Russian physicist, was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in the 1930s showing when a charged particle travels through any medium at a speed exceeding the speed of light in the medium (but not the speed of light in a vacuum), it emits light in a cone. This is called Cerenkov radiation.
(JST-TMC,1983, p.99)
1958 Joshua Lederberg (1925-2008), molecular biologist, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering that bacteria reproduced sexually in a process called recombination. Lederberg shared the prize with Prof. George Tatum of Yale and George Beadle.
(SFC, 2/8/08, p.B9)
1958 Pres. Eisenhower named John McCone head of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1961 Kennedy named him head of the CIA.
(SSFC, 6/9/02, p.F5)
1958 Pres. Eisenhower gave the green light for the Corona project, which would create satellites to spy on the Soviet Union. The new Lockheed Corp. facility in Palo Alto, Ca., quickly became involved in the program, which remained classified until 1995. Satellites equipped with parachutes kept tabs on the Eastern Bloc from 1960-1972.
(SFC, 9/15/06, p.D3)
1958 The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was formed in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
(SFC, 5/26/03, p.B1)
1958 A US B-47 bomber dropped a 7,600 pound, Mark-15 hydrogen bomb off the Georgia coast after it collided with a Navy fighter jet. It became one of “11 Broken Arrows," nuclear bombs never found during air or sea accidents. Evidence of unusual radiation in the area turned up in 2004 prompting a renewed search.
(SFC, 9/30/04, p.A7)
1958 US Congress banned futures trading in onions to stop speculation on prices. Onion farmers had lobbied Michigan congressman Gerald Ford to ban trading in onion futures. They blamed speculators for the volatility in the crops’ prices.
(Econ, 10/11/08, SR p.16)(Econ, 11/14/09, p.93)
1958 A serious recession hit the US and unemployment went to 7.7 percent.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)
1958 A bond market crash occurred when falling interest rates caused bondholders to speculate.
(WSJ, 11/12/96, p.A20)
1958 The US minted its last Wheat Ear penny.
(SFEC, 9/8/96, Par p.21)
1958 George Wallace ran for governor of Alabama but was defeated by John Patterson, a rabid racist with ties to the Klan. Patterson was the son of lawyer Albert Patterson, assassinated in 1954.
(WSJ, 4/17/00, p.A30)(USAT, 6/29/04, p.7A)
1958 Bill Egan became Alaska’s 1st governor.
(AH, 10/04, p.42)
1958 Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908-1979) was elected governor of New York. He beat Averell Harriman. A biography by Cary Reich was written in 1996 titled: "The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer (1908-1958)."
(SFC, 10/3/96, p.E2)
1958 NYC outlawed housing discrimination.
(Econ, 2/11/12, p.34)
1958 Nuclear submarines began to home-port in San Diego.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.A20)
1958 Leonard Reiffel began a classified study on the benefits and effects of a nuclear explosion on the moon sponsored by a US Air Force special weapons center.
(SFC, 5/16/00, p.A7)
1958 US marines landed in Lebanon to help put down an insurrection.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)
1958 Secretary John Foster Dulles firmly opposed a proposed U.S. visit by Nikita Khrushchev, warning it would confer recognition on the "Kremlin gangsters" and dispirit the captive people of Eastern Europe. Dulles symbolized the hard line anti-Soviet position. Dulles died in 1959 and later in the year Khrushchev visited the U.S. and a spirit of coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union began to flower.
(HNQ, 6/23/99)
1958 Frank Moss (1911-2003), liberal Utah Democratic was elected US Senator (1958-1976). He served until 1976 when he was defeated by Orrin Hatch.
(SFC, 2/3/03, p.B4)
1958 In SF the new $5.5 million Memorial Masonic Temple opened at California and Taylor streets. It included a 38-by-48-foot mural by Emile Norman, who used images made of glass, fabric, metal shells and dirt between sheets of translucent plastic. The 45-panel work depicts the Mason’s role in the development of California.
(SFC, 10/21/05, p.F6)
1958 In San Francisco architect Henrik Bull (1929-2013) talked a client into spending $75,000 on the Sentinel Building at Kearny and Columbus, which he then fixed up.
(SSFC, 12/8/13, p.C12)
1958 Herb Caen, SF newspaper columnist, was lured back to The Chronicle following 8 years with the SF Examiner.
(SFEC, 2/2/97, p.A13)
1958 The Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) hired B.R. Stokes (d.2013 at 89) as its director of information. He thus became BART’s first employee.
(SSFC, 5/26/13, p.C13)
1958 UC Berkeley took over the 5.8-acre site of the former SF State College at 55 Laguna to serve as an extension for adult and continuing education programs. In 2010 it negotiated a long-term lease for the development of housing on the site.
(SFC, 8/1/13, p.E2)
1958 UC Berkeley Prof. Harold F. Weaver (1917-2017) founded the UC Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Berkeley, Ca.
(SSFC, 5/7/17, p.C10)
1958 In SF Enrico Banducci, owner of the hungry i nightclub, opened his North Beach sidewalk café on Broadstreet and named in Enrico’s.
(SFC, 4/4/07, p.E3)
1958 Lefty O’Doul (1897-1969), former baseball player and manager, opened a saloon at 333 Geary St. in San Francisco where friends and family could come to eat and meet with sports stars. Increased rents forced the bar to close at the end of 1997. It later re-opened as a bar and hofbraus restaurant.
(SFC, 7/18/97, p.A1)(www.leftyodouls.biz/whoislefty.html)
1958 Robert Stafford (1913-2006) was elected governor of Vermont he served 2 years and then won his 1st term in the US Congress. In 1971 he was appointed to the US Senate.
(SSFC, 12/24/06, p.D7)
1958 The Elizabeth copper mine in Vermont closed for good. It had produced more than 100 million pounds of copper, about 90% of that from World War II onward. The closure left behind 7,800 feet of tunnels; abandoned buildings; equipment; huge piles of rock, known as tailings; and other mining debris. In 2001 the Elizabeth Mine was added to the Superfund list. In 2003 work began to cleanup the site. In 2019 work began winding down, and the Environmental Protection Agency was getting ready to turn the site over to the state for long-term monitoring.
(AP, 9/7/19)
1958 The Barbie doll was patented by Mattel, but not marketed until 1959. Ruth Handler invented the Barbie Doll, named after her daughter in 1959. The full Barbie name was Barbara Millicent Roberts.
(SFC, 8/19/98, Z1 p.6)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R34)(SFC, 8/7/99, p.D3)
1958 Best Foods Inc., merged with Corn Products Refining Co.
(WSJ, 5/28/96, p. R-45)
1958 In Fair Lawn, New Jersey, a new Nabisco bakery opened.
(WSJ, 11/22/08, p.W4)
1958 Jim Haslam (aka Big Jim) founded Pilot when he paid $6,000 for a filling station in Virginia. In 2015 Pilot Flying J had revenues of more than $30 billion.
(Econ, 2/6/15, p.60)
1958 John McCarthy (1927-2011), computer science pioneer, invented the List Processing Language (LISP).
(SFC, 10/29/11, p.C5)(Econ, 11/5/11, p.114)
1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller first proposed their theorem on capital structure (the Modigliani-Miller theorem), arguably forming the basis for modern thinking on capital structure. The basic theorem states that in the absence of taxes, bankruptcy costs, agency costs, and asymmetric information, and in an efficient market, the value of a firm is unaffected by how that firm is financed. Modigliani was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Economics for this and other contributions.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theorem)
1958 Dr. Creighton Hale (1924-2017), the Little League’s first director of research, formally introduced his Little League batting helmet at the Little League Congress in Chicago.
(SSFC, 10/22/17, p.C13)
1958 Binney & Smith Inc., makers of Crayola crayons, introduced the 64-count Crayola crayon box that included the new "Indian red" color. The former "Prussian blue" was renamed "midnight blue."
(SFC, 7/28/99, p.B12)
1958 The Hearst Corp. acquired Popular Mechanics magazine and launched WTAE-TV, Pittsburgh.
(SFC, 8/7/99, p.A9)
1958 McDonald’s hit the 100 million mark in this year.
(WSJ, 11/13/98, p.B1)
1958 Arnold Neustadter began marketing Rolodex, a rotary card filing system, invented by his employee Hildaur L. Neilsen. Neustadter had patented the system in 1956.
(WSJ, 11/24/07, p.W7)
1958 The aluminum can was introduced as a food container.
(SFC, 8/4/05, p.C1)
1958 Ford Motor built the prototype car of the future called the Nucleon. It was powered by a nuclear reactor.
(SFC, 1/13/99, Z1 p.3)
1958 The last Packard rolled off the assembly line.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 Industry experts in 1996 picked the 1958 Packard as the number 6 worst American-made car.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 Industry experts in 1996 picked the 1958 Edsel as the number 9 worst American-made car.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 The first incarnation of Super Glue, called Eastman 910, hit the market. Harry Wesley Coover Jr. (1917-2011) first happened upon the super-sticky adhesive, more formally known as cyanoacrylates, by accident when he was experimenting with acrylates for use in clear plastic gun-sights during World War II. An experimental accident in 1951 brought it back to his attention. Kodak was not able to capitalize commercially on Dr. Coover’s discovery and sold the business to National Starch in 1980.
(www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/28coover.html?_r=1)(SFC, 3/28/11, p.A4)
1958 The 1,500 room Stardust casino-hotel opened in Las Vegas, Nv. In 2006 Boyd Gaming Corp. planned to tear it down and build a $4 billion complex.
(SFC, 1/5/06, p.C1)
1958 Thompson Products merged with Ramo-Wooldridge. It would become known as TRW in 1965.
(F, 10/7/96, p.70)
1958 Toyota and Datsun introduced small cars into the US.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 A Western Flyer peddle car in good shape would fetch $800 in 1997.
(SFC, 7/9/97, Z1 p.3)
1958 Charles Harrison (1931-2018), an African-American designer, was put in charge of redesigning the 3-D View-Master, first introduced in 1939. He made it lighter, more durable and easy enough to be used by a child. In 1961 he was hired by Sears and became the company's first black executive.
(SFC, 12/7/18, p.C12)
1958 Legos, the toy Lego building block kit with simple red bricks, was introduced with 8-stud bricks that could be combined 24 ways. The company was founded by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1932. Legos became a registered trademark in 1954. The name was derived from “les godt," Danish for play well.
(SFC, 1/9/99, p.B8)(Econ, 10/28/06, p.76)
1958 Masudaya, a Japanese toy maker, introduced Radicon, a battery powered mechanical robot. Radicon was followed by Nonstop, Sonic, Target and Machine Man.
(WSJ, 8/6/99, p.W12)
1958 Hal Anger (1920-2005) demonstrated his gamma camera at a meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine. It employed gamma radiation to depict metabolic processes within a living body.
(SFC, 11/12/05, p.B5)
1958 Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes developed their laser, light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, while working at Bell labs. They received a patent in 1960.
(www1.bell-labs.com/history/laser/)(www.ipmall.info/about/user11.asp)
1958 An American scientist made a dwarf grow with human growth serum. In 1967 some patients began to display CJD disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, from hormone prepared with contaminated pituitary glands.
(SFEC, 5/21/00, p.A1,14)
1958 Dr. Samuel L. Katz of Duke Univ. co-developed the Edmonston B vaccine against measles.
(SFC, 11/16/00, p.A19)
1958 Dr. Aaron Lerner (1920-2007) led a Yale team in the discovery of melatonin, a hormone from the pineal gland in the brain. They had hoped that a substance from the pineal gland might be useful in treating skin diseases. It was later found to regulate human sleep-wake cycles.
(SFC, 2/19/07, p.B4)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland)(Econ, 5/16/15, p.73)
1958 The virus that causes hemorrhagic fever was identified. A rare mouse that is both host and vector of the disease in Argentina rapidly multiplied when rangelands were converted to maize fields.
(NH, 2/97, p.53)
1958 The rapid development of penicillin-resistance by staphylococci led to the compound 05865 (later known as vancomycin) being fast-tracked for approval by the FDA. It became the best weapon against bacteria that were no longer vulnerable to other drugs. In 1988 bacteria resistant to vancomycin began to be detected.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancomycin)(SFEC, 9/14/97, p.C1,4)
1958 Monkeypox was first described in Denmark when several monkey imports developed lesions. The disease emerged in the Congo in 1970 with sporadic outbreaks over the years, primarily in Central and West Africa. Ten percent of those infected can die, and there is evidence of person-to-person transmission.
(AP, 11/29/06)
1958 An anti-trust court case forced AT&T to license its non-telephone related technology to anyone who asked.
(Econ, 6/12/04, p.38)
1958 Mercedes-Benz brought the 1st diesel to the US market, the rounded, pokey 190D.
(WSJ, 1/14/05, p.W10)
1958 The US launched its first satellite, a 31-lb device.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)
1958 Passenger service by air over the Atlantic exceeded passenger steamship crossings for the 1st time.
(SSFC, 12/14/03, p.D2)
1958 Monta Bell, silent film director, died.
(SFEC, 10/13/96, DB p.54)
1958 Harry Cohn, the tyrannical boss of Columbia Pictures, died.
(SFC, 6/1/01, p.C11)
1958 Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958) died. As president of Delco he introduced the electric-starter in 1912, one of many inventions that he pioneered.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 Tyrone Power, film actor, died on a Madrid movie set.
(SFC, 6/1/01, p.C11)
1958 The San Quentin Drama Workshop began at the California prison after a performance of Waiting for Godot the previous year.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Quentin_State_Prison)
1958 A 2nd eastern Carquinez Bridge opened over the Sacramento River between Crocket and Vallejo, Ca. The 1st cantilever bridge was built by American Toll Bridge Co. in 1927.
(SFC,12/26/97, p.A1)(SSFC, 6/2/02, p.A18)(SFC, 6/24/02, p.B3)
1958 The Achievement Rewards for College Students (ARCS) was co-founded by Barbara Chisholm Cole (d.1998 at 82) to assist students with scholarships in the natural sciences, medicine and engineering. The Foundation was formed by a group of women in Los Angeles following the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
(SFC, 5/11/98, p.A20)(http://tinyurl.com/ybzduc7)
1958 Charles E. Dederich (d.1997 at 83), dentist, founded Synanon in northern California. It was a communitarian scheme to rehabilitate drug addicts based on the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. It used an encounter session called "The Game" to work out problems with group pressure and venting.
(SFEC, 3/3/97, p.A21)(SFEM, 4/13/97, p.32)
1958 Nuclear submarines began to home-port in San Diego.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.A20)
1958 William F. Knowland gave up a shoo-in re-election campaign for senator in a disastrous bid for the governorship of California.
(SFEC, 5/17/98, BR p.5)
1958 California banned backyard incinerators.
(SFC, 9/19/00, p.A6)
1958 A plaque was placed near Morro Rock in San Luis Obispo, Ca., that recounts its history.
(SFC, 10/12/97, p.T3)
1958 In California the Iron Mountain mine owner built a small treatment plant to capture copper and halt the killing of salmon.
(SFEC,11/2/97, p.A13)
1958 The Basic Vegetable Products processing plant in King City, Ca., opened.
(SFC, 11/12/99, p.A19)
1958 Joe Coulombe established Pronto Markets, a string of convenient stores, in Los Angeles, Ca. He expanded the chain in 1967 to include gourmet foods and changed the name to Trader Joe’s. In 1979 he sold the company to Theo and Karl Albrecht of Germany.
(SFC, 6/6/06, p.C2)
1958 In southern California mobster Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death by Cheryl Crane as her mother, Lana Turner, watched in horror. Stompanato and actress Lana Turner had been lovers.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.4)(USAT, 10/8/97, p.4D)
1958 The Gamburtsev mountains were detected in East Antarctica during the first International Polar Year exploration. The mountains were named after Soviet geophysicist Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Gamburtsev (1903-1955), are 1,200 km (750 miles) long, with jagged peaks up to 2,700 m (8,900 feet) high intersected by deep troughs and valleys. Some 34 million years ago, the mountains became smothered by the East Antarctic icesheet, an area the size of Canada. A billion years ago several mini-continents collided together to form a super-continent called Gondwana, creating a mountain range at the point of impact. Periods of rifting, some 250 million years ago and again about 100 million years ago, pulled Gondwana apart in tectonic agony. This created a 3,000-km (2,000-mile) fracture in the planet's crust that extends from East Antarctica across the ocean to India. A residual "root," combined with the rifting, helped force up the land that is now East Antarctica.
(AP, 11/17/11)
1958 A periodic flowering took place in the bamboo forests of Bangladesh leading to a plague of rats. The flowering recurred in 2008 causing a similar rodent plague.
