December 1958


The following events occurred in December 1958:

December 1, 1958 (Monday)

December 2, 1958 (Tuesday)

  • The completion of the Kariba Dam closed off the Zambezi River, creating the world's largest artificial lake and reservoir by volume, Lake Kariba. Four years and four months later, the lake was filled to sufficient capacity to make a hydroelectric plant operable.
  • In Ireland's County Kildare, 15 prisoners successfully escaped Curragh Camp out of 26 who made the attempt. The moment came during a soccer football game outside the prison building. The leaders managed to use "improvised wire-cutters" to break through the three fences that encircled the prison, but some were stopped by "aimed leg-shots by the guard and the blinding flash effect of ammonia grenades", as well as the setting afire of bushes that would have been used as hiding places. Two were unable to cross the final barrier, a "substantial ditch", because of injuries, and two more were recaptured after an extensive search.
  • Space Task Group officials visited the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to determine the feasibility of using the Jupiter launch vehicle for the intermediate phase of Project Mercury, to discuss the Redstone program, and to discuss the cost for Redstone and Jupiter launch vehicles.
  • In the Associated Press college football poll of 212 sportswriters, the LSU Tigers finished ahead of the Iowa Hawkeyes, 1,904 points to 1,459, to be recognized by the NCAA as the undisputed champion of the 1958 season in both the AP and UPI rankings. LSU received 139 first-place votes, compared to 17 for Iowa and 13 for the Army Cadets.
  • Born: George Saunders, American short story writer; in Amarillo, Texas
  • Died:
  • *Dr. Ernest Sachs, 79, pioneering American neurosurgeon and the first Professor of Neurosurgery at a U.S. medical school.
  • *Cora Wilson Stewart, 73, American educator who pioneered, in 1914, the night school concept with the opening of the "Moonlight School" in Kentucky, and the subsequent establishment of similar "Moonlight" programs in other states to offer education to illiterate people outside of regular school hours.

December 3, 1958 (Wednesday)

December 4, 1958 (Thursday)

  • All 21 people aboard an Aviaco Airlines SE.161 Languedoc in Spain were killed when the piston-engine plane crashed into the side of "La Rodina de la Mujer Muertal", a mountain peak in the Sierra de Guadarrama range. The plane had departed at 3:40 in the afternoon from Vigo en route to Madrid.
  • Died:
  • *José María Caro, 92, Chilean Roman Catholic Cardinal and Archbishop of Santiago
  • *Isabel Lyon, 94, former private secretary of Mark Twain, who fired her in 1909 after accusing her of embezzlement.

December 5, 1958 (Friday)

December 6, 1958 (Saturday)

December 7, 1958 (Sunday)

  • A mystery that remains unsolved more than sixty years later began when a family from Portland, Oregon, Ken Martin, Barbara Martin, and their three daughters, left home to buy a Christmas tree, and never returned. The body of 12-year-old Virginia Martin was found at the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, and the body her 10-year-old sister Susan would be located on May 3 near Camas, Washington. No trace of the other three victims was ever located, nor was their car, a red and white station wagon ever found. After more than sixty years, the mystery remained unsolved.
  • Elections were held in West Berlin for the 133-seat "city parliament", and voters rejected all Communist Party candidates on the ballot, halting an attempt by the Soviet Union to make the landlocked area a "neutral city" with no ties to West Germany.
  • Basel became the first city in Switzerland to grant women the right to vote and to be elected to office, after the city's men approved a resolution, 9,401 to 5,517.

December 8, 1958 (Monday)

  • Moscow Radio announced the removal of General Ivan Serov from his position as director of the KGB, the intelligence agency of the Soviet Union. Despite Serov's support for Khrushchev in a 1957 attempt by the Politburo to remove Khrushchev from leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev acted on the advice of other Politburo members to transfer Serov to the less powerful position of director of the GRU. Khrushchev picked Alexander Shelepin to replace Serov, and would later regret the decision in 1964, when the Politburo removed Khrushchev from power. A prominent Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev, would write in 1978 "With Serov in place, Khrushchev's power would have been intact" in 1964, but that Shelepin "as it turned out, was himself dreaming of taking Khrushchev's place."
  • East Germany abolished its five states — Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia — as well as the Länderkammer, the upper house of the bicameral East German parliament, as it moved to a unicameral legislature, the Volkskammer. Pre-selected by East Germany's Communist party, the National Front, the members of the Länderkammer voted the body out of existence. The five Länder were replaced for the rest of the German Democratic Republic's existence by the 14 Bezirke, the administrative units that had been created in 1952 to allow the central government to assume the states' functions. The five Länder would resume existence effective October 3, 1990, to join the 11 West German Bundesländer as part of the Republic of Germany">Republic Aviation">Republic of Germany after German reunification.
  • Gwadar Port was officially incorporated into Pakistan, three months after it had been purchased from the Sultanate of Oman.
  • Fulbert Youlou became the new Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, succeeding Jacques Opangault. At the time, the Republic of the Congo had limited self-government as a member of the French Community, and would become fully independent of France on August 15, 1960, with Youlou as its first president.
  • The Space Task Group indicated that nine Atlas launch vehicles were required in support of the Project Mercury crewed and uncrewed flights and these were ordered from the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division.
  • The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod Foundation, with assets of nearly one billion U.S. dollars by 2022, was created with the LCMS church to serve as the investment and trust administrator for the Missouri Synod Lutheran church congregations and schools, as well as the seven-unit Concordia University System.
  • Born:
  • *Vitaly Mutko, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia from 2016 to 2020; in Kurinskaya, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
  • *Mike de Vries, German manager and brand developer; in Arnsberg, West Germany
  • Died:
  • *Peig Sayers, 85, Irish Gaelic language storyteller
  • *Tris Speaker, 70, American major league centerfielder who had 3,514 hits and a lifetime batting average of.345, enshrined at the Baseball Hall of Fame

