March 1980


The following events happened in '''March 1980'''

March 1, 1980 (Saturday)

March 2, 1980 (Sunday)

March 3, 1980 (Monday)

March 4, 1980 (Tuesday)

  • A conspiracy, led by Pakistani Army Major General Tajammul Hussain Malik, to assassinate Pakistan's President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq during the annual March 23 Pakistan Day Parade, was foiled. Malik and his co-conspirators were sentenced to life imprisonment, but would be released after Zia's death in 1988.
  • The first civilian killings known as the "Río Negro massacres" took place in a chapel of the Guatemala village of El Oratorio, when members of the Guatemalan Army shot seven people identified as opponents to the construction of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam. Located on the banks of the Rio Negro River in the Baja Verapaz Department, El Oratorio was one of the communities whose residents, mostly indigenous Maya peoples, the Achi, were forcibly relocated. According to a 2005 petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, as many as 5,000 people were killed over a period of two years, most notably on March 13, 1982, when 440 men, women and children were shot in the village of Río Negro.
  • The Walt Disney Company entered the video rental business for the first time, as VHS videotapes of 13 of its films were authorized for rental by the Fotomat film developing kiosks nationwide. Among the video rentals were Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, The Love Bug and the more recent Disney release, The Black Hole.
  • A little-known candidate, U.S. Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, won the Massachusetts primary election for the Republican Party nomination, ahead of former U.S. Representative George Bush and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Teddy Kennedy, the U.S. Senator for Massachusetts, won 66% of the vote in his home state with twice as many votes as U.S. President Carter. Anderson would later run as a third-party candidate for the U.S. presidency.
  • The West German TV mystery series, Anderland premiered on the ZDF television network as an entertaining and informative program for children. It would run for 45 episodes until December 14, 1986.
  • Born:
  • *Jeong Da-bin, South Korean TV actress
  • *Omar Bravo, Mexican soccer football forward and national team member, in Los Mochis
  • Died: Salim Lawzi, 57, Lebanese journalist and publisher of the weekly magazine Al Hawadeth, was found dead nine days after being kidnapped. He had probably died on February 28 or February 29.

March 5, 1980 (Wednesday)

  • Independent Sector, an American coalition of nonprofit organizations, foundations and corporate charities, was created by a merger of the Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations and the National Council of Philanthropy.
  • After losing in the New Hampshire Primary, Tennessee U.S. Senator Howard Baker became the first candidate to withdraw from the Republican race for the presidential nomination.
  • Beyond Westworld premiered on CBS but ran for only three episodes before being canceled. In its final showing on March 19, it finished 69th out of 69 shows in the Nielsen ratings. It was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards, for art direction and for makeup.
  • Born: William Owens, U.S. Navy SEAL, in Peoria, Illinois
  • Died:
  • *Jay Silverheels, 67, Mohawk American TV actor known for portraying Tonto in The Lone Ranger
  • *Marc Edmund Jones, 91, American astrologer

March 6, 1980 (Thursday)

  • Edwin H. Land, who had founded the Polaroid company that was a major manufacturer of cameras and film, and a pioneer in self-developing photographs, resigned as its CEO after the corporation's loss of money from attempting to market the Polavision video camera system. Among the problems with Polavision was that, although films could be seen soon after they had been made, the film could not be reused.
  • The Iranian students who had held the U.S. Embassy diplomats hostage since November announced that they were ready to turn their captives over to the control of Iran's government. The students then made new demands the following day.
  • Colombian terrorists, who had seized the Dominican Republic's Embassy and taken 15 ambassadors hostage, released one of their captives, Austrian Ambassador Edger Selzer, whose wife was terminally ill in Vienna.
  • Died:
  • *Barbara Brukalska, 80, Polish architect and exponent of functionalism
  • *Park Heung-ju, 40, was shot by a firing squad, becoming the first of the co-conspirators to be executed for the October 26 assassination of President Park Chung Hee. The other five would be hanged on May 24.