(SFC, 2/16/08, p.B6)
1958 Pierre Culliford (Peyo), Belgian cartoonist, created the gnomelike Smurfs for publisher Charles Dupuis (d.2002 at 84). Hanna-Barbera turned it into a US cartoon program in 1981.
(SFC, 12/3/02, p.A24)
1958 The Paddington Bear first appeared in "A Bear Called Paddington"— a stowaway from "Darkest Peru" who arrived at London's Paddington train station wearing a sign saying "Please look after this bear. Thank you." Author Michael Bond (1926-2017) based his story on a stuffed animal purchased as a last-minute Christmas gift for his wife.
(AP, 6/28/17)
1958 The British government sent out a pamphlet to farmers titled “Home Defence and the Farmer."
(Econ, 7/31/04, p.48)
1958 Sir John Woolf (d.1999 at 86), British film producer, established Anglia Television.
(SFC, 7/1/99, p.C4)
1958 William Phillips of the London School of Economics showed that for much of the previous 100 years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. This came to be called the “Phillips curve."
(Econ, 10/14/06, p.79)
1958 The British investment firm S.G. Warburg initiated the first hostile takeover bid for British Aluminum on behalf of the American group Reynolds and Tube Investments.
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.B4)
1958 John Gurdon of Oxford Univ. cloned frogs by nuclear transfer, but his creations never developed beyond the tadpole stage.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.17)
1958 China’s Mao Zedong wrote a poem titled "Farewell to the god of plague" to celebrate the country's victory over snail fever. Snail fever remained a major health risk for more than 50 million Chinese, with approximately 1 million people and several hundred thousand livestock infected as of 2010.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2863366/)(Econ., 6/13/20, p.31)
1958 China began construction of its National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. It was formally opened to the public in 1963. Construction of a new facility, based on a design by French architect Jean Nouvel, was set to begin in 2014.
(Econ, 12/21/13, p.8)(www.namoc.org/en/about/history/)
1958 China's national museum to the Korean war first opened in the border city of Dandong. It closed in 1966 when Peng Dehuai, the commander of Chinese forces in Korea, came under attack. It re-opened in 1993, a year after China normalized relations with South Korea. The hall closed again in 2014, ostensibly for repairs. It re-opened again in 2020.
(Econ., 10/3/20, p.36)
1958 China’s Mao Zedong introduced the hukou, a certificate system, in order to prevent a flood of migrants into cities. It was eased in the 1980s when China needed cheap labor for its factories.
(Econ, 4/19/14, SR p.7)(Econ, 5/17/14, p.43)
1958 China introduced its first leading small group, a shadowy committee that often eclipses the power of more public political structures.
(Econ 6/10/17, p.43)
1958 Yu Qiuli became petroleum minister and took charge of building the Daqing oil field, the largest in China.
(SFC, 2/6/99, p.A21)
1958 In China Ai Qing (1910-1996), a poet, was denounced as a rightist and spent the next 18 years in hard labor in the Xinjiang region. His son Ai Weiwei (b.1957), later became renowned as an artist and political activist.
(Econ, 5/5/12, p.82)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Qing)
1958 The Chinese government updated the system for spelling Chinese words with Roman letters. It also introduced simplified written Chinese characters in a system called pinyin. Zhou Youguang (1906-2017) invented pinyin, the romanized spelling system that linked ancient Chinese writing to the modern age. He had been drafted in 1955 to lead the committee in developing an alphabetic system.
(SFC, 5/8/06, p.A1)(CSM, 1/15/17)
1958 In China Christian Pastor Samuel Lamb (1924-2013) was jailed a 2nd time for 20 years. He had already served time from 1955-57. Fewer than 400 worshippers attended his underground church, Damazhan. He was a leader in the Chinese house church movement, and known for his resistance against participation in the churches of the state-controlled "Three-Self Patriotic Movement."
(Econ, 8/24/13, p.42)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Lamb)
1958 Colombian Dr. Alberto Vejarano Laverde and engineer Jorge Reynolds Pombo developed the first artificial pacemaker with internal electrodes and external electronic unit and implanted it into Gerardo Florez (70), a priest from Ecuador, who then lived another 18 years.
(Econ, 3/9/13, TQ p.6)(http://tinyurl.com/3rgfcqq)
1958 In Cuba Johnny Weissmuller played in a celebrity golf tournament and saved himself from Castro’s guerrillas by beating his chest and performing his famous yell thereby invoking requests for autographs.
(SDUT, 6/6/97, p.E2)
1958 The Theatre on the Balustrade was founded in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Founders Helena Philipova, Ivan Vyskocil, Jiri Suchy and Vladimir Vodicka named their professional theatre after a street leading from the square to the river.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_on_the_Balustrade)
1958 The French film "Le Beau Serge" starred Gerard Blain (d.2000) and was directed by Claude Chabrol.
(SFC, 12/19/00, p.B5)
1958 Marcel Carne (1906-1990), French film director, made "The Cheaters" (Les Tricheurs) with Jean-Paul Belmondo.
(SFC, 11/1/96, p.A28)
1958 The French film “Night Heat" starred Mylene Demongeot.
(SFC, 10/31/15, p.E4)
1958 France exited from Morocco.
(G&M, 7/31/97, p.A18)
1958 Maurice Papon was named the police chief of Paris.
(SFC, 4/3/98, p.B2)
1958 Jean Dausset (1916-2009), French immunologist, discovered the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue system allowed doctors to verify compatibility between donor and receiver for an organ transplant.
(AP, 6/24/09)
1958 One in 5 French workers was engaged in farming. By 2004 this shrunk to just over 3%.
(Econ, 5/29/04, p.51)
1958 In France Ifop, a polling group, began measuring presidential popularity.
(Econ, 11/30/13, p.50)
1958 Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India, trekked for a month to make a treaty with Bhutan. He demanded to be met at the border by someone of equal rank. King Wangchuk balked at making the trip and quickly appointed his aide, Jigme Palden Dorji, as prime minister to meet Nehru 127 miles away by mule and foot.
(WSJ, 3/6/97, p.A8)(Econ, 5/14/05, p.46)
1958 India began designing and buying equipment for a plutonium reprocessing plant at Trombay, which would provide it capability for atomic weapons.
(SFC, 5/28/98, p.A9)
1958 Dhirubhai Ambani (1932-2002) moved to Mumbai to start his own business in spices. He moved into textiles and in 1966 founded India's project-building Reliance Corp. In 2002 its sales reached $16.8 billion.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhirubhai_Ambani)(Econ, 12/20/03, p.98)(Econ, 11/27/04, p.69)
1958 In Indonesia Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution (d.2000 at 81) pushed through the adoption of a policy that allowed the military a direct role in national politics.
(SFC, 9/6/00, p.D2)
1958 A secret war in Indonesia ended abruptly when Allen Pope, a CIA contract pilot, was downed in a dogfight. Pope was carrying a trove of documents that revealed the extent of US involvement. The CIA had been sending weapons and advisers to anti-government rebels on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island as mercenaries mounted combat sorties in a fleet of unmarked B-26 bombers. Indonesia later received a batch of 10 C-130 transport planes from the US in exchange for Pope’s release.
(AP, 4/24/05)(AP, 5/20/09)
1958 Iraq’s Prime minister Fadhel al-Jamali (1903-1997) was sentenced to death after the military coup. He was freed after Morocco interceded and he later became an advisor to Pres. Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia who granted him citizenship.
(SFC, 5/27/97, p.A22)
1958 Saddam Hussein was recruited by his uncle Khairalla Msallat, an army officer and fervent Arab nationalist, to assassinate a prominent communist in Tikrit. Saddam killed his victim, a distant cousin, with a single shot to the head. Hussein was arrested and imprisoned for six months, then released for lack of evidence.
(www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.html)
1958 Waltert Eytan (d.2001 at 90), diplomat, authored "The First Ten Years: A Diplomatic History of Israel."
(SSFC, 5/27/01, p.A27)
1958 Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion made a secret visit to Ankara, Turkey.
(SFC, 10/26/99, p.B2)
1958 Mourad Faham smuggled the Aleppo Codex out of Syria to Turkey and then to Jerusalem, where it was presented to the president of Israel. In 1982 the first missing page, from the Book of Chronicles, surfaced in New York and was sent to join rest of the manuscript. In 2007 another fragment, a piece from the Exodus story of the 10 plagues, was sent to Jerusalem. Sam Sabbagh, an Aleppo Jew living in New York, had carried it in wallet for decades as good luck charm.
(AP, 9/27/08)
1958 Israeli scholars at Hebrew Univ. began working on the Bible Project. They sought to publish an authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia.
(AP, 8/12/11)
1958 In Japan Sue Sumii published the first volume of her novel "The River With No Bridge." It was about the plight of the burakumin (the untouchables) of Japan. She died working on the 8th volume in 1997 at age 95.
(SFC, 6/24/97, p.A19)
1958 In Japan a restaurant in Tokyo introduced a conveyor belt to serve sushi.
(Econ, 4/22/17, p.60)
1958 In Japan the Tokyo Tower was erected in the capital city as a relay for radio and TV signals. In 1998 it faced replacement.
(SFC, 12/11/98, p.D4)
1958 Japan’s Shimano Industrial Co. (bicycle part manufacturer) passed to the leadership of Shozo Shimano, age 30. He implemented a 4-point strategic plan that was: 1) to continue to manufacture components. 2) modernize the distribution system. 3) initiate an aggressive export program. 4) implement a new technical development program to make the best components.
(Hem, 8/96, p.33)
1958 Japan’s Tokyo Telecommunications changed its name to Sony Corp. and listed as a publicly traded company.
(WSJ, 3/7/05, p.A8)(Econ, 9/20/14, p.62)
1958 Jordan’s King Hussein forged a federation with Iraq, which was led by his cousin, Faisal II. The federation soon failed when Faisal was killed during a revolution in Iraq.
(HNQ, 8/20/00)
1958 Morocco’s crown prince and army chief Hassan II crushed a rebellion in the Rif Mountains.
(Econ, 7/15/06, p.46)(www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/icl/mo__indx.html)
1958 Authorities in Paraguay under Alfredo Stroessner arrested 108 people "of dubious moral conduct" who were subjected to public derision.
(Reuters, 4/5/19)
1958 Arequipa, Peru, was hit by an earthquake.
(SSFC, 6/24/01, p.A16)
1958 In Romania Veronica Antal was stabbed repeatedly as she resisted being raped. In 2018 Pope Francis approved a decree recognizing the martyrdom of Antal.
(AP, 1/27/18)
1958 Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian writer, completed the first draft of "In the First Circle," a novel, set during Stalin's rule. It was about the effects of incarceration and forced labor on the minds and souls of innocent and intelligent men. He immediately put it through two revisions. He wrote 4th draft in 1962. In 1968 it was first published in the West. A Russian edition came out in 1978. A new edition in 2009 included parts left out in earlier editions.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574431450891084972.html)
1958 Dmitry Shostakovich's 1958 operetta, "Moscow, Cheryomushki," celebrated the first five-storey buildings in Moscow -- nicknamed khrushchevki after the Soviet leader. They rehoused people living in communal flats -- where entire families were squeezed into one room -- and were celebrated as a symbol of social progress. In 2017 residents faced plans to demolish more than 4,500 apartment blocks and relocate hundreds of thousands of Muscovites.
(AFP, 5/7/17)
1958 Russia’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev decided to establish a town devoted entirely to science. This resulted in the construction of Akademgorodok, 20 miles from Novosibirsk.
(WSJ, 3/20/07, p.B10)
1958 In central Moscow Detsky Mir (Children's World), a new huge toy store, opened. In 2008 the hulking block-long building across from the KGB's notorious Lubyanka headquarters closed for a 3-year, $200 million renovation project.
(AP, 7/2/08)
1958 Colin Tennant (1926-2010), Scottish noble and later Lord Glenconner, acquired the island of Mustique, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and turned it into a luxury playground for his friends.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Tennant,_3rd_Baron_Glenconner)(Econ, 9/11/10, p.103)
1958 The Scottish Presbyterian Church ended its 375-year ban on the Catholic feast of Christmas. Christmas remained a normal working day in Scotland until this year.
(http://gouk.about.com/od/festivalsandevents/qt/hogmaney.htm)
1958 In South Korea Cho Yong-gi founded Yoido Full Gospel Church. By 2011 it ranked as the world’s largest Christian congregation with over one million members.
(Econ, 10/15/11, p.51)
1958 The Goldstar electronics firm was founded in South Korea. It later became known as LG Electronics.
(Econ, 1/24/09, p.70)
1958 In Sri Lanka P.P. James (34) was falsely jailed for the murder of his father, who remained alive after being knifed by an assailant. James spent the next 50 years in jail, a victim of the country’s bureaucracy.
(AP, 4/20/08)
1958 In Sudan the 1st in a series of military coups overthrew the civilian-elected government.
(WSJ, 10/22/03, p.A4)
1958 Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann (1906-2008) first identified psilocybin and psilocin as the active compounds in psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann)(Econ, 6/8/19, p.58)
1958 The US CIA began airdropping weapons over Tibet.
(WSJ, 8/30/08, p.A8)
1958-1960 Billy Higgins, drummer, played with Ornette Coleman’s quartet.
(SFEM, 10/5/97, p.)
1958-1961 China underwent its Great Leap Forward.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward)
1958-1962 The TV game show “Play Your Hunch" featured Merv Griffin as host.
(WSJ, 8/15/07, p.D12)
1958-1962 China experienced a great famine during this period. An estimated 36 million people died. In 2008 Yang Jisheng authored “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962." In 2012 the book became available in English.
(Econ, 10/27/12, p.83)
1958-1963 In Romania Ion Ficior served as commander of the Periprava labor camp during this period. In 2013 Ficior (85) was charged with genocide for his alleged role in the deaths of 103 political prisoners. In 2017 a court upheld the verdict.
(SFC, 10/25/13, p.A2)(AP, 3/29/17)
1958-1964 In Romania Col. Gheorghe Craciun (d.2001) commanded the Aiud Prison. He was later charged with the deaths of 216 prisoners but died before the trial was completed.
(SFC, 6/16/01, p.A17)
1958-1964 These are the years covered in the Beatles Anthology I CD released recently.
(WSJ, 11/22/95, p.A-8)
1958-1966 Jay DeFeo (d.1989), SF artist, created her massive painting "The Rose." She was married to artist Wally Hedrick.
(SFEC, 8/25/96, BR p.39)(SSFC, 1/25/04, p.E5)
1958-1969 Generals seized power in Pakistan. Field Marshal M. Ayub Khan announced that "our ultimate aim is to restore democracy but of the type that people can understand."
(SFEC, 8/3/97, p.A15)(SFEC, 11/21/99, p.A22)
1958-1970 Japan achieves economic superpower status. Restrictions on foreign travel are removed and huge numbers of Japanese begin to travel abroad.
(Jap. Enc., BLDM, p. 216)
1958-1973 The TV game show "Concentration" was hosted by Art James (1929-2004). It was NBC's longest running game show.
(SFC, 4/1/04, p.B7)
1958-1996 In 1997 David Platzker compiled a "Catalog Raisonne" of the graphic art produced during this time by Claes Oldenburg: "Printed Stuff: Prints, Posters, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg."
(SFEC, 10/5/97, BR p.4)
Return to home
1958 Jan 1, Treaties establishing the European Economic Community went into effect.
(AP, 1/1/98)
1958 Jan 1, Dr. Douglas Kelley (45), psychiatrist, committed suicide using potassium cyanide. He was one of the psychiatrist used by the US Army to interview Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and authored the book “22 Cells in Nuremberg."
(SSFC, 2/6/05, p.A17)
1958 Jan 1, Photographer Edward Weston (b.1886) died. A 1973 biography was titled "Edward Weston: Fifty Years." In 1998 his model Charis Wilson published "Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston."
(SFEM, 6/30/96, p.23)(SFC, 5/18/98, p.D1)(SFC, 9/2/06, p.E3)
1958 Jan 3, The first six members of the newly formed US Commission on Civil Rights held their first meeting at the White House after they were sworn in by President Eisenhower.
(AP, 1/3/08)
1958 Jan 3, Edmund Hillary reached the South Pole (Antarctica) overland. Hillary was part of a joint New Zealand-British ice trek that drove farm tractors on the Skelton Glacier to the South Pole. He beat Vivian Fuchs to the South Pole by 17 days.
(SFC, 1/14/99, p.C2)(MC, 1/3/02)
1958 Jan 3, The British created the West Indies Federation with Lord Hailes as governor general. The federation lasted to 1962. It included Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago and the Windward and Leeward Islands.
