July 1977


The following events occurred in July 1977:

July 1, 1977 (Friday)

  • The last Railway Mail Service mail train in the U.S. completed its run, bringing an end to almost 113 years of service. The final train departed New York on Thursday, June 30 and arrived in Washington DC the next morning, after which the service was permanently discontinued. At its height, the RMS had 30,000 employees, while only 68 were left when the final train made its delivery. Starting in the 1950s, jet aircraft had gradually replaced the slower method of shipping mail by train.
  • Uganda's dictator Idi Amin lifted restrictions that he had imposed on June 8, when he said that the remaining 240 British residents would not be allowed to leave the East African nation. The decision was announced on Radio Kampala.
  • By a single vote, a proposal failed in the U.S. Senate to end all funding for development of an American neutron bomb. A motion by Senator Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon lost, 42 to 43.
  • The U.S. Department of State announced that diplomatic relations with Cuba would be restored on September 1, when ten U.S. diplomats would be stationed in Havana and ten Cuban diplomats would open and office in Washington D.C.
  • Serial killer Patrick Kearney of Redondo Beach, California, sought for the murder of eight people, voluntarily turned himself in at the office of the Riverside County Sheriff.
  • The East African Community was dissolved.
  • Tennis star Virginia Wade became the last British woman to win the women's singles title at Wimbledon. It was her third, and final Grand Slam win in tennis. After losing the first set, 4–6, in the best-2-of-3 Wade defeated Betty Stöve, Wade won the second set, 6–3, and the deciding set, 6–1.
  • Born: Liv Tyler, American actress; in New York City

July 2, 1977 (Saturday)

  • In defiance of South Africa's apartheid laws of favored treatment for white citizens and of racial segregation, the Boy Scouts Association of South Africa combined its four branches into a single Boy Scouts of South Africa organization. The decision took place at the Scouting associations' first multiracial convention, the Quo Vadis Conference in Pietermaritzburg.
  • Björn Borg of Sweden won the men's singles title at Wimbledon, defeating Jimmy Connors of the U.S. in the best-3-of-5 series. Borg, who had won the 1976 Wimbledon title, lost the first and fourth match before defeating Connors in the deciding fifth, 3–6, 6–2, 6–1, 5-7 and 6–4.
  • Born: Carl Froch, British professional boxer, world super-middleweight champion for the WBC, IBF and WBA ; in Nottingham
  • Died:
  • *Vladimir Nabokov, 78, Russian-born American novelist known for Lolita. Nabokov had been writing a new novel, The Opposite of Laura and had completed the equivalent of 30 manuscript pages before becoming ill. His son Dmitri Nabokov would complete the manuscript more than 30 years later, and with the altered title of The Original of Laura, the book would be published in 2009 by Penguin Books and Knopf Publishing.
  • *Gert Potgieter, 47, South African operatic tenor known for his performances in the operas Peter Grimes, In die Droogte and La bohème, was killed in a car accident.

July 3, 1977 (Sunday)

  • The first MRI scan of a human being was performed with the use of magnetic resonance imaging by Dr. Raymond Damadian on Larry Minkoff, who had volunteered to be the test subject. The 5-hour process took place at the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Brooklyn. The imaging process would be perfected by Paul C. Lauterbur, a professor of chemistry at SUNY Stony Brook.
  • Turkey's Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit resigned after losing a vote of no confidence in his government. Members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey voted, 229 to 217, against Ecevit's Republican People's Party, which finished with the highest number of seats in the June 5 general election but fell short of a majority. After the vote, Ecevit drove to the presidential palace in Ankara to present his resignation to President Fahri Koruturk, but agreed to stay on as premier until a new government could be formed.
  • Pakistan's Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto received a warning from Major General K. M. Arif that Pakistan's military was planning a coup d'état, and was urged to negotiate with the opposition parties in the Pakistan National Alliance. Although Bhutto and the PNA leaders reached an agreement for new elections to be called, the coup would be carried out anyway.
  • A pair of hired assassins shot and killed Haiti's Ambassador to Brazil as he was leaving a bar at the Meridien Hotel in the beach resort of Salvador. The two gunmen, who shot Delorme Mehu in the back, told police that they had been hired by Louis Robert Makensie, Haiti's secretary to President Jean-Claude Duvalier, to carry out the assassination.
  • Soviet athlete Vladimir Yashchenko broke the world record for the high jump, clearing 7 feet, 7¾ inches, half an inch better than the mark of 7'7¼" set by Dwight Stones in 1976. Yashchenko's mark was set at the USSR-USA Junior track meet in Richmond, Virginia at the University of Richmond.
  • The championship of Mexico's top soccer football league, the Primera División de México, was won by the UNAM Pumas of Mexico City, 1 to 0 over the Leones Negros of Guadalajara after the two teams had played to a 0-0 draw on June 29 in the two game series.
  • A.C. Milan defeated Inter Milan, 2 to 0, to win the Coppa Italia final|Coppa Italia], the playoff tournament of Italy's premier soccer football league. A.C. Milan had finished in tenth place in the regular season, while Inter Milan had placed fourth.
  • Died: Gertrude Abercrombie, 68, American painter known as "the queen of the Bohemian artists"