March 7, 1980 (Friday)

March 8, 1980 (Saturday)

  • The "Spring Rhythms Festival", also known as "Tbilisi-80", began in Tbilisi, capital of the Georgian SSR as the Soviet Union's first approved rock music festival and would run for nine consecutive days.
  • Iran began the break off diplomatic relations with neighboring Iraq, recalling its ambassador from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and expelling Iraq'a ambassador from Tehran. The next day, Iraq announced that Iran's ambassador in Baghdad, Mohammed Duaei, was persona non grata. Both nations allowed relations to continue at the chargé d'affaires level. The two nations would go to war on September 22.
  • Jaime Roldós, the President of Ecuador, announced his National Development Plan to advance the nation's economy over a period of years.
  • Busan Kyungsang College opened to students in Busan, South Korea. Its first graduation ceremony would be on February 13, 1982.
  • A group of 50,000 Brazilians gathered at the village of Casimiro de Abreu after a local farmer had told a national TV audience that a flying saucer from Jupiter would land on his farm at dawn. The saucer did not arrive as scheduled, and the crowd dispersed peacefully.
  • A plan to release the U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran was rejected by the Iranian students who were holding the diplomats hostage in Tehran.

March 9, 1980 (Sunday)

March 10, 1980 (Monday)

  • The Berber Spring, protests began against the government of Algeria by the Berber minority that makes up about one-fourth of Algeria's population, in their homeland, the Kabylia region on the northeast coast. The triggering event was the cancellation of a Kabyle language poetry reading by Mouloud Mammeri at the University of Tizi Ouzou.
  • Rádio e Televisão de Portugal, which had started TV broadcasting on March 7, 1957, introduced color television broadcasting to Portugal.
  • At Rancho Mirage, California, the National Football League held its annual meeting, where 22 of the NFL's 28 teams voted unanimously against allowing the Oakland Raiders to move to Los Angeles. The Raiders did not participate and the owners of five teams abstained. Team owner Al Davis announced that he reserved the right to ignore the vote and to move the team anyway, a move which would take place in 1982 after his suit against the league. In the years that followed the Oakland Raiders moved to Los Angeles, then back to Oakland in 1995, then to Las Vegas in 2020. Six of the other teams in 1980 would relocate, and others would threaten to do so unless they received concessions from the cities where they operated.
  • Died: Dr. Herman Tarnower, 69, American cardiologist and dietician famous for the high-protein, low-fat Scarsdale diet, was murdered by his former lover, school executive Jean Harris, who claimed that the death was an accident during her own suicide attempt

March 11, 1980 (Tuesday)

March 12, 1980 (Wednesday)

March 13, 1980 (Thursday)

  • In State of Indiana v. Ford Motor Company, a jury in Winamac, Indiana acquitted the automaker in the first criminal trial in the U.S. of a corporation for homicide. Ford Motor Company was found not guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of three teenaged females from a product defect in its Ford Pinto economy cars. On August 11, 1978, Judy Ulrich, her sister and her cousin had died in a fiery crash after her 1973 Ford Pinto economy car had been struck from behind by another car. Although a conviction would have carried a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine for each count, the evidence developed in the trial established Ford's knowledge of the defect in the design and placement of its gasoline tanks.
  • Died:
  • *Roland Symonette, 81, the first Premier of the Bahamas after it was granted self-government by the British
  • *Lillian Ngoyi, 68, South African black nationalist known as "the mother of black resistance"
  • *Nettie Rosenstein, 90, American fashion designer who popularized the little black dress style

March 14, 1980 (Friday)