(HN, 1/3/99)(WUD, 1994, p.1623)
1958 Jan 6, Moscow announced a reduction in its armed forces by 300,000.
(HN, 1/6/99)
1958 Jan 7, USSR shrank its army to 300,000.
(MC, 1/7/02)
1958 Jan 7, Petru Groza (74), premier and president (Romania, 1945-58), died.
(MC, 1/7/02)
1958 Jan 8, Bobby Fisher won the United States Chess Championship for the first time at 14 years of age.
(MC, 1/8/02)
1958 Jan 9, President Eisenhower, in his State of the Union address to Congress, warned of the threat of Communist imperialism.
(AP, 1/9/08)
1958 Jan 10, Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" reached #1.
(MC, 1/10/02)
1958 Jan 13, 9,000 scientists of 43 nations petitioned the UN for a nuclear test ban.
(MC, 1/13/02)
1958 Jan 21, Charles Starkweather, 19, killed the mother, stepfather and half-sister of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, at her family's home in Lincoln, Neb. Starkweather, who had also killed a gas station attendant the previous November, and Fugate went on a road trip which resulted in seven more slayings. Starkweather was executed in 1959; Fugate, who maintained she had been Starkweather's hostage, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life; she was paroled in 1976. His slaying spree inspired the 1973 film “Badlands" starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.
(SFEM, 2/8/98, p.8)(AP, 1/21/08)
1958 Jan 21, James Grover Tarver (b.1885), Texas-born giant, died in Arkansas. He had grown to be 8 feet 4 inches tall and traveled with the Ringling Bros. and other circuses. In 1917 he played the giant in the film “Jack and the Beanstalk."
(SFC, 3/5/08, p.G5)(www.forensicgenealogy.info/contest_80_results.html)
1958 Jan 21, The Soviet Union called for a ban on nuclear arms in Baghdad Pact countries.
(HN, 1/21/99)
1958 Jan 23, Venezuela gained liberties with the overthrow of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, its last dictator. The social democrats' Democratic Action (AD) and the Christian Democrats (Copei) began alternating power and then entered into the power-sharing agreement called "Pacto de Punto Fijo." Rafael Antonio Caldera (1916-2009) was one of the three signers of the Punto Fijo pact, which organized democratic elections after the fall of Jimenez.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.A15)(SSFC, 6/24/01, p.T6)(AP, 1/23/04)(AP, 12/24/09)
1958 Jan 24, After warming to 100,000,000 degrees, 2 light atoms were bashed together to create a heavier atom, resulting in the 1st man-made nuclear fusion.
(MC, 1/24/02)
1958 Jan 28, Roy Campanella, catcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, was paralyzed in a car crash. In 1959 Topps Chewing Gum Company issued a baseball card in his honor featuring Campanella in a wheelchair with the phrase “Symbol of Courage."
(AH, 6/03, p.56)(http://tinyurl.com/ry7spx)
1958 Jan 29, Actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married in Las Vegas.
(AP, 1/29/08)
1958 Jan 30, The play "Sunrise at Campobello," by Dore Schary about Franklin D. Roosevelt's struggle against polio, opened on Broadway with Ralph Bellamy as FDR.
(AP, 1/30/08)
1958 Jan 31, Explorer 1, the first successful US satellite, was launched by a Jupiter-C rocket and the United States entered the Space Age. It discovered the "Van Allen radiation belts" around Earth named after James Van Allen. Radio signals from the transmitter aboard the 30.8 pound satellite were picked up in California within a few minutes after the launch. Two months earlier, the first attempt to launch a satellite had failed.
(SFEC, 9/28/97, p.A14)(AP, 1/31/98)(SFC, 8/10/06, p.B7)
1958 Feb 1, Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic. Most Syrians resented the merger, which was led by the radical Baath (Arab Socialist Resurrection) party. The union of Syria and Egypt was dissolved in 1961 following a coup in Syria. Egypt kept the name United Arab Republic until 1971.
(WUD, 1994, p.1555)(HNQ, 6/5/98)(AP, 2/1/08)
1958 Feb 5, A B-47 accidentally dropped an unarmed thermonuclear bomb at the mouth of Georgia’s Savannah River. It was never found.
(SFEC, 11/22/98, Par p.22)
1958 Feb 5, Gamel Abdel Nasser was formally nominated to become the first president of the new United Arab Republic. Egypt used the UAR name from 1961-1971.
(AP, 2/5/97)(WUD, 1994, p.1555)
1958 Feb 7, The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team became the LA Dodgers, Inc.
(SFEC, 9/15/96, Par p.14)
1958 Feb 13, Georges Rouault (86), French painter (Christ aux outrages), died.
(MC, 2/13/02)
1958 Feb 14, The Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan formed under Iraq’s Faisal II. King Hussein forged a federation with Iraq, which was led by his cousin, Faisal II. The federation failed when Faisal was killed during a revolution in Iraq.
(HNQ, 8/20/00)(MC, 2/14/02)
1958 Feb 15, Sjafroeddin Prawiranegara formed the anti-government of Middle Sumatra.
(MC, 2/15/02)
1958 Feb 17, The comic strip "B.C.", created by Johnny Hart (1931-2007), 1st appeared.
(http://www.toonopedia.com/bc.htm)
1958 Feb 19, Rebecca ("Becky") Hoppe, founder of Soccer Moms of US, was born.
(MC, 2/19/02)
1958 Feb 19, Hail the size of baseballs was reported with flash lightning over parts of Minneapolis.
(MC, 2/19/02)
1958 Feb 20, The Broadway play “The Day the Money Stopped" opened at the Belasco Theater. It featured the debut of actress Collin Wilcox-Paxton (d.2009 at 74).
(SFC, 10/23/09, p.D5)
1958 Feb 21, Egypt-Syria as UAR elected Gamel Nasser president with a 99.9% vote.
(MC, 2/21/02)
1958 Feb 27, Harry Cohn, CEO of Columbia Pictures, died of a heart attack.
(MC, 2/27/02)
1958 Mar 1, Doctors declared that President Eisenhower had fully recovered from his stroke.
(HN, 3/1/98)
1958 Mar 1, Giacomo Balla (b.1871), Italian composer and painter, died. He was a signatory to the 1910 Futurist Manifesto, and designed and painting Futurist furniture. He also created Futurist "antineutral" clothing.
(Econ, 2/22/14, p.71)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Balla)
1958 Mar 2, Chart Toppers: Sweet Little Sixteen, Chuck Berry; At the Hop, Danny & the Juniors; Oh Julie, Crescendos; Don't, Elvis Presley.
(HC, Internet, 2/3/98)
1958 Mar 2, A multinational expedition led by British geologist and explorer Vivian Fuchs (d.1999 at 91) completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica by way of the South Pole in 99 days.
(SFC, 11/13/99, p.A22)(AP, 3/2/08)
1958 Mar 2, Yemen announced it will join the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria).
(SC, 3/2/02)
1958 Mar 3, Nuri ash Said became premier of Iraq.
(SC, 3/3/02)
1958 Mar 6, Form letters from Pres. Eisenhower to 6 civilians appointees provided for them to take office in the event of a national emergency. The group met in 1960 with the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization to discuss staffing for their agencies. Pres. Kennedy relieved the group of its duties in 1961.
(SSFC, 3/21/04, p.A2)
1958 Mar 8, William Faulkner said US schools had degenerated to become babysitters.
(MC, 3/8/02)
1958 Mar 11, A B-47 out of Hunter AFB in Savannah, Georgia, had just leveled off at 15,000 feet, when a bomb lock failed and dropped a nuclear bomb on the suburban neighborhood of Florence, South Carolina. The bomb's high explosives exploded on impact, wrecking a house and injuring several people on the ground. The extent of radioactive contamination was never revealed. The device had fallen after Captain Bruce Kulka accidentally grabbed a lever opening the bomb bay -- almost falling out himself. It was not fully armed with a fissile core.
(www.willthomasonline.net/willthomasonline/Broken_Arrows.html)(AFP, 12/10/14)
1958 Mar 14, RIAA certified its 1st gold record: Perry Como's Catch A Falling Star.
(MC, 3/14/02)
1958 Mar 17, The U.S. Navy launched the Vanguard 1 satellite.
(AP, 3/17/02)
1958 Mar 19, The film "South Pacific," adapted from the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical, was released.
(AP, 3/19/08)
1958 Mar 21, Gary Oldman, actor (Sid and Nancy, Criminal Law, State of Grace), was born.
(MC, 3/21/02)
1958 Mar 22, Movie producer Mike Todd (56) and three other people were killed in the crash of Todd's private plane near Grants, N.M.
(AP, 3/22/08)
1958 Mar 24, Rock 'n' roll singer Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army in Memphis, Tenn. After nearly six months of basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, Presley was posted to Friedberg, West Germany; he was honorably discharged in 1960.
(AP, 3/23/08)
1958 Mar 25, Canada’s era of supersonic flight began when pilot Jan Zurakowski took off from Malton Airport near Toronto in an Avro CF-105 Arrow for a 35-minute maiden flight. Less than a month later, Zurakowski flew the Arrow at Mach 1.5 at an altitude of 50,000 feet. In spite of the aircraft’s early promise, the Canadian government scrapped the project before the Arrow could be put into production.
(HN, 3/21/99)
1958 Mar 26, In the 30th Academy Awards "The Bridge on the River Kwai" won 7 Awards, including best picture of 1957; its director, David Lean, and star Alec Guinness also received Oscars. Joanne Woodward was named best actress for "The Three Faces of Eve."
(AP, 3/26/08)
1958 Mar 26, The U.S. Army launched America’s third successful satellite, Explorer 3.
(AP, 3/26/97)
1958 Mar 27, The U.S. announced a plan to explore space near the moon.
(HN, 3/27/98)
1958 Mar 27, CBS Labs announced new stereophonic records.
(MC, 3/27/02)
1958 Mar 27, The Havana Hilton opened.
(MC, 3/27/02)
1958 Mar 27, Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet premier in addition to First Secretary of the Communist Party.
(AP, 3/27/97)(HN, 3/27/98)
1958 Mar 28, W.C. Handy, the "Father of the Blues," died in New York at age 84.
(AP, 3/28/08)
1958 Mar 29, Aerial circus star Clyde Pangborn died. He and playboy Hugh Herndon, Jr. complete the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean in 1931.
(HN, 10/2/99)(ON, 1/03, p.10)
1958 Mar 31, US Navy formed the atomic sub division.
(MC, 3/31/02)
1958 Mar 31, Moscow declared a halt on all atomic tests and asked other nations to follow.
(HN, 3/31/98)
1958 Mar, KTVU-Channel 2 went on the air in the SF Bay Area. Bob March (1927-2020) began hosting the Captain Satellite TV show on the Oakland-based station. The show continued to 1972.
(SFC, 8/13/20, p.B3)
1958 Mar, Charles D. Keeling (1928-2005) installed a gas analyzer on the slopes of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. It gave a reading of 314 ppm for carbon dioxide. It was part of the International Geophysical Year project and the carbon dioxide research was under Keeling. The atmospheric chemist had begun monitoring the pure air at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the South Pole. Subsequent CO2 readings indicated climbed steadily and became known as the Keeling Curve. After one year of gathering data it was clear that the whole planet has an annual cycle for photosynthesis and respiration that is visible by measuring carbon dioxide concentration. [See 1988]. 50 years later the CO2 reading was about 387 parts per million.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_David_Keeling)(WSJ, 12/14/07, p.B1)(Econ, 9/17/11, p.89)
1958 Apr 1, President Eisenhower signed a $1.85 billion emergency housing measure.
(AP, 4/1/08)
1958 Apr 2, National Advisory Council on Aeronautics was renamed NASA.
(HN, 4/2/98)
1958 Apr 3, "Say, Darling" opened at ANTA Theater NYC for 332 performances.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1958 Apr 3, Fidel Castro's rebels attacked Havana.
(MC, 4/3/02)
1958 Apr 4, The 1st march against nuclear weapons began in London with a 4-day to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment close to Aldermaston, England.
(Econ, 8/16/08, p.56)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldermaston_Marches)
1958 Apr 9, A Cuban general strike was called but failed. Urban militias in Havana and Santiago were put down by the police.
(WSJ, 7/10/02, p.D8)
1958 Apr 13, In the 12th Tony Awards: Sunrise at Campobello and Music Man won.
(MC, 4/13/02)
1958 Apr 13, Van Cliburn became the first American to win the Tchaikovsky International Piano Contest in Moscow. Lev Vlasenko (1929-1996) took 2nd place. Liu Chi Kung came in 2nd. [see China 1959] In 2016 Nigel Cliff authored “Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story – How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War."
(SFC, 7/6/96, p.E3)(TMC, 1994, p.1958)(SFC, 8/27/96, p.A17)(AP, 4/13/97)(SFEC, 10/22/00, Z1 p.1)(Econ, 10/15/16, p.80)
1958 Apr 14, Sputnik 2 (with dog Laika) burned up in the atmosphere.
(MC, 4/14/02)
1958 Apr 14, A crowd of some 200,000 swarmed Market St. to welcome the Giants baseball team translocated to San Francisco from New York by owner Horace Stoneham (d.1990).
(SFEC,12/797, Z1 p.6)(SSFC, 1/4/15, DB p.42)
1958 Apr 15, In the 10th Emmy Awards: Gunsmoke, Robert Young and Jane Wyatt won.
(MC, 4/15/02)
1958 Apr 15, The Giants baseball team of Horace Stoneham, brought from New York to San Francisco, opened at Seal Stadium against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants won 8-0.
(SFC, 10/8/97, p.A20)(SFEC,12/797, Z1 p.4,5)
1958 Apr 16, Arnold Palmer won his first Masters golf tournament.
(HN, 4/16/98)
1958 Apr 16, Rosalind Franklin (b.1920), English chemist and one of the four scientists who discovered the structure of DNA, died in London of ovarian cancer. She made the 1st x-ray image that revealed the double helix structure of DNA (1953). In 2002 Brenda Maddox authored "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin)(SSFC, 11/10/02, p.M2)
1958 Apr 17, A World Fair opened in Brussels, Belgium. The 335-foot Atomium, representing a large-scale metal molecule, was built to celebrate the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. It became one of Belgium's most famous landmarks and in 2005 was restored to its shiny splendor, the faded aluminum sheets on the nine balls fully replaced with hardy stainless steel.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_'58)(AP, 9/16/05)
1958 Apr 19, The last Key System train left Oakland for SF. Ferry service from the Ferry Building ended the next day when the Southern Pacific "Eureka" made its last crossing from SF to Oakland.
(SFC, 8/10/98, p.A5)(SFC, 9/4/98, p.A25)(SFC, 8/7/07, p.A6)(SFC, 4/18/08, p.B1)
1958 Apr 20, The last Key System train left San Francisco for Oakland. Ferry service from the SF Ferry Building ended when the Southern Pacific "Eureka" made its last crossing to Oakland. Train tracks were taken off the lower deck of the Bay Bridge and the lanes were paved in for car traffic.
(SFC, 8/10/98, p.A5)(SFC, 9/4/98, p.A25)(SFC, 8/7/07, p.A6)(SFC, 4/18/08, p.B1)
1958 Apr 23, The film noir thriller "Touch of Evil," starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh and Orson Welles, who also directed, was released.
(AP, 4/23/08)
1958 Apr 25, The Xunhua Incident, an uprising of Tibetan and Salar people, ended in suppression and a massacre by the People's Liberation Army. 435 people were killed within four hours, most of whom were unarmed civilians.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunhua_Incident)
1958 Apr 27, Billy Graham began a 6-week Bay Area crusade at the Cow Palace in Daly City, Ca. Some 18,000 crowded inside as another 5,000 stood in the parking lot. Graham began a 3-day revival crusade at the Cow Palace that drew nearly 700,000 people.
(SFC, 10/1/96, p.D1)(SSFC, 4/27/08, DB p.58)
1958 Apr 28, Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, began a goodwill tour of Latin America that was marred by hostile mobs in Lima, Peru, and Caracas, Venezuela.
(AP, 4/28/99)
1958 Apr 28, The United States conducted the first of 35 nuclear test explosions in the Pacific Proving Ground as part of Operation Hardtack I.
(AP, 4/28/08)(http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Hardtack1.html)
1958 Apr 29, Daniel Day-Lewis, actor (Last of the Mohicans, My Left Foot), was born in England.
(MC, 4/29/02)
1958 Apr 29, Michelle Pfeiffer, actress, was born in Midway City, Calif.
(MC, 4/29/02)
1958 Apr 30, Britain's Life Peerages Act 1958 allowed women to become members of the House of Lords.
(AP, 4/30/08)
1958 May 3, Ismael Valenzuela (1935-2009) rode Tim Tam to victory in the Kentucky Derby.
(SFC, 9/4/09, p.D6)(www.kentuckyderby.com/2009/history/statistics/1951-1975)
1958 May 5, The Arkansas Gazette received the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis; James Agee was posthumously honored for his novel "A Death in the Family."