July 4, 1977 (Monday)

July 5, 1977 (Tuesday)

  • General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq led a coup d'état to overthrow Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. The day before, Bhutto and other military chiefs had been guests at ceremonies at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad for the U.S. independence day. Bhutto, his cabinet ministers, and opposition leaders were placed in "temporary protective custody" and General Zia announced that a four-member military council would rule the Asian nation until free elections could be held in October. The elections, however, did not take place. Bhutto and the other government members arrested were released on July 28 so that they could participate in the promised October elections, but Bhutto would be arrested again later.
  • The Ugandan Army arrested playwright John Male, Uganda National Theatre director Dan Kintu, and an undersecretary of the Ugandan Ministry of Culture, Mark Sebuliba, after the staging of a play titled "The Office Is Empty". President Idi Amin inferred that the title of the play and the story was a reference to him, and the three men were charged with "insulting the president". After a trial by a military tribunal, Male, Kintu, and Sebuliba would be executed on July 24.

July 6, 1977 (Wednesday)

July 7, 1977 (Thursday)

  • Fan Yuanye, a pilot of China's People's Liberation Army Air Force veered off course after taking off from Jinjiang and became the first person to deliver Communist China's new Shenyang J-6 fighter to the West. Fan, the third Chinese PLAAF pilot to defect to Taiwan, and the first since 1965, brought secret documents with him and was promised a reward of 5,000 ounces worth of gold, worth US$698,400 at that time. Six other pilots would defect while flying the J-6 between 1979 and 1990.
  • The Marxist nation of Albania, led by Communist Party Chief Enver Hoxha, criticized "its only friend in the world", the People's Republic of China, as China worked on closer diplomatic ties with the United States. The official Communist Party newspaper, Zeri I Popullit, featured an editorial, apparently authored by Hoxha, that said that "'My enemy's enemy is my friend' cannot be applied when it is a matter of the two imperialist powers, the Soviet Union and the United States," adding that "The present theories about the so-called Third World and nonaligned countries are intended to curb the revolution and defend capitalism.". Three weeks later, Albania asked China to remove its military advisers from the Balkan nation.
  • The reggae album Two Sevens Clash by the Jamaican group Culture and its songwriter and lead vocalist Joseph Hill, was released to coincide with the date 7/7/77, in anticipation of a prediction by Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey that the date would be a time when chaos would ensue and wrongs would be righted. Although the prediction caused great concern in Jamaica, no unusual incidents occurred.
  • The governing body of the San Diego chapter Hells Angels Motorcycle Club gang voted unanimously to declare war on the rival Mongols Motorcycle Club gang in a dispute over territory in southern California. Over the summer, four Mongols members and a 15-year-old boy would be killed, and six others injured in shootings and bombings. In October, 32 members of the San Diego Hells Angels chapter would be arrested.