December 9, 1958 (Tuesday)

December 10, 1958 (Wednesday)

December 11, 1958 (Thursday)

December 12, 1958 (Friday)

  • French Air Force General Maurice Challe arrived in Algeria as the new commander-in-chief of the French forces to lead the counter-insurgency in the fight against the Front de libération nationale during the Algerian War. France's then-Prime Minister, Charles de Gaulle, assigned General Challe to replace General Raoul Salan. Though his series of attacks was more successful than previous French efforts in repelling FLN gains, the FLN had already achieved insurmountable control over most of French Algeria. Challe and Salan would later join in an attempted coup against the De Gaulle government in 1961.
  • The balloon Small World and its British crew of three men and one woman set off from the Canary Islands in an attempt to make the first free-balloon flight across the Atlantic Ocean, with a destination of Barbados. Radio contact with the expedition, led by Arnold Eloart, was lost after December 19, and a December 26 report that the balloon had landed safely in Venezuela proved to be a hoax.
  • Robert R. Gilruth, Mercury Project Manager, requested that the Lewis Flight Research Branch provide technical support for Project Mercury. The Space Task Group was particularly interested in Lewis' instrumentation facilities for use in research and development tests of Big Joe.
  • Space Task Group personnel began technical assessment of crewed spacecraft development proposals submitted by industry. Charles Zimmermann headed the technical assessment team.
  • Born: Sheree J. Wilson, American TV actress known for Dallas and Walker, Texas Ranger; in Rochester, Minnesota
  • Died:
  • *Herbert Bankole-Bright, 75, Sierra Leonean politician and independence activist
  • *Milutin Milanković, 79, Serbian Yugoslavian astronomer and climatologist who discovered the Milankovitch cycles of the predictable variation of the Earth's change in angle relative to the plane of its orbit would cause variations in the amount of solar energy which would reach the Northern Hemisphere. Milankovic's theory that variations in the amount of solar energy, combined with other factors, could cause climate change sufficient to affect the advance or deterioration of the polar ice caps. The theory, which could not be corroborated with the available means at the time of gathering data, would not be confirmed until 1976, after his death.

December 13, 1958 (Saturday)

  • The newly created NASA space agency made its first launch of an animal into space, sending a squirrel monkey named Gordo to an altitude of on a Jupiter rocket. Gordo endured a 10g force and floated weightlessly inside the capsule for 8.3 minutes, then endured reentry at 40g and. Telemetry showed that Gordo survived the forces, and in good condition, indicating that a human being could endure a launch and return to Earth. Unfortunately, after the spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, the recovery team was unable to locate it after a six-hour search and Gordo was lost at sea.
  • The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs was created.
  • Near Fortaleza in Brazil, a 12-coach express train derailed, sending five cars plunging down an embankment and killing at least 20 people and injuring 50 people.
  • Died: Harry "Tim" Moore, 71, African-American vaudeville and TV comedian known for portraying "Kingfish" on The Amos 'n' Andy Show, tuberculosis

December 14, 1958 (Sunday)

December 15, 1958 (Monday)

December 16, 1958 (Tuesday)

  • A fire and panic killed 84 people at the Vida Department Store in Bogotá in Colombia. The fire began from a short circuit in colored lights used to decorate a large Nativity Scene in the center of the store's ground floor, and the blaze was fed by paper and straw that spread to nearby counters piled with boxes of toys.
  • California's Vandenberg Air Force Base established itself as the U.S. West Coast rocketry center with the launch of a PGM-17 Thor missile.
  • Soviet polar pilot V. M. Perov, flying an Li-2, rescued Gaston de Gerlache and three other Belgian polar explorers who had survived five days after a plane crash in Antarctica, from their base.