(AP, 5/5/08)
1958 May 6, The US "Cactus" bomb test was relatively small, but it left a lasting legacy for the Marshall Islands in a dome-shaped radioactive dump. It was built two decades after the blast in the Pacific Ocean region. The US military filled the bomb crater on Runit island with radioactive waste, capped it with concrete, and told displaced residents of the Pacific's remote Enewetak atoll they could safely return home. The 45-cm (18-inch) thick concrete dome later developed cracks.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hardtack_I)(AFP, 5/26/19)
1958 May 7, Howard Johnson set an aircraft altitude record in F-104.
(HN, 5/7/98)
1958 May 8, Vice President Nixon was shoved, stoned, booed and spat upon by anti-American protesters in Lima, Peru. Vice President Richard Nixon’s eight-nation South America goodwill tour in May 1958 encountered violent demonstrations, particularly in Peru and Venezuela, spurring President Dwight Eisenhower to order the movement of U.S. forces into Caribbean bases.
(AP, 5/8/97)(HNQ, 6/14/99)
1958 May 9, The film "Vertigo" with James Stewart and Kim Novak was released. It was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and had been shot in the SF Bay Area. "Vertigo" premiered in San Francisco.
(SFEC, 8/11/96, DB, p.39)(AP, 5/9/08)
1958 May 12, The United States and Canada signed an agreement to create the North American Air Defense Command (later the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD for short).
(AP, 5/12/08)
1958 May 13, Stan Musial made hit # 3000.
(SS, Internet, 5/13/97)
1958 May 13, Vice President Nixon's limousine was battered by rocks thrown by anti-U.S. demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela. Nixon’s eight-nation South America goodwill tour encountered violent demonstrations, particularly in Peru and Venezuela, spurring President Dwight Eisenhower to order the movement of US forces into Caribbean bases.
(AP, 5/13/97)(HNQ, 6/14/99)
1958 May 13, French troops took control of Algiers as French settlers rioted against the French army.
(HN, 5/13/98)(MC, 5/13/02)
1958 May 15, The MGM movie musical "Gigi," starring Leslie Caron as a young French courtesan-in-training, was released.
(AP, 5/15/08)
1958 May 15, Vice President Richard Nixon received a hero's welcome on his return from a violence-marred tour of Latin America.
(AP, 5/15/08)
1958 May 15, In South Korea the Yoido Full Gospel Church was founded by David Yonggi Cho and his mother-in-law, Choi Ja-shil, both Assemblies of God pastors. Their first worship service was held in the home of Choi Ja-shil. Apart from the two pastors, only Choi Ja-shil's three daughters and one elderly woman, who had come in to escape from the rain, attended the first service. By 2007 Yoido counted some 830,000 members and its church in Seoul was the largest in the world.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Yonggi_Cho)
1958 May 15, Sputnik III, the first space laboratory, was launched in the Soviet Union.
(HN, 5/15/99)
1958 May 16, A man endured a record 82.6 G for .04 seconds on a water-braked rocket sled at Holloman Air Force Base. He was hospitalized for 3 days for recovery.
(SFEC, 7/2/00, Z1 p.2)
1958 May 18, Chairman Mao Tse Tung spoke at the Second Session of the Eight Party Congress and called for schoolchildren to assist in the elimination of the four pests, which included sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes. A massive 3-day campaign soon began to exterminate sparrows, which were thought harmful because they ate the peasant's grain. Numerous other birds were killed in the process and the following year a plague of locusts became a problem. In 2001 Judith Shapiro, Donald Worster and Alfred W. Crosby authored “Mao's War Against Nature: Politics & the Environment in Revolutionary China."
(http://tinyurl.com/8gbhg)(Econ, 12/20/08, p.65)(http://tinyurl.com/7m9egc)
1958 May 19, The movie "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" was released in the movie theaters in USA.
(DTnet, 5/19/97)
1958 May 19, The United States and Canada formally established the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD).
(AP, 5/19/97)(Econ, 3/5/05, p.38)
1958 May 19, British actor Ronald Colman died in Santa Barbara, Calif., at age 67.
(AP, 5/19/08)
1958 May 23, Mao Tse Tung started his "Great leap forward" movement in China. China tried to modernize its economy in "The Great Leap Forward" and urged factories and farms to meet impossible production targets. Farmers were forced to pool their possessions and devote all land to grain cultivation. Rather than concede failure, local officials misled central planners about output. The result: a famine that may have killed as many as 30 million people by the end of 1960. The story is told by Jasper Becker in his 1997 book "Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine."
(WSJ 12/10/93)(SFEC, 10/7/96, A12)(WSJ, 2/7/97, p.A14)(MC, 5/23/02)
1958 May 24, United Press International (UPI) was formed through a merger of the United Press and the International News Service.
(AP, 5/24/97)
1958 May 24, Pres Batista opened an offensive against Fidel Castro's rebellion.
(MC, 5/24/02)
1958 May 25, Paul Weller, guitar (Jam-This is the Modern World, Style Council), was born.
(SC, 5/25/02)
1958 May 26, Janice Kulsar was born in Manhattan, N.Y. She later established renown as a denizen of the Cafe Babar in SF, and went on to sail the world as an adventuress and healer.
(CB, 12/28/97)
1958 May 26, Union Square in San Francisco became a state historical landmark.
(HN, 5/26/98)
1958 May 27, Ernest Green and 600 whites graduated from Little Rock's Central High School. Green became the first black Central High graduate.
(http://tinyurl.com/qyjp4)(www.centralhigh57.org/1957-58.htm)
1958 May 28, Mikulas Schneider-Trvavsky (77), composer, died.
(MC, 5/28/02)
1958 May 29, Annette Bening, actress (American Beauty, Grifters, Bugsy, Valmont), was born in Topeka, KS.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1958 May 29, Juan Ramón Jimenez (76), Spanish poet (Nobel 1956), died.
(SC, 5/29/02)
1958 May 30, Unidentified soldiers killed in World War II and the Korean conflict were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
(AP, 5/30/97)
1958 Jun 1, "Youth Wants To Know", TV Public Affairs; last aired on NBC. Apparently, they didn’t want to know.
(DT, 6/1/97)
1958 Jun 1, Charles de Gaulle became premier of France, marking the beginning of the end of the Fourth Republic and the beginning of the Fifth Republic. France, on the verge of civil war over Algeria, called De Gaulle out of retirement.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)(AP, 6/1/08)(Econ., 3/21/15, p.44)
1958 Jun 4, French premier De Gaulle arrived in Algiers.
(MC, 6/4/02)
1958 Jun 6, Premier Charles de Gaulle said Algeria will always be French.
(MC, 6/6/02)
1958 Jun 7, Prince Rogers Nelson, rock star later known as Prince, was born in Minneapolis, Minn.
(WSJ, 3/30/04, p.B1)
1958 Jun 15, Greece severed military ties to Turkey because of the Cyprus issue.
(HN, 6/15/98)
1958 Jun 16, The US Supreme Court, in Kent v. Dulles, ruled that artist Rockwell Kent could not be denied a passport because of his communist affiliations.
(AP, 6/16/08)
1958 Jun 16, Imre Nagy (b.1896), former Hungarian premier (1956) and symbol of the 1956 uprising against Soviet rule, was hanged by the Communist government of Janos Kadar.
(www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/nagy/)(Econ, 10/21/06, p.95)
1958 Jun 17, Radio Moscow reported the execution of Hungarian ex-premier Imre Nagy by hanging.
(MC, 6/17/02)
1958 Jun 18, President Eisenhower expressed support for his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, who was accused of improperly accepting gifts from a businessman. Adams resigned in September 1958.
(AP, 6/18/08)
1958 Jun 19, "The Lux Show Starring Rosemary Clooney", TV Variety; last aired on NBC.
(DT, 6/19/97)
1958 Jun 19, In Washington, D.C. nine entertainers refused to answer a congressional committee’s questions on communism.
(HN, 6/19/98)
1958 Jun 19, Entrepreneurs Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin sought a trademark for a plastic cylinder based on a similar toy in Australia. Wham-O began selling the Hula Hoop following a demonstration of a rattan hoop imported from Australia. After one year teenagers in the US purchased some 100 million hoops at a suggested retail price of $1.98.
(SFC, 7/1/02, p.B5)(SFC, 6/19/08, p.C3)
1958 Jun 20, FBI headquarters learned of Ronald Reagan’s desire to star in the film "The FBI Story." The bureau rejected the idea because of Reagan’s association with Communist front organizations in the 1940s.
(SSFC, 6/9/02, p.F3)
1958 Jun 21, A federal judge allowed Little Rock Arkansas to delay school integration.
(HN, 6/21/98)
1958 Jun 23, Dr. John Jay Osborn (d.2014) and cardiac surgeon Frank Gerbode used their heart-lung machine to operate on a boy (8) at Stanford Hospital before a Bay Area televisioon audience of some 1.2 million.
(SFC, 5/1/14, p.D6)
1958 Jun 23, In the Netherlands the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation was founded by Prince Bernhard. It awarded the annual Erasmus Prize to individuals or institutions that have made notable contributions to European culture, society, or social science.
(www.123exp-culture.com/t/03604490053/)
1958 Jun 24, Victor M. Gerena, security guard who robbed $7 million (FBI wanted), was born in NYC.
(MC, 6/24/02)
1958 Jun 25, A four-day dedication of the Mackinac Bridge linking Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas began, even though the bridge had been open to traffic since November 1957.
(AP, 6/25/08)
1958 Jun 27, Rebel forces kidnapped 29 US sailors and Marines and held them until Jul 18.
(SSFC, 1/20/02, p.A7)
1958 Jun 28, Alfred Noyes (77), British poet, essayist (Robin Hood, The Highwayman), died.
(MC, 6/28/02)
1958 Jun 29, A bomb exploded at the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.; there were no injuries.
(AP, 6/29/08)
1958 Jun 29, Brazil won its first World Cup in thrilling fashion, defeating host Sweden 5-2 in the final and in the process becoming the first team to win the tournament outside its continent. The tournament is largely remembered for the emergence of 17-year-old Edson Arantes do Nascimento, aka Pele.
(AP, 6/2/18)
1958 Jun 30, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor (Giro), was born in Helsinki, Finland.
(MC, 6/30/02)
1958 Jun 30, Congress passed a law authorizing the admission of Alaska as the 49th state in the Union, the first new state since 1912. The Senate passed the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.
(HN, 6/30/98)(AP, 6/30/08)
1958 Jun, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, of African American and American Indian ancestry, traveled from Caroline County, Va., to marry in Washington, DC. Upon returning home they were arrested for violating the state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Their one year sentenced was suspended on condition that they leave the state.
(SFC, 2/14/12, p.E4)
1958 Jun, In Japan Mount Aso erupted and left 12 people dead.
(SFEC, 4/2/00, p.A17)
1958 Jul 7, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska statehood bill. Alaska became the 49th state in January 1959.
(AP, 7/7/07)
1958 Jul 8, President Eisenhower began a visit to Canada, where he conferred with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and addressed the Canadian Parliament.
(AP, 7/8/08)
1958 Jul 10, A largest tsunami on record was caused by the fall of 90 million tons of rock and ice into Lituya Bay, Alaska, following a local earthquake. The wave washed 500 meters up a mountain on the opposite shore.
(CW, Spring ‘99, p.30)
1958 Jul 11, Monument Valley, straddling the Arizona-Utah border, became the 1st Navajo Tribal Park.
(SSFC, 10/6/02, p.C15)
1958 Jul 14, In Iraq Gen. Abdel Karim al-Kassem (Qassim) assassinated Faisal II with his son and premier. Karim proclaimed a republic. Jordan’s King Hussein succeeded Faisal. Faisal II, Hashemite King of Iraq (1939-58), was assassinated at Baghdad and Noeri el-Said, premier of Iraq, was murdered. Mohammed Hadid (d.1999 at 92) served as the first finance minister under the government of Abdel Karim Qassem.
(PC, 1992 ed, p.963)(AP, 7/14/97)(USAT, 3/24/99, p.18A)(SFC, 8/6/99, p.D4)
1958 Jul 15, President Eisenhower ordered 5,000 US Marines to Lebanon, at the request of that country’s president, Camille Chamoun, in the face of a perceived threat by Muslim rebels, to help end a short-lived civil war. Eisenhower justified his decision to send troops to the region on the basis that it was the "birthplace of three great religions," as well as having "two-thirds of the presently known oil deposits."
(SFEC, 4/13/97, p.T8)(AP, 7/15/98)(HN, 7/15/98)(Econ, 4/25/20, p.22)
1958 Jul 16, Michael Flatley, Irish choreographer (Lord of Dance), was born in Chicago, Ill.
(MC, 7/16/02)
1958 Jul 16, The science-fiction film "The Fly" opened in San Francisco.
(AP, 7/16/08)
1958 Jul 20, King Hussein of Jordan broke off diplomatic relations with UAR.
(MC, 7/20/02)
1958 Jul 23, Queen Elizabeth named four women to peerages, the 1st women to it in Britain's House of Lords.
(AP, 7/23/97)
1958 Jul 24, Jack Kilby (1923-2005) of Texas Instruments came up with the idea for creating the 1st integrated circuit on a piece of silicon. By September 12 he made a working prototype.
(SFC, 10/11/00, p.A6)(SFC, 6/22/05, p.A5)(Econ, 7/25/05, p.75)
1958 Jul 26, Britain's Prince Charles (9), was made the Prince of Wales by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, although his investiture did not take place until the following year.
(AP, 7/26/08)
1958 Jul 27, Claire Chennault (b.1893), renowned leader of the Flying Tigers in China and Burma during WW II, died in New Orleans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Lee_Chennault)
1958 Jul 29, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which created NASA.
(AP, 7/29/97)
1958 Jul, Mildred Loving (1940-2008), a woman of American Indian and black heritage, and her white husband, Richard (d.1975), were arrested in Virginia within weeks of arriving from Washington DC and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife. In 1967 the US Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
(Econ, 5/17/08, p.105)
1958 Jul, Soviet fighter planes shot down an RB-50G US reconnaissance plane over the east coast of the USSR. In 2002 William E. Burrows authored "by Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in the Cold War."
(AH, 6/02, p.70)
1958 Aug 1, US atomic sub USS Nautilus 1st dove under the North Pole.
(MC, 8/1/02)
1958 Aug 1, Jordan’s King Hussein dissolved the Arab Federation of Jordan and Iraq.
(PCh, 1992, p.963)
1958 Aug 3, The nuclear-powered submarine USS Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater. The Nautilus was decommissioned in 1980 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982.
(PCh, 1992, p.965)(AP, 8/3/97)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_%28SSN-571%29)
1958 Aug 4, Mary Decker Stanley, winner of seven track and field records, was born.
(HN, 8/4/98)
1958 Aug 4, Billboard, founded in 1894, premiered its all-genre singles Hot 100 chart.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Hot_100)
1958 Aug 7, Alberto Lleras Camargo (1906-1990) began serving as President of Colombia and continued to August 7, 1962.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Lleras_Camargo)
1958 Aug 14, Gladys Love Smith Presley (48), Elvis Presley's mother, died in Memphis, Tenn.
(AP, 8/14/08)
1958 Aug 14, KLM Superconstellation crashed west of Ireland, killing 99.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1958 Aug 14, Frederic Joliot-Curie, French nuclear physicist (Nobel 1936), died.
(MC, 8/14/02)
1958 Aug 16, Madonna [Ciccone], entertainer and singer whose biggest record was "Like a Virgin," was born.
(HN, 8/16/98)
1958 Aug 17, Belinda Carlisle, (GoGos lead singer, Heaven on Earth), was born in Hollywood.
(SC, 8/17/02)
1958 Aug 17, World's 1st Moon probe, US's Thor-Able, exploded at T +77 sec.
(SC, 8/17/02)
1958 Aug 18, The 1st US edition of the novel "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov was published by Putnam. The 1st French edition was in 1955.
(WSJ, 3/20/97, p.A14)(www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=9§ion=notes)
1958 Aug 18, A TV game show scandal investigation started.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1958 Aug 18, Fidel Castro made a speech on Cuban pirate radio Rebelde.