July 8, 1977 (Friday)

July 9, 1977 (Saturday)

July 10, 1977 (Sunday)

July 11, 1977 (Monday)

July 12, 1977 (Tuesday)

July 13, 1977 (Wednesday)

  • At 9:34 p.m., a blackout shut off electric in all five boroughs of New York City, the largest city in the U.S., and parts of suburban Westchester County. The failure of the Consolidated Edison Company system left an estimated 12,000,000 people in darkness and shut down the subway system, commuter trains, elevators and all electric appliances. The blackout, coming on one of the hottest and most humid nights of the summer, became an opportunity for looting, vandalism and arson until power was restored 25 hours later, and 3,377 people were arrested. By contrast, there were fewer than 100 arrests in the blackout of November 9, 1965.
  • Born: Kari Wahlgren, American voice actress; in Hoisington, Kansas
  • Died: Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, 67, Swedish aviator, humanitarian and mercenary, was killed in Ethiopia by Somali soldiers who overran the town of Gode during the Ogaden War. For 10 years after World War II, Colonel von Rosen commanded the Ethiopian Air Force at the request of Emperor Haile Selassie.

July 14, 1977 (Thursday)

  • In the largest anti-nuclear protest held in Spain, more than 150,000 demonstrators turned out in Bilbao against the Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant, being constructed in Bizkaia province, populated largely by Spain's Basque minority. Construction would be halted in 1982.
  • A U.S. Army Chinook CH-47 cargo helicopter with four people on board strayed across the Demilitarized Zone from South Korea and was shot down in North Korea. Three of the people on board were killed and a fourth was captured. The Chinook had departed from Pyongtaek and was bound for Gangneung, but veered northward despite warning shots fired from South Korean observation posts. After landing for the crew to inspect for possible damage, the helicopter flew southward again and was shot down inside North Korea. Two days later, North Korea freed the lone survivor, Chief Warrant Officer Glenn Schwanke, and released the bodies of the three other crew.
  • At least 96 coal miners were killed in Colombia, and 40 more were trapped underground, after an explosion at Villa Diana.
  • Sir John Kerr, who in 1975 had caused a major constitutional crisis by firing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, announced that he would be retiring as Governor-General of Australia effective December 8.
  • Born: Princess Victoria, heiress apparent to the throne of Sweden as the first child of King Carl XVI Gustaf; in Solna. The birth of Victoria Ingrid Alice Desiree of the House of Bernadotte marked "the first time a child was born to a reigning Swedish king and queen in 178 years, and the first time the delivery has taken place at a public hospital."

July 15, 1977 (Friday)

  • Mishaal bint Fahd Al Saud, 19, Saudi Arabian princess, great niece of King Khalid, was executed in public along with her lover, Khaled al Sha'er Muhalhal, after both were convicted of adultery. On instructions from her grandfather, Prince Muhammad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Princess Mishaal was shot to death outside of the Queen's Building in Jeddah, while Khaled Muhalhal was beheaded with a sword. Her death would be the subject of the 1980 British documentary Death of a Princess.
  • The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, signed by multiple nations in 1972, went into effect.
  • Donald Mackay, whose information to Australian police had led to the largest drug bust in the nation's history up to that time, disappeared in Griffith, New South Wales after having drinks with a group of friends at a hotel. He was returning to his van at the hotel parking lot when he was apparently assaulted, dragged away and shot three times. His body would never be found and would still be missing more than 45 years later.
  • Died: Konstantin Fedin, 85, Soviet Russian novelist and playwright known for ''Cities and Years''

July 16, 1977 (Saturday)

July 17, 1977 (Sunday)

  • In aerial combat between Ethiopia and Somalia, two Ethiopian F-5 fighters of the 9th Fighter Squadron were on patrol near Harer when they engaged with four Somali MiG-21 fighters. The Ethiopian F-5s shot down two of the Somali MiG-21s, while the other two MiGs collided in midair while attempting to avoid an air-to-air AIM-9B Sidewinder missile. During the summer, the Ethiopians would down 25 Somali jets with Sidewinder missiles.
  • South Korea's government freed 14 dissidents from jail, among the 170 arrested under an emergency decree from President Park Chung-hee. More than 150 other government opponents remained incarcerated, including former presidential candidate Kim Dae Jung. "Dissident Release 'a Trick,' Korea Opposition Says", Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1977, p. I-12
  • Born: Nina Kreutzmann Jørgensen, Greenlandic popular singer; in Godthåb, Greenland