December 17, 1958 (Wednesday)

December 18, 1958 (Thursday)

  • The United States launched the SCORE, the world's first communications satellite, from Cape Canaveral on an SM-65B Atlas rocket. Serving as the relay by the U.S. Army's Signal Corps for messages transmitted from one ground station to another, SCORE "proved that active communications satellites could provide a means of transmitting messages of all sorts from one point to any other on the planet Earth." The rocket itself was the satellite, packed with electronic gear designed to transmit and receive.
  • The Bell XV-3 Tiltrotor made the first true mid-air transition from vertical helicopter-type flight to fully level fixed-wing flight, with test pilot Bill Quinlan making the conversion from helicopter mode to airplane mode.
  • Former Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin, who had been fired on March 27 after being head of the government since 1955, made an appearance before the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and delivered a confession of sorts that he had been the leader of an "Anti-Party Group" that had included former Premiers Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov, former Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov and former Deputy Premier Lazar Kaganovich. On June 18, 1957, Bulganin, Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich had been among members of the Communist Party Politburo who had voted, 7 to 4, to remove Khrushchev the Party Secretary. According to the TASS News Agency, Bulganin told the committee, "The stern and principled assessment of the criminal activities of the anti-party group and of my participation in it revealed and helped me to realize all the harm of the group and to see the rottenness of the anti-party swamp in which I found myself." He added "Working in the council of national economy, I see the genius-like character and wisdom of policy of our party and its Central Committee."
  • The Republic of Niger was established as an autonomous state within the French Community, under the leadership of Hamani Diori as president for limited domestic self-government, but with France still guiding the West African republic's foreign affairs.
  • Born: Julia Wolfe, American composer and 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music winner; in Philadelphia

December 19, 1958 (Friday)

  • In Turkey, near Adana, the fall of a truck down a ravine killed 33 workers who were riding in the back.
  • Pursuant to U.S. Executive Order 50–59, the Advanced Research Projects Agency established Project Shepherd, a predecessor to the United States Space Surveillance Network, as the first network of stations to track orbiting objects as part of national defense. For that purpose, the Space Track Filter Center was opened at Bedford, Massachusetts.
  • A pre-recorded message from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was broadcast from the SCORE satellite to Earth stations at 3:15 in the afternoon Eastern time and could be heard on short wave radio at 132.905 megacycles. Eisenhower's statement was "This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means, I convey to you and to all mankind America's wish for peace on earth and goodwill toward men everywhere." The message then repeated.
  • From All of Us to All of You, produced by Walt Disney Productions as an animated Christmas special, with greetings from Disney characters and cartoons, was shown for the first time, appearing as an episode of the U.S. ABC television network's Walt Disney Presents. The show is an annual feature of television on Christmas Eve in most Scandinavian nations.
  • Born: Limahl, English pop music singer and the lead vocalist for Kajagoogoo; at Pemberton, Lancashire
  • Died: Francis P. Murphy, 81, U.S. shoe manufacturer and philanthropist who served as governor of the state of New Hampshire from 1937 to 1940.

December 20, 1958 (Saturday)

  • A 9-year-old girl, Mary Olive Hattam, was kidnapped from the town of Ceduna, South Australia, and murdered. The crime led to the arrest and conviction of an Indigenous Australian, Max Stuart, who was originally picked up for violating a state law prohibiting "full-blooded" Aboriginal people from drinking alcohol without a license. Stuart was charged with murder two days later, then coerced into signing a typed confession despite his limited understanding of the English language, and convicted of the murder, with a scheduled execution day of July 7, 1959. Under pressure from the Australian press over the uncertainty of Stuart's actual guilt and the disparate treatment for Australia's aborigines contrasted with its white people, the state postponed the execution. Stuart would be paroled in 1973. Years later, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson would say of the Stuart case, "It was a dramatic and very important case because it alerted Australia to the difficulties that Aborigines, who then weren't even counted in the census, encountered in our courts. It alerted us to the appalling feature of capital punishment of the death sentence that applied to people who may well be innocent."
  • NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command for the U.S. and Canada, approved the creation of 10 "Super Combat Center" underground bunkers that would house the command and control for the 10 NORAD air divisions in the event of a nuclear war. The plan envisioned excavation of caverns in Georgia's Kenesaw Mountain and New York state's Whitehorse Mountain, as well as deep underground bunkers to serve Ottawa, St Louis, San Antonio, Chicago, Phoenix, Portland, Oregon, Spokane, Washington, and Minot, North Dakota. The number of SCCs was reduced to seven in June, then to six by the following December, then canceled altogether effective March 18, 1960.
  • The first Copa Chile, a knockout tournament for the championship of Chilean soccer football, ended with Colo-Colo of Macul playing to a 2 to 2 draw against Club Deportivo Universidad Católica of Santiago before an audience of 22,752 at the Estadio Nacional de Chile. Colo-Colo was awarded the victory because it had a higher goal average during the tournament. The first-place finisher in the regular season, the Santiago Wanderers, had been eliminated in the first round of the tournament by Colo-Colo.