(MC, 8/18/02)
1958 Aug 21, Walter Schumann (44), choral director (Ford Show), died.
(SC, 8/21/02)
1958 Aug 23, China resumed fire on Quemoi and Matsu.
(MC, 8/23/02)
1958 Aug 24, Leo Blech (87), German conductor and composer, died.
(MC, 8/24/02)
1958 Aug 25, The game show "Concentration" premiered on NBC-TV.
(AP, 8/25/08)
1958 Aug 25, President Eisenhower signed a measure providing pensions for former U.S. presidents and their widows.
(AP, 8/25/08)
1958 Aug 25, Momofuku Ando (48), head of Japan’s Nissin Food Products, announced that he had finally perfected his flash-frying method and therefore invented the instant noodle.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momofuku_Ando)
1958 Aug 26, Alaskans went to the polls to overwhelmingly vote in favor of statehood.
(AP, 8/26/08)
1958 Aug 26, Ralph Vaughan Williams (85), English composer (Fantasia on Themes of Thomas Tallis), died.
(MC, 8/26/02)
1958 Aug 27, The Arkansas Legislature voted 94-1 to pass a law allowing Gov. Orval E. Faubus to close public schools in the face of forced integration. Ray S. Smith (1924-2007) was the only dissenting legislator.
(SFC, 11/13/07, p.D9)
1958 Aug 27, USSR launched Sputnik 3 with 2 dogs aboard.
(MC, 8/27/01)
1958 Aug 28, Ernest Orlando Lawrence (b.1901), US physicist, Nobel Prize winner (1939), died.
(RTH, 8/28/99)
1958 Aug 29, Michael Jackson (d.2009), pop singer, entertainer, was born in Gary, Ind., the 7th of nine children.
(SFC, 6/14/05, p.D6)(SFC, 6/26/09, p.A1)
1958 Aug 29, Air Force Academy, established in 1954, opened its doors near Colorado Springs, Colo.
(www.cdphe.state.co.us/hm/academy.htm)
1958 Aug 29, Britain’s Notting Hill Riots began when a gang of white youths attacked a Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison. The youths had seen her the previous night arguing with her Jamaican husband Raymond at Latimer Road tube station. This led to a series of violent demonstrations against non-white West Indians in the ethnically diverse northwest London neighborhood of Notting Hill. This event first drew public attention to the growing problem of racial tension in Britain.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Notting_Hill_race_riots)(Econ, 6/30/12, SR p.5)
1958 Aug 31, Edwin Moses, track star, was born. Olympic Gold Medalist [1976, 1984] & Hall of Famer: 400-meter hurdles: the first athlete to use 13 strides between hurdles; 1983 winner of Sullivan Award: the U.S. outstanding amateur athlete.
(MC, 8/31/01)
1958 Aug, The CBS TV game show “Dotto," hosted by Jack Narz (1922-2008), was cancelled following allegations that the show was rigged.
(SFC, 10/17/08, p.B8)
1958 Sep 2, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, which provided aid to public and private education to promote learning in such fields as math and science.
(AP, 9/2/08)
1958 Sep 5, The novel "Doctor Zhivago" by Russian author Boris Pasternak was published in the United States for the first time.
(AP, 9/5/98)
1958 Sep 5, Martin Luther King was arrested in an Alabama protest for loitering and fined $14 for refusing to obey police.
(HN, 9/5/98)
1958 Sep 5, The 1st color video recording on magnetic tape was presented in Charlotte, NC.
(MC, 9/5/01)
1958 Sep 6, Miss Mississippi Mary Ann Mobley was crowned Miss America 1959 in Atlantic City, N.J.
(AP, 9/6/08)
1958 Sep 11, Responding to Communist China's artillery attacks on the Taiwan-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, President Eisenhower said in a broadcast address the US had to be prepared to fight to prevent a communist takeover of the islands.
(AP, 9/11/08)
1958 Sep 11, India passed its Armed Forces Special Powers Act. It conferred special powers upon armed forces in what the language of the act calls "disturbed areas" in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura. It allowed soldiers to search houses without warrants and shoot anyone suspected of being a terrorist.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Forces_%28Special_Powers%29_Act,_1958)
1958 Sep 12, The US Supreme Court, in Cooper v. Aaron, unanimously ruled that Arkansas officials who were resisting public school desegregation orders could not disregard the high court's rulings.
(AP, 9/12/08)
1958 Sep 15, A commuter train crashed through a drawbridge, killing 48 in Newark, NJ.
(http://www.emergency-management.net/traincrash.htm)
1958 Sep 20, Rev. Martin Luther King was stabbed by Izola Curry, a deranged woman, during a book signing on 125th St. in Harlem. Dr. Aubre De Lambert Maynard (d.1999 at 97) performed a successful operation on King who had a knife embedded in his sternum. Curry was later found mentally incompetent.
(SFC, 3/25/99, p.C3)(AP, 9/20/08)
1958 Sep 22, The detective TV show "Peter Gunn" premiered on NBC with Craig Stevens (d.2000 at 81) as the private eye. The show was created by Blake Edwards (1922-2010) and marked this collaboration with composer Henry Mancini.
(SFC, 5/13/00, p.A19)(AP, 9/22/08)(SFC, 12/17/10, p.D5)
1958 Sep 22, Sherman Adams, assistant to President Eisenhower, resigned amid charges of improperly using his influence to help an industrialist. Critics of the Eisenhower Administration called Chief Presidential Adviser Sherman Adams the "Assistant President" because they considered him to be too powerful. Adams was the former governor of New Hampshire. Adams resigned after it was revealed that a Boston industrialist had given him gifts in exchange for preferential treatment before the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
(AP, 9/22/97)(HNQ, 6/13/98)
1958 Sep 22, The nuclear submarine USS Skate remained a record 31 days under the North Pole.
(MC, 9/22/01)
1958 Sep 24, "The Donna Reed Show" premiered on ABC-TV.
(AP, 9/24/08)
1958 Sep 25, John B Watson, US psychologist and behaviorist, died.
(MC, 9/25/01)
1958 Sep 28, Voters in the African country of Guinea overwhelmingly favored independence from France.
(AP, 9/28/08)
1958 Sep 30, The police drama "Naked City" debuted on ABC-TV.
(AP, 9/30/08)
1958 Sep, Orval Faubus (1910-1994), governor of Arkansas, shut Little Rock’s schools to prevent any more black children from attending white schools.
(Econ, 9/22/07, p.44)(www.africanamericans.com/LittleRock.htm)
1958 Sep, A Navy plane crashed during a training mission in Washington’s Puget Sound. The plane carried an unarmed nuclear weapon that was never found.
(SFEC, 11/22/98, Par p.22)
1958 Oct 1, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was inaugurated [See Apr 2, Jul 29].
(SFC, 10/2/07, p.A6)
1958 Oct 1, American Express launched its first credit card.
(www.bostonapartments.com/loans/american_express_credit_card.html)
1958 Oct 1, Britain transferred Christmas Island (south of Java) to Australia.
(MC, 10/1/01)
1958 Oct 2, Marie Stopes, birth control pioneer, died.
(MC, 10/2/01)
1958 Oct 2, The former French colony of Guinea in West Africa proclaimed its independence from France under the leadership of Sekou Toure.
(WP, 6/29/96, p.A15)(AP, 10/2/97)
1958 Oct 4, The first trans-Atlantic passenger jetliner service was begun by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with flights between London and New York.
(AP, 10/4/97)
1958 Oct 4, In Minnesota a single engine military Cessna L-19 crashed into Green Lake and took the life of Captain Richard P. Carey, 36, who was returning to the Willmar airfield from Rochester. The pane was recovered in 2005.
(AP, 8/14/05)
1958 Oct 5, Racially desegregated Clinton High School in Clinton, Tenn., was mostly leveled by an early morning bombing.
(AP, 10/5/08)
1958 Oct 6, The US nuclear submarine Seawolf surfaced after spending 60 days submerged.
(AP, 10/6/08)
1958 Oct 7, In Pakistan President Iskander Mirza abrogated the Constitution and declared Martial Law in the country. Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan was named chief martial law administrator.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayub_Khan)
1958 Oct 8, Dr. Ake Senning installed the 1st fully implantable pacemaker in Stockholm. Arne Larsson (43) received the pacemaker, which was built Dr. Rune Elmqvist. Larsson died in 2001 after receiving 26 different pacemakers.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker)(Econ, 3/7/09, TQ p.25)
1958 Oct 9, Pope Pius XII died, 19 years after he was elevated to the papacy. He was succeeded by Pope John the 23rd. In 1999 John Cornwell published "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII."
(WSJ, 4/25/97, p.A18)(AP, 10/9/00)(SFC, 9/7/99, p.A4)
1958 Oct 10, The private-eye series "77 Sunset Strip" premiered on ABC-TV. The hour-length American television private detective series, created by Roy Huggins, starred Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Roger Smith, and Edd Byrnes.
(AP, 10/10/08)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77_Sunset_Strip)
1958 Oct 11, The lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched; it failed to go as far as planned, fell back to Earth, and burned up in the atmosphere.
(AP, 10/11/97)
1958 Oct 14, Paul Osborn's "World of Suzie Wong," premiered in NYC.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1958 Oct 14, Brendan Behan's "Hostage," premiered in London.
(MC, 10/14/01)
1958 Oct 16, Tim Robbins, West Covina, Ca., actor (Bull Durham, Shawshank Redemption), was born.
(MC, 10/16/01)
1958 Oct 17, The special "An Evening with Fred Astaire," the first major TV program produced on color videotape, aired on NBC.
(AP, 10/17/08)
1958 Oct 19, John Bloom, [Joe Bob Briggs], drive-in movie critic, was born.
(MC, 10/19/01)
1958 Oct 23, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in literature. However, Soviet authorities pressured Pasternak into relinquishing the award.
(SFC,11/27/97, p.B3)(AP, 10/23/99)
1958 Oct 23, De Gaulle offered Algerian defiance "peace of the brave."
(MC, 10/23/01)
1958 Oct 23, USSR lent money to UAR to build Aswan High Dam.
(MC, 10/23/01)
1958 Oct 25, The last U.S. troops left Beirut
(HN, 10/25/98)
1958 Oct 26, Pan American Airways pilot Samuel H. Miller (d.2001 at 84) flew the first Boeing 707 passenger service jetliner from New York’s Idlewild Airport (later JFK) to Paris; the trip took eight hours and 41 minutes. 111 passengers flew aboard the Clipper America and a ticket cost $489.60. The plane was christened a week earlier by Mamie Eisenhower. The first New York London transatlantic jet passenger service was inaugurated by BOAC. [see Oct 4]
(AP, 10/26/97)(WSJ, 10/23/98, p.W6)(HN, 10/26/98)(SFC, 9/12/01, p.A21)
1958 Oct 27, In Pakistan Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan carried out the country’s first military coup. He announced that "our ultimate aim is to restore democracy but of the type that people can understand." Corruption had become so widespread within the national and civic systems of administration that Ayub Khan was welcomed as a national hero by the people. This launched more than a decade of military rule.
(www.storyofpakistan.com/articletext.asp?artid=A065)(SFEC, 8/3/97, p.A15)(SFEC, 11/21/99, p.A22)
1958 Oct 28, The Samuel Beckett play "Krapp's Last Tape" premiered in London.
(AP, 10/28/08)(SFEC, 10/15/00, DB p.50)
1958 Oct 28, The Roman Catholic patriarch of Venice, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, was elected Pope, taking the name John XXIII.
(AP, 10/28/97)
1958 Oct 29, Boris Pasternak refused the Nobel prize for literature. Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago" was on the best seller list in the west.
(WSJ, 10/10/95, p.A-14)(MC, 10/29/01)
1958 Oct 29, Dr. F. Mason Sones became the 1st doctor to perform a coronary angiogram.
(MC, 10/29/01)
1958 Oct, The Kingston Trio released the "Ballad of Tom Dooley."
(SFC, 7/10/96, p.E5)(SFEC, 8/11/96, DB, p.52)
1958 Nov 1, Jack Dobbins (30) was murdered in Charleston, S.C., for having allegedly made sexual advances. John Mahon (18), the confessed killer, used a brass candlestick and was later acquitted after using a gay panic defense.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_murder)
1958 Nov 4, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown was elected as democratic governor of California.
(SSFC, 1/30/05, p.C1)
1958 Nov 4, Alan Cranston was elected California state controller, the 1st Democrat to hold the post since 1890.
(SFC, 1/1/01, p.A5)
1958 Nov 4, Glenn Anderson won the election for lieut. gov. of California.
(SFC, 10/17/96, C2)
1958 Nov 4, Angelo G. Roncalli was crowned as Pope John XXIII.
(MC, 11/4/01)
1958 Nov 12, Warren Harding (d.2002 at 77), Wayne Merry and George Whitmore scaled the "nose" of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite Valley. They had spent 47 days of climbing over 16 months to reach the top of the 2,900 foot cliff. In 1970 Harding and Dean Caldwell spent 27 days climbing another route up El Capitan. Harding later authored "Downward Bound."
(SFC, 3/9/02, p.A24)(SSFC, 11/9/08, p.B6)
1958 Nov 15, Tyrone Power (44), actor, died of a heart attack in Madrid, Spain, while filming "Solomon and Sheba."
(AP, 11/15/08)
1958 Nov 18, The cargo freighter SS Carl D. Bradley sank during a storm in Lake Michigan, claiming 33 of the 35 lives on board.
(AP, 11/18/08)
1958 Nov 18, The 1st true reservoir in Jerusalem opened.
(MC, 11/18/01)
1958 Nov 21, Mel Ott (49), Baseball Hall-of-Famer, died in New Orleans.
(AP, 11/21/08)
1958 Nov 21, A Soviet-East German commission met in East Berlin to discuss the transfer to East German control of Soviet functions and end its occupation status in Berlin.
(AP, 11/21/02)
1958 Nov 25, Charles F. Kettering (82), inventor of the auto self-starter, died.
(MC, 11/25/01)
1958 Nov 27, Artur Rodzinski (66), Polish conductor and composer, died.
(MC, 11/27/01)
1958 Nov 28, The U.S. reported the first full-range firing of an ICBM
(DT, 11/28/97)
1958 Nov 28, The Middle Congo province of French Equatorial Africa voted to proclaim itself independent as the Congo Republic (Brazzaville). French Equatorial Africa, was a federation of French territories in Central Africa that included Chad, Gabon, Middle Congo and Ubanga-Shari. Each became autonomous in 1958.
(WUD, 1994, p.567)(DT, 11/28/97)
1958 Nov 28, The African nation of Chad became an autonomous republic within the French community.
(AP, 11/28/97)
1958 Nov 30, Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins (70) died. In 1959 the USS Skate became the 1st submarine to surface at the North Pole and the ships crew held a funeral service and scattered the ashes of Wilkins (d.1958), who had attempted the feat in 1931.
(ON, 1/02, p.9)
1958 Dec 1, The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Flower Drum Song" opened on Broadway.
(AP, 12/1/97)
1958 Dec 1, In Chicago Our Lady of Angels School burned. 92 students and 3 nuns were killed.
(MC, 12/1/01)
1958 Dec 9, Robert H.W. Welch Jr. and 11 other men met in Indianapolis to form the anti-Communist John Birch Society.
(AP, 12/9/97)
1958 Dec 10, The first domestic passenger jet flight took place in the United States as a National Airlines Boeing 707 flew 111 passengers from New York City to Miami.
(AP, 12/10/97)
1958 Dec 13, Ahmed Mukhtar Baban, premier of Iraq, was executed along with Burhanuddin Bashajan, Iraqi minister of Foreign Affairs and Rafiq Aref, Iraqi chief-staff Arabs Statenbond.
(MC, 12/13/01)
1958 Dec 14, The United States, Britain and France rejected Soviet demands that they withdraw their troops from West Berlin and agreed to liquidate the Allied occupation in West Berlin.
(AP, 12/14/02)
1958 Dec 17, Howard Hickey (41) was named coach of the SF 49ers to replaced Frank Albert, who had retired unexpectedly.
(SSFC, 12/14/08, p.54)
1958 Dec 19, An Eisenhower White House memo gave authority to senior military commanders to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the president could not be reached or was unable to respond to a nuclear attack against the US in a policy known as "pre-delegation authority."
(SFC, 3/21/98, p.A2)(SFC, 9/2/98, p.A5)
1958 Dec 21, Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), having come out of retirement, was elected to a seven-year term as the first president of the Fifth Republic of France. De Gaulle selected Maurice Couve de Murville (d.1999 at 92) as his foreign minister.
(AP, 12/21/98)(SFC, 12/25/99, p.B4)(Econ, 10/04/08, p.56)
1958 Dec 28, At Yankee Stadium the Baltimore Colts beat the NY Giants in the NFL championship game 23-17, after the game went into overtime for the first time. In 2008 Mark Bowden authored “The Best Game Ever: The Birth of the Modern NFL."