July 18, 1977 (Monday)

  • Project Flower, a secret agreement between Israel and Iran for Israeli missiles to be supplied in exchange for Iranian oil, began as Iran's General Hassan Toufanian, the assistant Minister of War, arrived in Israel for meeting with Israel's Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann. In return for $280,000,000 worth of Iranian oil, Israel began developing anti-ship missiles similar to existing U.S. weapons.
  • Rhodesia's Prime Minister Ian Smith dissolved parliament and scheduled elections for August 31, limited to white residents only in the minority ruled African nation.
  • Protasio Montalvo Martin, the former Mayor of Cercedilla in Spain, near Madrid, emerged from his home after 38 years of hiding. Montalvo, a Socialist, had stayed in the basement of his house, coming up upstairs only occasionally to assist his wife in housework, but never ventured outside because he had been in fear of reprisal from the government of Francisco Franco.

July 19, 1977 (Tuesday)

July 20, 1977 (Wednesday)

July 21, 1977 (Thursday)

July 22, 1977 (Friday)

  • Deng Xiaoping, who had been Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China before being purged from the Chinese Communist Party in 1976, was restored to power nine months after the "Gang of Four" was expelled from power. The decision to restore Deng to the posts of Chief of Staff of the Chinese armed forces, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Vice Premier of the PRC, and Vice Chairman of the CCP Military Commission, was approved by the Central Committee of the CCP. Beijing television showed Deng, now the third-ranking Chinese leader, sitting on the right side of CCP Chairman Hua Guofeng and the second most powerful leader, Defense Minister Ye Jianying, sitting on Hua's left.
  • Spain's King Juan Carlos I opened the first session of the newly-elected Cortes Generales, the first parliament in Spain since 1936 to have been freely elected.
  • Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 90, with 103 people on board, narrowly averted a mid-air collision when the pilot put the Lockheed Electra into a sudden dive to avoid a collision with a small private plane. The steep dive of in seconds injured 26 passengers who were thrown from their seats, but PSA Flight 90 landed safely at Los Angeles at the end of its travel from South Lake Tahoe.
  • In Paris, the representatives of 23 Western nations agreed on a plan from the Council of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for the dumping of radioactive waste in the Earth's oceans, a practice already in effect in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, and soon to start in Japan.

July 23, 1977 (Saturday)

July 24, 1977 (Sunday)

  • In the U.S., representatives of the Comanche Nation and Ute nations signed a peace treaty in the small town of Ignacio, Colorado, capital of the Ute Indian Reservation">Ute people">Ute Indian Reservation. The verbal pact to make peace had been agreed upon in the 1860s between Quanah Parker of the Comanches and Sapiah of the Southern Utes, but ended in a gun battle with no conclusion.
  • Kuwait and Iraq announced that they were reopening the border between their two nations, closed since 1972.
  • An express train crashed into a passenger train that was stopped at the Jitan station in North Chungcheong province in South Korea, killing 19 people and injuring 125.
  • Born: Mehdi Mahdavikia, Iranian soccer football player with 111 caps for the Iran National team; in Shahr-e Ray

July 25, 1977 (Monday)

  • Neelam Sanjiva Reddy was sworn in as the sixth President of India for a five-year term. The inauguration took place after Reddy, the Speaker of the House of the Lok Sabha, was declared on July 21 to be elected without opposition because no other candidates had sought nomination. A vote scheduled for August 6 was declared unnecessary.
  • Egypt's President Anwar Sadat extended an invitation to all former Egyptian Jews to return home and pledged that the 100,000 who had moved away from Egypt since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 would be granted full citizenship and equal rights with other Egyptians. The announcement, which came in an interview in the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram, was similar to announcements made by Morocco, Iraq, Sudan and Syria, and came after the Palestine Liberation Organization had campaigned for "Oriental Jews"— those who had immigrated to Israel from Arab nations— to be given incentives to return to the Arab world.
  • Died: David Toro, 79, President of Bolivia from 1936 to 1937