December 21, 1958 (Sunday)

December 22, 1958 (Monday)

December 23, 1958 (Tuesday)

  • The Tokyo Tower, designed as a duplicate of the Eiffel Tower of Paris, but taller, opened to the public as the tallest freestanding tower in the world.
  • All 21 people aboard Aeroflot Flight 466 were killed as the Ilyushin Il-14 was approaching Tashkent in Uzbekistan from Ashgabat in Turkmenistan on the last scheduled leg of a multistop trip within the Soviet Union. The plane stalled while making a second approach to the runway in poor weather.
  • Switzerland's seven-member Federal Council voted to instruct the historically neutral nation's department of defense to study the logistics and execution of attaining nuclear weapons.

December 24, 1958 (Wednesday)

December 25, 1958 (Thursday)

December 26, 1958 (Friday)

  • U.S. President Eisenhower directed that the secret Special Group 303 committee begin holding weekly meetings, with representatives of the U.S. State Department and U.S. Department of Defense participating to ensure that the President would be aware of all ongoing operations of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Died: Viola Turpeinen, 49, American accordion player, died of cancer.

December 27, 1958 (Saturday)

  • In Egypt, representatives of the Soviet Union and the United Arab Republic signed an agreement for a 400 million rubles loan from the Soviets for the construction of the proposed Aswan Dam. Under the terms of the agreement, the loan was at 2 1/2% interest and payment would not begin until January 1, 1964. U.S. support for construction of the dam had been halted in 1956. The Vice President of the UAR, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer signed along with Soviet Ambassador to Egypt E.D. Kisaelev and the Chairman of the Soviet Committee for Foreign Economic Relations, Pyotr Nikitin.
  • Japan created its first universal health insurance program with the enactment of the National Health Care Act creating National Health Insurance (Japan) for persons not covered by Employees' Health Insurance.
  • Indonesia nationalized all Netherlands-owned companies that had been created during the colonial period of the Dutch East Indies, including those operating hospitals, plantations, electrical power, and oil exploration, drilling and refining, as President Sukarno issued 1958 Law No. 86.
  • A sudden storm off of the coast of Japan's Fukushima Prefecture sank seven fishing boats and killed 52 crew aboard, while 30 other boats from the Matsukawa Fisheries and the Harakama Fisheries were able to reach land safely. Another three ships sank in the Pacific Ocean storms elsewhere in Japan, and more than 50 people were missing.
  • Two deputies of the Congress of the Republic of Peru fought in an unsuccessful duel after Carlos Bisso challenged Victor Freundt Rosell to gunshots and 40 meters. Freundt had called Bisso "an ignoramus" during an angry debate over the government budget, prompting the argument. Meeting at a field in Lima, the two men fired at each other with a pistol and missed. They then agreed to try again from a distance of 30 meters and missed again. With only their pride wounded, the two politicians "decided to give up and shook hands."
  • Born:
  • *Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Prime Minister of Pakistan 2017 to 2018; in Murree, Punjab province
  • *Susur Lee, Hong Kong-born Canadian chef, in Hong Kong
  • *Emory Tate, U.S. chess player and the first African-American grandmaster; in Chicago
  • Died: Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, 71, Prime Minister of Albania 1941 to 1943 during the Axis occupation, known for his persecution of the Serbian Albanian minority

December 28, 1958 (Sunday)

December 29, 1958 (Monday)

December 30, 1958 (Tuesday)

December 31, 1958 (Wednesday)

  • The government of the Philippines issued a general amnesty for all remaining Japanese prisoners who had been convicted of war crimes.
  • At a New Year's Eve party for his cabinet and top government and military officials, Cuba's President Fulgencio Batista told his guests that he was going to leave the country before Fidel Castro's troops arrived. Batista and 40 family members and supporters boarded an airplane at 3:00 in the morning the next day at Camp Columbia and flew to the Dominican Republic, along with much of his fortune of $300 million that he had amassed from graft and payoffs.
  • Born:
  • *Bebe Neuwirth, American TV, stage and film actress, winner of two Emmy Awards for portraying "Lilith" on Cheers, and two Tony Awards for Sweet Charity and the musical Chicago; as Beatrice Neuwirth in Newark, New Jersey
  • *Defao, popular Congolese/Zairean singer; in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo
  • Died:
  • *Hermann Unger, 72, German composer
  • *Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, 57, Russian-born American pediatrician and promoter of psychoactive mushrooms for adults