(WSJ, 6/9/08, p.A15)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_NFL_Championship_Game)
1958 Dec 28, A Chipmunks song (Alvin, Simon & Theodore with David Seville) hit #1. "The Chipmunk Song" went on to win 3 statues in the Grammys.
(SFEC, 2/21/99, DB p.38)(SFC, 12/24/99, p.C3)(MC, 12/28/01)
1958 Dec 31, Cuba’s dictator Juan Batista fled the country taking most of the Central Bank’s reserves of dollars and gold as rebels under Fidel Castro marched into Havana.
(Econ, 12/3/16, p.18)
1958 Dec, Julen Madariaga helped found ETA. EKIN (engage), a Basque nationalist group, transformed into Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (E.T.A., Basque Homeland and Freedom). ETA was the only armed group that emerged in the Spanish state during Francoism [see July 31, 1959].
(www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/westeurope/sources/birtheta.html)(Econ, 9/11/10, p.62)
1958 H.C. Westermann (1922-1981), sculptor, created "Memorial to the Idea of Man if He Was an Idea." His work was laced with dark humor.
(WSJ, 4/18/02, p.D7)
1958 John Diebenkorn, California figurative painter, made his " Woman and Mirror."
(SFEC, 3/16/97, DB p.33)
1958 Jasper Johns had his debut show at the Castelli Gallery in New York and became an overnight success. This year he painted his work "Tennyson."
(WSJ, 10/17/96, p.A20)
1958 Georgia O'Keeffe created her oil on canvas painting "Ladder to the Moon."
(SFEC, 8/10/97, p.T7)(SSFC, 6/22/03, p.C8)
1958 David Park, American artist, painted: "Man in a T-Shirt" and "Untitled".
(SFEC, 12/1/96, DB p.21)(SFC, 8/23/97, p.A20)
1958 Picasso made his sketch "Femme Nue Assise."
(SFC, 7/5/96, DB, p.36)
1958 Stanley Spencer, English artist, painted "The Crucifixion."
(SFC, 10/14/97, p.B1)(SFC, 6/5/98, p.C1)
1958 Allan Kaprow, inventor of the events known as Happenings, wrote an influential article that described the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock as pivotal in the way the artist’s action was converted directly into art content.
(SFC, 2/10/98, p.E4)
1958 Jorge Amado (d.2001 at 88), Brazilian writer, published his novel "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon."
(SFC, 8/9/01, p.D2)(www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9182926)
1958 Jean Anouilh wrote his play "Becket."
(SFC, 9/27/96, p.C6)
1958 Roger Brown authored “Words and Things," a look at the influence of language on thought and the evolution of speech.
(WSJ, 2/23/08, p.W8)
1958 Max Frisch, Swiss dramatist, wrote his expressionistic drama "The Firebugs." It was about a businessman lured into complicity with a band of terrorists.
(SFC, 2/17/00, p.B3)
1958 "The Magic-Maker: E.E. Cummings" by Charles Norman, poet and biographer, was published.
(SFC, 9/16/96, p.A15)
1958 Chinua Achebe of Nigeria authored the novel "Things Fall Apart." It was about the Igbo tribe's efforts to guard its way of life against English colonialism and was made into a theater production in 1997. It sold millions of copies worldwide and was voted Africa's best book of the century. In 2004 Achebe rejected a Nigerian national honors award, protesting conditions in the West African nation and saying renegades were trying to turn his home state into "a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom."
(WSJ, 2/09/99, p.A20)(SFEC, 8/6/00, BR p.4)(P, 10/18/04)
1958 E. Digby Baltzell (1916-1996) published "Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class."
(SFC, 8/20/96, p.A18)
1958 Edward Banfield, American sociologist, authored “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society." It was about poverty in southern Italy.
(Econ, 6/11/11, SR p.12)
1958 William Carrol Bark (1909-1996), professor emeritus of history at Stanford, published "Origins of the Medieval World."
(SFC, 10/18/96, A23)
1958 Wernher von Braun, German-born rocket scientist, authored “First Men to the Moon."
(Econ, 7/2/11, p.7)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun)
1958 Algis Budrys published his sci-fi novel "Who," in which was described an artificial heart, 5-years before a working version was developed.
(SFEC, 11/24/96, Z1 p.2)
1958 New York papers reported that San Francisco writer and bon vivant Barnaby Conrad was dying due to a goring wound received in a Spanish bullfight. Conrad survived and later opened the Matador nightclub in SF.
(SSFC, 11/16/03, p.E3)
1958 Cliffs Notes, created by Cliff Hillegass (d.2001 at age 83), began publishing condensed studies of literary works in Lincoln, Nebraska.
(WSJ, 7/5/00, p.B1)(SSFC, 5/6/01, p.A27)
1958 Edwin Dale Jr. (d.1999 at 75), NY Times journalist, co-authored "Inflation and Recession?" with Richard E. Mooney.
(SFC, 5/11/99, p.A19)
1958 Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), expatriate British writer, authored “Balthazar," the second volume his 4-part Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Durrell)
1958 Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), expatriate British writer, authored “Mountolive," the third volume his 4-part Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Durrell)
1958 Sirs Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary published "The Crossing of Antarctica."
(SFC, 11/13/99, p.A22)
1958 Economist John Kenneth Galbraith authored “The Affluent Society." He described a country increasingly riven by economic divisions but too selfish to care.
(Econ, 1/10/09, p.76)(Econ, 12/17/11, p.123)
1958 Graham Greene published his novel “Our Man in Havana." It captured Cuba on the cusp of sweeping change.
(WSJ, 8/25/06, p.A1)
1958 Nora Johnson (1933-2017) published her novel “The World of Henry Orient." A 1964 film version starred Peter Sellers and was directed by George Roy Hill. Her father was filmmaker Nunally Johnson.
(WSJ, 8/6/04, p.W8)(SFC, 10/11/17, p.D6)
1958 Louis Kelso collaborated with the philosopher Mortimer Adler to write “The Capitalist Manifesto." It is considered the primary source of Kelso’s economic theories.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_O._Kelso)
1958 US Senator John F. Kennedy authored “A Nation of Immigrants." It was written as part of the Anti-Defamation League's series entitled the One Nation Library.
(Econ., 3/14/15, SR p.16)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nation_of_Immigrants)
1958 Prince Lampedusa authored the novel "The Leopard" which portrayed a decadent Sicilian aristocracy that made changes only in order to ensure that everything remained the same.
(WSJ, 2/26/99, p.A15)
1958 Robert Lewis wrote "Method—or Madness?," a book on his theories of acting that extended the system of acting developed by Konstantin Stanislovsky. It combined an emotional truth from the actor’s past that was relived in performance—with technique.
(SFC,11/25/97, p.A22)
1958 Forrest McDonald, historian, authored “We the People," an argument against Charles A. Beard’s 1913 book “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States."
(WSJ, 8/12/04, p.D8)
1958 Sir Lawrence van der Post (1906-1996) wrote "The Lost World of the Kalahari."
(SFC, 12/17/96, p.B4)
1958 Myra Cohn Livingston (1926-1996), children’s poet and anthologist, wrote her first book of poems "Whispers and Other Poems." She later wrote "The Child as Poet; Myth of Reality."
(SFC, 8/27/96, p.A17)
1958 William Manchester (d.2004), US historian and biographer, authored “The Arms of Krupp," a history of the German steel and munitions makers.
(SFC, 6/2/04, B7)
1958 James Michener (d.1997 at 90) wrote "The Hokusai Sketchbook."
(SFC,10/17/97, p.A17)
1958 Dennis Murphy (1932-2005) authored “The Sergeant." In 1971 he wrote the script for film version.
(SFC, 10/11/05, p.B9)
1958 Boris Pasternak’s novel "Dr. Zhivago" was on the best seller list.
(WSJ, 10/10/95, p.A-14)
1958 Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Polish-born Holocaust survivor, defected to West Germany. He was soon drawn into "Gruppe 47," the literary circle of Walter Jens and Heinrich Boll. In 1960 he joined Die Zeit as a literary critic.
(SFC, 9/2/02, p.D5)
1958 Paul Robeson, singer and actor, wrote his autobiography "Here I Stand."
(WSJ, 4/9/98, p.A21)
1958 Huston Smith (b.1919) authored “The Religions of Man."
(SSFC, 5/17/09, Books p.H1)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huston_Smith)
1958 Girodias published "Candy," authored by Terry Southern.
(SSFC, 3/11/01, BR p.7)
1958 Telford Taylor published "The March of Conquest." He helped write the rules for Nuremberg Trials.
(SFC, 5/26/98, p.B2)
1958 Leon Uris authored his best-seller "Exodus."
(AP, 6/24/03)(SFC, 6/25/03, p.A25)
1958 T.H. White (1906-1964), English writer, authored the Arthurian novel “The Once and Future King."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._H._White)
1958 Michael Young (1915-2002), British sociologist, authored “The Rise of Meritocracy." It was Lord Young's ideas that inspired the shake up of secondary education in the 1960s, leading to the rise of comprehensive schools, where children of all abilities and backgrounds are brought together under one roof.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4035181.stm)
1958 The "Film Quarterly" began publishing from UC Berkeley under editor Ernest Callenbach. In 1999 Brian Henderson and Ann Martin edited "Film Quarterly: Forty Years A Selection."
(SFEC, 3/7/99, BR p.3)(SFEC, 8/22/99, BR p.5)
1958 William Gibson's play "Two for the Seesaw," premiered in NYC with Anne Bancroft and Henry Fonda.
(SFC, 5/23/02, p.D9)
1958 Miyoshi Umeki starred in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "The Flower Drum Song." It based on the 1957 novel by C.Y. Lee and was made into a film in 1961.
(SFC, 10/9/97, p.C3)(SFC, 9/12/07, p.A17)
1958 Ludmilla Chiriaeff (1924-1996), Latvian-born dance pioneer, founded the Les Grandes Ballets Canadiens.
(SFC, 9/24/96, p.B2)
1958 George Ballanchine premiered his ballet "Stars and Stripes."
(SFC, 11/7/96, p.E3)
1958 Hans Werner Henze wrote his ballet "Undine."
(SFEC, 1/17/99, DB p.29)
1958 Vito Scotti (1918-1996) played Rama from India in "Gunga Ram" on Andy Devine’s TV show "Andy’s Gang."
(SFC, 6/12/96, p.C2)
1958 The TV program "The Ann Sothern Show" starred Don Porter and Ann Sothern and ran to 1961.
(SFC, 2/21/97, p.A26)
1958 The NBC TV series “Bat Masterson" featured Gene Barry (1919-2009) as Masterson. The show continued to 1961.
(SFC, 12/15/09, p.C5)
1958 The "Peter Gunn" detective show premiered with Craig Stevens (d.2000 at 81) as the private eye.
(SFC, 5/13/00, p.A19)
1958 The Chordettes made it to No. 2 on the Billboard chart with their recording "Lollipop." The group split up in 1964.
(SSFC, 3/1/20, p.B9)
1958 Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney recorded "Fancy Meeting You Here." It was reissued in 2001.
(WSJ, 11/28/01, p.A16)
1958 Freeman (1940-2017) wrote and sang “Do You Want to Dance". It reached No. 5 on the Billboard singles chart. The song later became known as “Do You Wanna Dance" and was performed by a number of other musicians including the Beach Boys.
(SFC, 2/15/17, p.D4)
1958 Don Gibson wrote his songs "I Can't Stop Loving You," and "Oh, Lonesome Me." Both songs made No. 1.
(SFC, 3/13/99, p.E6)
1958 Pop singer Eydie Gorme (1928-2013) appeared with her husband on TV in “The Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme Show."
(http://tinyurl.com/k2s24c4)
1958 Peggy Lee (1920-2002) made a hit with her rendition of the rhythm-and-blues hit “Fever."
(SFC, 5/18/10, p.E5)
1958 Domenico Modugno made a hit with "Volare."
(SFC, 11/30/02, p.D1)
1958 Johnny Otis, R&B writer and producer, wrote "Willie and the Hand Jive." In 2000 the 3-CD boxed set: The Johnny Otis Rhythm and Blues Caravan: The Complete Savoy Recordings" was produced.
(SFC, 4/4/00, p.B2)
1958 The song “Endless Sleep," by Rockabilly singer and songwriter Ralph Joseph Reynolds, (d.2008 at 75) sold over a million copies and kicked in the melodramatic teen tragedy genre.
(SFC, 11/19/08, p.B7)
1958 Sharon Sheeley (1950-2002) wrote the song "Poor Little Fool" and Ricky Nelson turned it into a hit.
(SFC, 5/25/02, p.A27)
1958 Ed Townsend (1929-2003) wrote his hit song "For Your Love."
(SSFC, 8/17/03, p.A27)
1958 Sheb Wooley (d.2003 at 82) recorded the hit song "Purple People Eater." He starred in a movie of the same name in 1988.
(SFC, 9/18/03, p.A21)
1958 Link Wray recorded "Rumble," and showed the way for the "power cord," and the conception of the electric guitar as a weapon.
(SFC, 7/7/97, p.E1)
1958 Faron Young sang his country hit "Alone With You."
(SFC, 12/12/96, p.C8)
1958 Jimmy Lyons directed the first Monterey Jazz Festival and featured Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan, Turk Murphy, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Dizzie Gillespie. Radio host Jimmy Lyons and Chronicle jazz critic Ralph Gleason came up with the idea. In 1997 William Minor and Bill Wishner wrote: "Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years."
(SFC, 6/30/96, B9)(SFEM, 9/15/96, p.6)(SFEC,12/14/97, BR p.7)
1958 The first "greatest hits" album was produced: "Johnny’s Greatest Hits" featured the songs of Johnny Mathis. It was on Billboard’s Top 100 chart for 9 years.
(SFC, 7/7/96, DB p.40)
1958 Mercury Records released a recording of the 1812 Overture that featured the antique canon of West Point. It became a standard for testing stereo sound equipment.
(WSJ, 2/3/97, p.A12)
1958 Benjamin Britten composed his Nocturne for Tenor and Chamber Orchestra.
(SFC, 3/5/99, p.C5)
1958 The Harry Simeone Chorale recorded the Fred Waring song: "Little Drummer Boy."
(SFC, 12/24/99, p.C8)
1958 The Country Music Association (CMA) was founded in Nashville.
(SFEC,10/19/97, Par p.2)
1958 Paul Krassner (b.1932) founded The Realist, a satirical political journal. It continued to 2001.
(SFC, 3/15/17, p.D6)
1958 Rex Humbard (1919-2007), televangelist, built the 5,400 seat, marble-and-glass Cathedral of Tomorrow in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. It was specially built to handle televised services.
(SSFC, 9/23/07, p.B5)
1958 The Lafayette Pavilion Apartments, a part of the Lafayette Park development in Detroit, Mich., was completed. The 78-acre urban renewal project, planned by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell, was originally called the Gratiot Park Development. It was built over the old neighborhood called Black Bottom. Chicago developer Herbert Greenwald (d.1959) assembled the team to demolish the build the project, which was completed in 1965. In 1966 the US national Park Service listed Lafayette Park on the national Register of Historic Places.
(WSJ, 12/22/07, p.W12)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_Park,_Detroit)
1958 The renegade Whip Jones started the ski area Aspen Highlands.
(Hem, Dec. 94, p.78)
1958 The Historic Charleston’s Revolving Fund was established to buy endangered buildings and hold them until a sensitive buyer could be found.
(Hem. 1/95, p. 70)
1958 Harry Winston, a noted New York Jeweler, donated the blue Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institute.
(Smith., 5/95, p.18-20)(THC, 12/3/97)
1958 Avalon Hill in Maryland published its war strategy game titled Tactics.
(WSJ, 7/2/10, p.W9)(www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1574/tactics-ii)
1958 Al Lapin Jr. (d.2004) and younger brother Jerry Lapin founded the Int’l. House of Pancakes (IHOP) with a single outlet at Toluca Lake in LA County. Lapin left IHOP in 1973.
(SFC, 6/21/04, p.B4)
1958 A rattlesnake roundup began in Seetwater, Texas, for ranchers concerned about rattlesnakes biting their cattle. It grew to become the world’s largest such event.
(Econ, 3/21/09, p.36)
1958 Robert Welch, candy baron, founded the John Birch Society. The society was named after an Army intelligence officer killed by Chinese Communists a week after World War II ended. The organization is a conservative group that believes a powerful group of "insiders" is manipulating global events in an attempt to create a totalitarian, atheistic one-world government.