July 26, 1977 (Tuesday)

  • The republics of Portugal and of Angola, a former Portuguese colony in Africa, reached an agreement for repatriation of black and white Angolan residents who had fled the country during the Angolan Civil War. A joint communique was issue from both Lisbon and Luanda pledging that the two countries would jointly request aid from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
  • Brazil's President and dictator, Ernesto Geisel, issued a decree banning political broadcasts from radio and television. The South American nation's election laws provided that the ruling party and the only authorized opposition party were each allowed two hours of free air time per year.
  • A forest fire that destroyed 200 homes in Montecito, California, began after a kite was blown by high winds into electrical power lines near the intersection of Coyote Road and Mountain Drive, and then spread by the winds into the unincorporated suburb of Santa Barbara. Stanley Roden, District Attorney for Santa Barbara County, California dismissed arson as a cause and revealed that it was an accident. "The strength of the wind caused the kite string handle to be wrested from the kite flier's hand," Roden said. "The handle wrapped itself around a cable TV wire directly below high tension wires; the force of the wind carried the kite and string forward so that a 16,000-volt line directly above the cable TV line arced with an adjacent high-tension wire." Roden said also that the kite-flyer was "a man in his early 20s" who was in seclusion outside of the city.
  • Born:
  • *Markwayne Mullin, American and Cherokee Nation citizen, U.S. Congressman 2013 to 2023 and U.S. Senator for Oklahoma since 2023, known also for being the fourth Native American to serve in the U.S. Senate and the first Cherokee U.S. senator since 1925; in Tulsa.
  • *Rebecca St. James, Australian Christian singer and 1999 Grammy Award winner; in Sydney

July 27, 1977 (Wednesday)

July 28, 1977 (Thursday)

  • Armed robbers in France committed what the newspaper France-Soir dubbed "the heaviest holdup in the world" after stopping a truck that was on its way from the French mint at Pessac to the Bank of France in Paris. The cargo was 17 million French francs, equivalent to US$3,540,000, but all of it was freshly-minted coins — 1-franc, 5-franc and 10-franc pieces. The French newspaper L'Aurore called the crime the robbery of "The Piggy Bank Truck" and asked the robbers in print, "Please write and tell us how on earth you are going to get rid of it. You can't buy a chateau, a car or even a pair of crocodile shoes with bags of change." In November, police arrested a man and a woman at their residence in Avon, Seine-et-Marne and found $270,000 worth of the missing coins
  • Peru's military ruler, President Francisco Morales Bermudez pledged in a nationally-televised address that general elections would be held in 1980 in order for Peru to make a transition to civilian government.
  • Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was released from a prison where he had been held in "protective custody" for more than three weeks after his July 5 overthrow as Prime Minister of Pakistan. Bhutto said upon being freed, "You will see as time passes that, no matter how the dice are loaded against me, the people are with me." Bhutto would be re-arrested on September 3 and charged with the murder of a political opponent, a crime for which he would later be convicted and executed.
  • Born: Manu Ginóbili, Argentine professional basketball player known for championship wins in the NBA, the EuroLeague and the Olympics; in Bahía Blanca

July 29, 1977 (Friday)

  • The first oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline arrived in Valdez, Alaska, at 1:02 in the morning, 50 days after the Alyeska Pipeline Service opened the pipeline on June 20 at Prudhoe Bay.
  • The Judge Retirement Age act took effect in Australia upon receiving royal assent and required that any federal judges appointed afterward would be put on retirement at age 70. Ray Northrop would be the last of the Australian federal judges exempt from mandatory retirement, and would step down in 1998 at the age of 73.

July 30, 1977 (Saturday)

July 31, 1977 (Sunday)

  • The "Southern Tagalog 10", 10 students at the University of the Philippines Los Baños were kidnapped after their activism against the martial law rule of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The bodies of three of the victims would be found later. The other seven were never seen again.
  • The Son of Sam serial killer in New York City claimed his final victims, shooting Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz while they sat in a car parked in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.
  • Died: Giuseppe Castellano, 83, Italian Army general who negotiated the surrender of Italy to the Allies in 1943