(SFC, 8/5/96, p.A5)
1958 Audrey Hepburn in the film "How to Steal a Million" wore a Hubert de Givenchy suit that was auctioned in 1997 for $10,350. The suit was part of Saint Laurent’s first collection as the successor to Christian Dior.
(SFC,10/31/97, p.C2)
1958 Abram Games (1914-1996), master of graphic arts, received the Order of the British Empire for his WW II posters. His parents were Latvian immigrants from 1904.
(SFC, 9/27/96, p.A24)
1958 Gregory Stout (d.1999 at 83) helped found the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
(SFC, 3/16/99, p.A17)
1958 The American Association of Retire Persons (AARP) was founded.
(SFEC,11/23/97, Par p.4)
1958 Horace Stoneham brought the New York Giants to San Francisco.
(SFC, 10/8/97, p.A20)
1958 Pavel Cerenkov, Russian physicist, was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in the 1930s showing when a charged particle travels through any medium at a speed exceeding the speed of light in the medium (but not the speed of light in a vacuum), it emits light in a cone. This is called Cerenkov radiation.
(JST-TMC,1983, p.99)
1958 Joshua Lederberg (1925-2008), molecular biologist, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering that bacteria reproduced sexually in a process called recombination. Lederberg shared the prize with Prof. George Tatum of Yale and George Beadle.
(SFC, 2/8/08, p.B9)
1958 Pres. Eisenhower named John McCone head of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1961 Kennedy named him head of the CIA.
(SSFC, 6/9/02, p.F5)
1958 Pres. Eisenhower gave the green light for the Corona project, which would create satellites to spy on the Soviet Union. The new Lockheed Corp. facility in Palo Alto, Ca., quickly became involved in the program, which remained classified until 1995. Satellites equipped with parachutes kept tabs on the Eastern Bloc from 1960-1972.
(SFC, 9/15/06, p.D3)
1958 The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was formed in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
(SFC, 5/26/03, p.B1)
1958 A US B-47 bomber dropped a 7,600 pound, Mark-15 hydrogen bomb off the Georgia coast after it collided with a Navy fighter jet. It became one of “11 Broken Arrows," nuclear bombs never found during air or sea accidents. Evidence of unusual radiation in the area turned up in 2004 prompting a renewed search.
(SFC, 9/30/04, p.A7)
1958 US Congress banned futures trading in onions to stop speculation on prices. Onion farmers had lobbied Michigan congressman Gerald Ford to ban trading in onion futures. They blamed speculators for the volatility in the crops’ prices.
(Econ, 10/11/08, SR p.16)(Econ, 11/14/09, p.93)
1958 A serious recession hit the US and unemployment went to 7.7 percent.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)
1958 A bond market crash occurred when falling interest rates caused bondholders to speculate.
(WSJ, 11/12/96, p.A20)
1958 The US minted its last Wheat Ear penny.
(SFEC, 9/8/96, Par p.21)
1958 George Wallace ran for governor of Alabama but was defeated by John Patterson, a rabid racist with ties to the Klan. Patterson was the son of lawyer Albert Patterson, assassinated in 1954.
(WSJ, 4/17/00, p.A30)(USAT, 6/29/04, p.7A)
1958 Bill Egan became Alaska’s 1st governor.
(AH, 10/04, p.42)
1958 Nelson A. Rockefeller (1908-1979) was elected governor of New York. He beat Averell Harriman. A biography by Cary Reich was written in 1996 titled: "The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer (1908-1958)."
(SFC, 10/3/96, p.E2)
1958 NYC outlawed housing discrimination.
(Econ, 2/11/12, p.34)
1958 Nuclear submarines began to home-port in San Diego.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.A20)
1958 Leonard Reiffel began a classified study on the benefits and effects of a nuclear explosion on the moon sponsored by a US Air Force special weapons center.
(SFC, 5/16/00, p.A7)
1958 US marines landed in Lebanon to help put down an insurrection.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)
1958 Secretary John Foster Dulles firmly opposed a proposed U.S. visit by Nikita Khrushchev, warning it would confer recognition on the "Kremlin gangsters" and dispirit the captive people of Eastern Europe. Dulles symbolized the hard line anti-Soviet position. Dulles died in 1959 and later in the year Khrushchev visited the U.S. and a spirit of coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union began to flower.
(HNQ, 6/23/99)
1958 Frank Moss (1911-2003), liberal Utah Democratic was elected US Senator (1958-1976). He served until 1976 when he was defeated by Orrin Hatch.
(SFC, 2/3/03, p.B4)
1958 In SF the new $5.5 million Memorial Masonic Temple opened at California and Taylor streets. It included a 38-by-48-foot mural by Emile Norman, who used images made of glass, fabric, metal shells and dirt between sheets of translucent plastic. The 45-panel work depicts the Mason’s role in the development of California.
(SFC, 10/21/05, p.F6)
1958 In San Francisco architect Henrik Bull (1929-2013) talked a client into spending $75,000 on the Sentinel Building at Kearny and Columbus, which he then fixed up.
(SSFC, 12/8/13, p.C12)
1958 Herb Caen, SF newspaper columnist, was lured back to The Chronicle following 8 years with the SF Examiner.
(SFEC, 2/2/97, p.A13)
1958 The Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) hired B.R. Stokes (d.2013 at 89) as its director of information. He thus became BART’s first employee.
(SSFC, 5/26/13, p.C13)
1958 UC Berkeley took over the 5.8-acre site of the former SF State College at 55 Laguna to serve as an extension for adult and continuing education programs. In 2010 it negotiated a long-term lease for the development of housing on the site.
(SFC, 8/1/13, p.E2)
1958 UC Berkeley Prof. Harold F. Weaver (1917-2017) founded the UC Radio Astronomy Laboratory at Berkeley, Ca.
(SSFC, 5/7/17, p.C10)
1958 In SF Enrico Banducci, owner of the hungry i nightclub, opened his North Beach sidewalk café on Broadstreet and named in Enrico’s.
(SFC, 4/4/07, p.E3)
1958 Lefty O’Doul (1897-1969), former baseball player and manager, opened a saloon at 333 Geary St. in San Francisco where friends and family could come to eat and meet with sports stars. Increased rents forced the bar to close at the end of 1997. It later re-opened as a bar and hofbraus restaurant.
(SFC, 7/18/97, p.A1)(www.leftyodouls.biz/whoislefty.html)
1958 Robert Stafford (1913-2006) was elected governor of Vermont he served 2 years and then won his 1st term in the US Congress. In 1971 he was appointed to the US Senate.
(SSFC, 12/24/06, p.D7)
1958 The Elizabeth copper mine in Vermont closed for good. It had produced more than 100 million pounds of copper, about 90% of that from World War II onward. The closure left behind 7,800 feet of tunnels; abandoned buildings; equipment; huge piles of rock, known as tailings; and other mining debris. In 2001 the Elizabeth Mine was added to the Superfund list. In 2003 work began to cleanup the site. In 2019 work began winding down, and the Environmental Protection Agency was getting ready to turn the site over to the state for long-term monitoring.
(AP, 9/7/19)
1958 The Barbie doll was patented by Mattel, but not marketed until 1959. Ruth Handler invented the Barbie Doll, named after her daughter in 1959. The full Barbie name was Barbara Millicent Roberts.
(SFC, 8/19/98, Z1 p.6)(WSJ, 1/11/99, p.R34)(SFC, 8/7/99, p.D3)
1958 Best Foods Inc., merged with Corn Products Refining Co.
(WSJ, 5/28/96, p. R-45)
1958 In Fair Lawn, New Jersey, a new Nabisco bakery opened.
(WSJ, 11/22/08, p.W4)
1958 Jim Haslam (aka Big Jim) founded Pilot when he paid $6,000 for a filling station in Virginia. In 2015 Pilot Flying J had revenues of more than $30 billion.
(Econ, 2/6/15, p.60)
1958 John McCarthy (1927-2011), computer science pioneer, invented the List Processing Language (LISP).
(SFC, 10/29/11, p.C5)(Econ, 11/5/11, p.114)
1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller first proposed their theorem on capital structure (the Modigliani-Miller theorem), arguably forming the basis for modern thinking on capital structure. The basic theorem states that in the absence of taxes, bankruptcy costs, agency costs, and asymmetric information, and in an efficient market, the value of a firm is unaffected by how that firm is financed. Modigliani was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Economics for this and other contributions.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theorem)
1958 Dr. Creighton Hale (1924-2017), the Little League’s first director of research, formally introduced his Little League batting helmet at the Little League Congress in Chicago.
(SSFC, 10/22/17, p.C13)
1958 Binney & Smith Inc., makers of Crayola crayons, introduced the 64-count Crayola crayon box that included the new "Indian red" color. The former "Prussian blue" was renamed "midnight blue."
(SFC, 7/28/99, p.B12)
1958 The Hearst Corp. acquired Popular Mechanics magazine and launched WTAE-TV, Pittsburgh.
(SFC, 8/7/99, p.A9)
1958 McDonald’s hit the 100 million mark in this year.
(WSJ, 11/13/98, p.B1)
1958 Arnold Neustadter began marketing Rolodex, a rotary card filing system, invented by his employee Hildaur L. Neilsen. Neustadter had patented the system in 1956.
(WSJ, 11/24/07, p.W7)
1958 The aluminum can was introduced as a food container.
(SFC, 8/4/05, p.C1)
1958 Ford Motor built the prototype car of the future called the Nucleon. It was powered by a nuclear reactor.
(SFC, 1/13/99, Z1 p.3)
1958 The last Packard rolled off the assembly line.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 Industry experts in 1996 picked the 1958 Packard as the number 6 worst American-made car.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 Industry experts in 1996 picked the 1958 Edsel as the number 9 worst American-made car.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 The first incarnation of Super Glue, called Eastman 910, hit the market. Harry Wesley Coover Jr. (1917-2011) first happened upon the super-sticky adhesive, more formally known as cyanoacrylates, by accident when he was experimenting with acrylates for use in clear plastic gun-sights during World War II. An experimental accident in 1951 brought it back to his attention. Kodak was not able to capitalize commercially on Dr. Coover’s discovery and sold the business to National Starch in 1980.
(www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/business/28coover.html?_r=1)(SFC, 3/28/11, p.A4)
1958 The 1,500 room Stardust casino-hotel opened in Las Vegas, Nv. In 2006 Boyd Gaming Corp. planned to tear it down and build a $4 billion complex.
(SFC, 1/5/06, p.C1)
1958 Thompson Products merged with Ramo-Wooldridge. It would become known as TRW in 1965.
(F, 10/7/96, p.70)
1958 Toyota and Datsun introduced small cars into the US.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 A Western Flyer peddle car in good shape would fetch $800 in 1997.
(SFC, 7/9/97, Z1 p.3)
1958 Charles Harrison (1931-2018), an African-American designer, was put in charge of redesigning the 3-D View-Master, first introduced in 1939. He made it lighter, more durable and easy enough to be used by a child. In 1961 he was hired by Sears and became the company's first black executive.
(SFC, 12/7/18, p.C12)
1958 Legos, the toy Lego building block kit with simple red bricks, was introduced with 8-stud bricks that could be combined 24 ways. The company was founded by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1932. Legos became a registered trademark in 1954. The name was derived from “les godt," Danish for play well.
(SFC, 1/9/99, p.B8)(Econ, 10/28/06, p.76)
1958 Masudaya, a Japanese toy maker, introduced Radicon, a battery powered mechanical robot. Radicon was followed by Nonstop, Sonic, Target and Machine Man.
(WSJ, 8/6/99, p.W12)
1958 Hal Anger (1920-2005) demonstrated his gamma camera at a meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine. It employed gamma radiation to depict metabolic processes within a living body.
(SFC, 11/12/05, p.B5)
1958 Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes developed their laser, light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, while working at Bell labs. They received a patent in 1960.
(www1.bell-labs.com/history/laser/)(www.ipmall.info/about/user11.asp)
1958 An American scientist made a dwarf grow with human growth serum. In 1967 some patients began to display CJD disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, from hormone prepared with contaminated pituitary glands.
(SFEC, 5/21/00, p.A1,14)
1958 Dr. Samuel L. Katz of Duke Univ. co-developed the Edmonston B vaccine against measles.
(SFC, 11/16/00, p.A19)
1958 Dr. Aaron Lerner (1920-2007) led a Yale team in the discovery of melatonin, a hormone from the pineal gland in the brain. They had hoped that a substance from the pineal gland might be useful in treating skin diseases. It was later found to regulate human sleep-wake cycles.
(SFC, 2/19/07, p.B4)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineal_gland)(Econ, 5/16/15, p.73)
1958 The virus that causes hemorrhagic fever was identified. A rare mouse that is both host and vector of the disease in Argentina rapidly multiplied when rangelands were converted to maize fields.
(NH, 2/97, p.53)
1958 The rapid development of penicillin-resistance by staphylococci led to the compound 05865 (later known as vancomycin) being fast-tracked for approval by the FDA. It became the best weapon against bacteria that were no longer vulnerable to other drugs. In 1988 bacteria resistant to vancomycin began to be detected.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancomycin)(SFEC, 9/14/97, p.C1,4)
1958 Monkeypox was first described in Denmark when several monkey imports developed lesions. The disease emerged in the Congo in 1970 with sporadic outbreaks over the years, primarily in Central and West Africa. Ten percent of those infected can die, and there is evidence of person-to-person transmission.
(AP, 11/29/06)
1958 An anti-trust court case forced AT&T to license its non-telephone related technology to anyone who asked.
(Econ, 6/12/04, p.38)
1958 Mercedes-Benz brought the 1st diesel to the US market, the rounded, pokey 190D.
(WSJ, 1/14/05, p.W10)
1958 The US launched its first satellite, a 31-lb device.
(TMC, 1994, p.1958)
1958 Passenger service by air over the Atlantic exceeded passenger steamship crossings for the 1st time.
(SSFC, 12/14/03, p.D2)
1958 Monta Bell, silent film director, died.
(SFEC, 10/13/96, DB p.54)
1958 Harry Cohn, the tyrannical boss of Columbia Pictures, died.
(SFC, 6/1/01, p.C11)
1958 Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958) died. As president of Delco he introduced the electric-starter in 1912, one of many inventions that he pioneered.
(WSJ, 6/19/96, Adv. Supl)
1958 Tyrone Power, film actor, died on a Madrid movie set.
(SFC, 6/1/01, p.C11)
1958 The San Quentin Drama Workshop began at the California prison after a performance of Waiting for Godot the previous year.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Quentin_State_Prison)
1958 A 2nd eastern Carquinez Bridge opened over the Sacramento River between Crocket and Vallejo, Ca. The 1st cantilever bridge was built by American Toll Bridge Co. in 1927.
(SFC,12/26/97, p.A1)(SSFC, 6/2/02, p.A18)(SFC, 6/24/02, p.B3)
1958 The Achievement Rewards for College Students (ARCS) was co-founded by Barbara Chisholm Cole (d.1998 at 82) to assist students with scholarships in the natural sciences, medicine and engineering. The Foundation was formed by a group of women in Los Angeles following the Soviet launch of Sputnik.
(SFC, 5/11/98, p.A20)(http://tinyurl.com/ybzduc7)
1958 Charles E. Dederich (d.1997 at 83), dentist, founded Synanon in northern California. It was a communitarian scheme to rehabilitate drug addicts based on the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program. It used an encounter session called "The Game" to work out problems with group pressure and venting.
(SFEC, 3/3/97, p.A21)(SFEM, 4/13/97, p.32)
1958 Nuclear submarines began to home-port in San Diego.
(SFC, 8/25/98, p.A20)
1958 William F. Knowland gave up a shoo-in re-election campaign for senator in a disastrous bid for the governorship of California.
(SFEC, 5/17/98, BR p.5)
1958 California banned backyard incinerators.
(SFC, 9/19/00, p.A6)
1958 A plaque was placed near Morro Rock in San Luis Obispo, Ca., that recounts its history.
(SFC, 10/12/97, p.T3)
1958 In California the Iron Mountain mine owner built a small treatment plant to capture copper and halt the killing of salmon.
(SFEC,11/2/97, p.A13)
1958 The Basic Vegetable Products processing plant in King City, Ca., opened.
(SFC, 11/12/99, p.A19)
1958 Joe Coulombe established Pronto Markets, a string of convenient stores, in Los Angeles, Ca. He expanded the chain in 1967 to include gourmet foods and changed the name to Trader Joe’s. In 1979 he sold the company to Theo and Karl Albrecht of Germany.
(SFC, 6/6/06, p.C2)
1958 In southern California mobster Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death by Cheryl Crane as her mother, Lana Turner, watched in horror. Stompanato and actress Lana Turner had been lovers.
(SFEC, 3/16/97, z1 p.4)(USAT, 10/8/97, p.4D)
1958 The Gamburtsev mountains were detected in East Antarctica during the first International Polar Year exploration. The mountains were named after Soviet geophysicist Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Gamburtsev (1903-1955), are 1,200 km (750 miles) long, with jagged peaks up to 2,700 m (8,900 feet) high intersected by deep troughs and valleys. Some 34 million years ago, the mountains became smothered by the East Antarctic icesheet, an area the size of Canada. A billion years ago several mini-continents collided together to form a super-continent called Gondwana, creating a mountain range at the point of impact. Periods of rifting, some 250 million years ago and again about 100 million years ago, pulled Gondwana apart in tectonic agony. This created a 3,000-km (2,000-mile) fracture in the planet's crust that extends from East Antarctica across the ocean to India. A residual "root," combined with the rifting, helped force up the land that is now East Antarctica.
(AP, 11/17/11)
1958 A periodic flowering took place in the bamboo forests of Bangladesh leading to a plague of rats. The flowering recurred in 2008 causing a similar rodent plague.
(SFC, 2/16/08, p.B6)
1958 Pierre Culliford (Peyo), Belgian cartoonist, created the gnomelike Smurfs for publisher Charles Dupuis (d.2002 at 84). Hanna-Barbera turned it into a US cartoon program in 1981.
(SFC, 12/3/02, p.A24)
1958 The Paddington Bear first appeared in "A Bear Called Paddington"— a stowaway from "Darkest Peru" who arrived at London's Paddington train station wearing a sign saying "Please look after this bear. Thank you." Author Michael Bond (1926-2017) based his story on a stuffed animal purchased as a last-minute Christmas gift for his wife.
(AP, 6/28/17)
1958 The British government sent out a pamphlet to farmers titled “Home Defence and the Farmer."
(Econ, 7/31/04, p.48)
1958 Sir John Woolf (d.1999 at 86), British film producer, established Anglia Television.
(SFC, 7/1/99, p.C4)
1958 William Phillips of the London School of Economics showed that for much of the previous 100 years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. This came to be called the “Phillips curve."
(Econ, 10/14/06, p.79)
1958 The British investment firm S.G. Warburg initiated the first hostile takeover bid for British Aluminum on behalf of the American group Reynolds and Tube Investments.
(SFC, 6/16/99, p.B4)
1958 John Gurdon of Oxford Univ. cloned frogs by nuclear transfer, but his creations never developed beyond the tadpole stage.
(Econ, 2/18/17, p.17)
1958 China’s Mao Zedong wrote a poem titled "Farewell to the god of plague" to celebrate the country's victory over snail fever. Snail fever remained a major health risk for more than 50 million Chinese, with approximately 1 million people and several hundred thousand livestock infected as of 2010.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2863366/)(Econ., 6/13/20, p.31)
1958 China began construction of its National Art Museum of China (NAMOC) in Beijing. It was formally opened to the public in 1963. Construction of a new facility, based on a design by French architect Jean Nouvel, was set to begin in 2014.
(Econ, 12/21/13, p.8)(www.namoc.org/en/about/history/)
1958 China's national museum to the Korean war first opened in the border city of Dandong. It closed in 1966 when Peng Dehuai, the commander of Chinese forces in Korea, came under attack. It re-opened in 1993, a year after China normalized relations with South Korea. The hall closed again in 2014, ostensibly for repairs. It re-opened again in 2020.
(Econ., 10/3/20, p.36)
1958 China’s Mao Zedong introduced the hukou, a certificate system, in order to prevent a flood of migrants into cities. It was eased in the 1980s when China needed cheap labor for its factories.
(Econ, 4/19/14, SR p.7)(Econ, 5/17/14, p.43)
1958 China introduced its first leading small group, a shadowy committee that often eclipses the power of more public political structures.
(Econ 6/10/17, p.43)
1958 Yu Qiuli became petroleum minister and took charge of building the Daqing oil field, the largest in China.
(SFC, 2/6/99, p.A21)
1958 In China Ai Qing (1910-1996), a poet, was denounced as a rightist and spent the next 18 years in hard labor in the Xinjiang region. His son Ai Weiwei (b.1957), later became renowned as an artist and political activist.
(Econ, 5/5/12, p.82)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Qing)
1958 The Chinese government updated the system for spelling Chinese words with Roman letters. It also introduced simplified written Chinese characters in a system called pinyin. Zhou Youguang (1906-2017) invented pinyin, the romanized spelling system that linked ancient Chinese writing to the modern age. He had been drafted in 1955 to lead the committee in developing an alphabetic system.
(SFC, 5/8/06, p.A1)(CSM, 1/15/17)
1958 In China Christian Pastor Samuel Lamb (1924-2013) was jailed a 2nd time for 20 years. He had already served time from 1955-57. Fewer than 400 worshippers attended his underground church, Damazhan. He was a leader in the Chinese house church movement, and known for his resistance against participation in the churches of the state-controlled "Three-Self Patriotic Movement."
(Econ, 8/24/13, p.42)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Lamb)
1958 Colombian Dr. Alberto Vejarano Laverde and engineer Jorge Reynolds Pombo developed the first artificial pacemaker with internal electrodes and external electronic unit and implanted it into Gerardo Florez (70), a priest from Ecuador, who then lived another 18 years.
(Econ, 3/9/13, TQ p.6)(http://tinyurl.com/3rgfcqq)
1958 In Cuba Johnny Weissmuller played in a celebrity golf tournament and saved himself from Castro’s guerrillas by beating his chest and performing his famous yell thereby invoking requests for autographs.
(SDUT, 6/6/97, p.E2)
1958 The Theatre on the Balustrade was founded in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Founders Helena Philipova, Ivan Vyskocil, Jiri Suchy and Vladimir Vodicka named their professional theatre after a street leading from the square to the river.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_on_the_Balustrade)
1958 The French film "Le Beau Serge" starred Gerard Blain (d.2000) and was directed by Claude Chabrol.
(SFC, 12/19/00, p.B5)
1958 Marcel Carne (1906-1990), French film director, made "The Cheaters" (Les Tricheurs) with Jean-Paul Belmondo.
(SFC, 11/1/96, p.A28)
1958 The French film “Night Heat" starred Mylene Demongeot.
(SFC, 10/31/15, p.E4)
1958 France exited from Morocco.
(G&M, 7/31/97, p.A18)
1958 Maurice Papon was named the police chief of Paris.
(SFC, 4/3/98, p.B2)
1958 Jean Dausset (1916-2009), French immunologist, discovered the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue system allowed doctors to verify compatibility between donor and receiver for an organ transplant.
(AP, 6/24/09)
1958 One in 5 French workers was engaged in farming. By 2004 this shrunk to just over 3%.
(Econ, 5/29/04, p.51)
1958 In France Ifop, a polling group, began measuring presidential popularity.
(Econ, 11/30/13, p.50)
1958 Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India, trekked for a month to make a treaty with Bhutan. He demanded to be met at the border by someone of equal rank. King Wangchuk balked at making the trip and quickly appointed his aide, Jigme Palden Dorji, as prime minister to meet Nehru 127 miles away by mule and foot.
(WSJ, 3/6/97, p.A8)(Econ, 5/14/05, p.46)
1958 India began designing and buying equipment for a plutonium reprocessing plant at Trombay, which would provide it capability for atomic weapons.
(SFC, 5/28/98, p.A9)
1958 Dhirubhai Ambani (1932-2002) moved to Mumbai to start his own business in spices. He moved into textiles and in 1966 founded India's project-building Reliance Corp. In 2002 its sales reached $16.8 billion.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhirubhai_Ambani)(Econ, 12/20/03, p.98)(Econ, 11/27/04, p.69)
1958 In Indonesia Gen. Abdul Haris Nasution (d.2000 at 81) pushed through the adoption of a policy that allowed the military a direct role in national politics.
(SFC, 9/6/00, p.D2)
1958 A secret war in Indonesia ended abruptly when Allen Pope, a CIA contract pilot, was downed in a dogfight. Pope was carrying a trove of documents that revealed the extent of US involvement. The CIA had been sending weapons and advisers to anti-government rebels on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island as mercenaries mounted combat sorties in a fleet of unmarked B-26 bombers. Indonesia later received a batch of 10 C-130 transport planes from the US in exchange for Pope’s release.
(AP, 4/24/05)(AP, 5/20/09)
1958 Iraq’s Prime minister Fadhel al-Jamali (1903-1997) was sentenced to death after the military coup. He was freed after Morocco interceded and he later became an advisor to Pres. Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia who granted him citizenship.
(SFC, 5/27/97, p.A22)
1958 Saddam Hussein was recruited by his uncle Khairalla Msallat, an army officer and fervent Arab nationalist, to assassinate a prominent communist in Tikrit. Saddam killed his victim, a distant cousin, with a single shot to the head. Hussein was arrested and imprisoned for six months, then released for lack of evidence.
(www.moreorless.au.com/killers/hussein.html)
1958 Waltert Eytan (d.2001 at 90), diplomat, authored "The First Ten Years: A Diplomatic History of Israel."
(SSFC, 5/27/01, p.A27)
1958 Israeli Premier David Ben-Gurion made a secret visit to Ankara, Turkey.
(SFC, 10/26/99, p.B2)
1958 Mourad Faham smuggled the Aleppo Codex out of Syria to Turkey and then to Jerusalem, where it was presented to the president of Israel. In 1982 the first missing page, from the Book of Chronicles, surfaced in New York and was sent to join rest of the manuscript. In 2007 another fragment, a piece from the Exodus story of the 10 plagues, was sent to Jerusalem. Sam Sabbagh, an Aleppo Jew living in New York, had carried it in wallet for decades as good luck charm.
(AP, 9/27/08)
1958 Israeli scholars at Hebrew Univ. began working on the Bible Project. They sought to publish an authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia.
(AP, 8/12/11)
1958 In Japan Sue Sumii published the first volume of her novel "The River With No Bridge." It was about the plight of the burakumin (the untouchables) of Japan. She died working on the 8th volume in 1997 at age 95.
(SFC, 6/24/97, p.A19)
1958 In Japan a restaurant in Tokyo introduced a conveyor belt to serve sushi.
(Econ, 4/22/17, p.60)
1958 In Japan the Tokyo Tower was erected in the capital city as a relay for radio and TV signals. In 1998 it faced replacement.
(SFC, 12/11/98, p.D4)
1958 Japan’s Shimano Industrial Co. (bicycle part manufacturer) passed to the leadership of Shozo Shimano, age 30. He implemented a 4-point strategic plan that was: 1) to continue to manufacture components. 2) modernize the distribution system. 3) initiate an aggressive export program. 4) implement a new technical development program to make the best components.
(Hem, 8/96, p.33)
1958 Japan’s Tokyo Telecommunications changed its name to Sony Corp. and listed as a publicly traded company.
(WSJ, 3/7/05, p.A8)(Econ, 9/20/14, p.62)
1958 Jordan’s King Hussein forged a federation with Iraq, which was led by his cousin, Faisal II. The federation soon failed when Faisal was killed during a revolution in Iraq.
(HNQ, 8/20/00)
1958 Morocco’s crown prince and army chief Hassan II crushed a rebellion in the Rif Mountains.
(Econ, 7/15/06, p.46)(www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/icl/mo__indx.html)
1958 Authorities in Paraguay under Alfredo Stroessner arrested 108 people "of dubious moral conduct" who were subjected to public derision.
(Reuters, 4/5/19)
1958 Arequipa, Peru, was hit by an earthquake.
(SSFC, 6/24/01, p.A16)
1958 In Romania Veronica Antal was stabbed repeatedly as she resisted being raped. In 2018 Pope Francis approved a decree recognizing the martyrdom of Antal.
(AP, 1/27/18)
1958 Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian writer, completed the first draft of "In the First Circle," a novel, set during Stalin's rule. It was about the effects of incarceration and forced labor on the minds and souls of innocent and intelligent men. He immediately put it through two revisions. He wrote 4th draft in 1962. In 1968 it was first published in the West. A Russian edition came out in 1978. A new edition in 2009 included parts left out in earlier editions.
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574431450891084972.html)
1958 Dmitry Shostakovich's 1958 operetta, "Moscow, Cheryomushki," celebrated the first five-storey buildings in Moscow -- nicknamed khrushchevki after the Soviet leader. They rehoused people living in communal flats -- where entire families were squeezed into one room -- and were celebrated as a symbol of social progress. In 2017 residents faced plans to demolish more than 4,500 apartment blocks and relocate hundreds of thousands of Muscovites.
(AFP, 5/7/17)
1958 Russia’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev decided to establish a town devoted entirely to science. This resulted in the construction of Akademgorodok, 20 miles from Novosibirsk.
(WSJ, 3/20/07, p.B10)
1958 In central Moscow Detsky Mir (Children's World), a new huge toy store, opened. In 2008 the hulking block-long building across from the KGB's notorious Lubyanka headquarters closed for a 3-year, $200 million renovation project.
(AP, 7/2/08)
1958 Colin Tennant (1926-2010), Scottish noble and later Lord Glenconner, acquired the island of Mustique, part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and turned it into a luxury playground for his friends.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Tennant,_3rd_Baron_Glenconner)(Econ, 9/11/10, p.103)
1958 The Scottish Presbyterian Church ended its 375-year ban on the Catholic feast of Christmas. Christmas remained a normal working day in Scotland until this year.
(http://gouk.about.com/od/festivalsandevents/qt/hogmaney.htm)
1958 In South Korea Cho Yong-gi founded Yoido Full Gospel Church. By 2011 it ranked as the world’s largest Christian congregation with over one million members.
(Econ, 10/15/11, p.51)
1958 The Goldstar electronics firm was founded in South Korea. It later became known as LG Electronics.
(Econ, 1/24/09, p.70)
1958 In Sri Lanka P.P. James (34) was falsely jailed for the murder of his father, who remained alive after being knifed by an assailant. James spent the next 50 years in jail, a victim of the country’s bureaucracy.
(AP, 4/20/08)
1958 In Sudan the 1st in a series of military coups overthrew the civilian-elected government.
(WSJ, 10/22/03, p.A4)
1958 Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann (1906-2008) first identified psilocybin and psilocin as the active compounds in psilocybin mushrooms, also known as magic mushrooms.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann)(Econ, 6/8/19, p.58)
1958 The US CIA began airdropping weapons over Tibet.
(WSJ, 8/30/08, p.A8)
1958-1960 Billy Higgins, drummer, played with Ornette Coleman’s quartet.
(SFEM, 10/5/97, p.)
1958-1961 China underwent its Great Leap Forward.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward)
1958-1962 The TV game show “Play Your Hunch" featured Merv Griffin as host.
(WSJ, 8/15/07, p.D12)
1958-1962 China experienced a great famine during this period. An estimated 36 million people died. In 2008 Yang Jisheng authored “Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962." In 2012 the book became available in English.
(Econ, 10/27/12, p.83)
1958-1963 In Romania Ion Ficior served as commander of the Periprava labor camp during this period. In 2013 Ficior (85) was charged with genocide for his alleged role in the deaths of 103 political prisoners. In 2017 a court upheld the verdict.
(SFC, 10/25/13, p.A2)(AP, 3/29/17)
1958-1964 In Romania Col. Gheorghe Craciun (d.2001) commanded the Aiud Prison. He was later charged with the deaths of 216 prisoners but died before the trial was completed.
(SFC, 6/16/01, p.A17)
1958-1964 These are the years covered in the Beatles Anthology I CD released recently.
(WSJ, 11/22/95, p.A-8)
1958-1966 Jay DeFeo (d.1989), SF artist, created her massive painting "The Rose." She was married to artist Wally Hedrick.
(SFEC, 8/25/96, BR p.39)(SSFC, 1/25/04, p.E5)
1958-1969 Generals seized power in Pakistan. Field Marshal M. Ayub Khan announced that "our ultimate aim is to restore democracy but of the type that people can understand."
(SFEC, 8/3/97, p.A15)(SFEC, 11/21/99, p.A22)
1958-1970 Japan achieves economic superpower status. Restrictions on foreign travel are removed and huge numbers of Japanese begin to travel abroad.
(Jap. Enc., BLDM, p. 216)
1958-1973 The TV game show "Concentration" was hosted by Art James (1929-2004). It was NBC's longest running game show.
(SFC, 4/1/04, p.B7)
1958-1996 In 1997 David Platzker compiled a "Catalog Raisonne" of the graphic art produced during this time by Claes Oldenburg: "Printed Stuff: Prints, Posters, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg."
(SFEC, 10/5/97, BR p.4)