  • All 87 people on board LOT Polish Airlines Flight 7, including the 14-member U.S. amateur boxing team and 42 citizens of Poland, were killed when the flight from New York crashed short of the runway during an emergency landing attempt at Warsaw. The Ilyushin Il-62 jet airliner had departed New York City the night before at 9:18. A turbine disc on the jet had failed, from metal fatigue, in the number 2 engine of the Ilyushin Il-62, causing the engine to fall apart. Debris then damaged the jet's rudder and its elevator control lines, causing it to dive into the ground from the runway at 11:14 in the morning local time The main part of the fuselage fell into a deep pond that had been frozen over.
  • The first round of voting for the Majlis, the 270-member Islamic Consultative Assembly that served as Iran's Parliament. A second round, for seats that had no candidate receiving 50% or more of the vote, took place on May 9.
  • The Grob G 109, manufactured by the West German Grob Aircraft Company as the first all-composite motor glider, flew for the first time.
  • U.S. President Carter signed legislation abolishing three federal government agencies whose existence was no longer necessary. The 188-year-old United States Assay Commission, formed in 1792 to supervise the testing of gold and silver in U.S. Mint coins, had served no purpose after the passage of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 and the Coinage Act of 1965, and as Carter noted, "the United States no longer produces gold or silver coins of equivalent value." The U.S. Marine Corps Memorial Commission had continued to exist even after it had completed its plan to create a plan for a memorial in Chicago's Grant Park, and the Low-Emission Vehicle Certification Board, created to certify low-emission federal government vehicles, had been superseded by the Electric and Hybrid Research & Development Demonstration Act of 1976.
  • Died:
  • *Anna Jantar, 29, Polish singer, in the crash of LOT Flight 007 on her way home from her U.S. tour
  • *Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, 52, Spanish naturalist and TV show host, in a plane crash
  • *Mohammad Hatta, 77, Prime Minister of Indonesia from 1948 to 1949 and the nation's first Vice President
  • *Allard K. Lowenstein, 51, political activist and former U.S. Congressman, was murdered in his office by a mentally ill friend.

March 15, 1980 (Saturday)

  • The Boston Globe inadvertently ran one of the most famous headline mistakes in U.S. history, when an editorial on economic proposals by U.S. president Jimmy Carter, supposed to be titled "All Must Share the Burden", carried the headline "Mush from the Wimp" instead in its early edition. Globe editorial writer Kirk Scharfenberg, who would later become the deputy managing editor, took the blame for the mistake and would note later, "I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication. It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day." The Globe corrected the blunder in the second print run of the day, and apologized three days later with a statement at the bottom of page 14 of its Tuesday editorial page, writing "The first editions of last Saturday's Globe carried a headline on the lead editorial that was inappropriate and not intended for publication. In later editions the editorial, which supported President Carter's new initiatives on the economy, was titled, 'All must share the burden.'"
  • Former U.S. President Gerald R. Ford announced that he would not run for the Republican Party nomination for the 1980 U.S. presidential election, reversing earlier comments that he didn't believe that front-runner Ronald Reagan would be able to defeat President Carter.
  • The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was launched from the shipyard at Newport News, Virginia. For the first time since 1900, the U.S. Navy named a vessel for a living person, and retired U.S. Congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, 96 years old, was present for the launch. During his Congressional tenure from 1914 to 1965, Vinson had successfully marshaled support for building new warships for the Navy with the Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934, the Naval Act of 1938 and the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940.
  • The Circle K Sunkus chain of Japanese convenience stores began with the opening of the first "Circle K" store in Japan, located in the Tenpaku-ku ward of the city of Nagoya. Four months later, on July 23, the first "Sunkus" store opened at the Aoba-ku ward of Sendai. The chains would merge in 2004 as Circle K Sunkus and would be rebranded in 2016 as part of the FamilyMart chain.
  • Voters in the Penobscot Indian Nation voted, 234 to 113, to accept a proposed settlement of $81,500,000 to drop further claims for 12,500,000 acres of land, almost two-thirds of the of land in the U.S. state of Maine.
  • In an upset victory, Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. defeated defending champion Nottingham Forest F.C., 1 to 0, before a crowd of 96,527 spectators at Wembley Stadium to win The Football League Cup championship. Nottingham Forest was the defending European Cup champion and was expected to easily win its third consecutive League Cup. Andy Gray scored the winning goal in the 67th minute, after Nottingham goalkeeper Peter Shilton collided with his teammate, David Needham.
  • Died: Abram Grushko, 61, Soviet Russian painter

March 16, 1980 (Sunday)

  • Closed captioning was first shown on a television program in the United States. The first program to use captioning was Disney's Wonderful World on NBC at 7:00 p.m., a showing of the 1963 film Son of Flubber. ABC debuted captioning with the ABC Sunday Night Movie. The ABC and NBC networks initially offered five hours per week each of captioned programming, and the PBS network began with four, with plans to increase to 10½ by July. The CBS network elected not to participate, arguing that the decoding equipment would soon become obsolete.
  • Only seven days after taking office as the first woman Mayor of St. Albans, Vermont, Janet L. Smith was fatally wounded by a handyman who lived in the Smith house. Smith, the only female mayor in the state of Vermont, died the next day after several hours of surgery.
  • Died: Neville D'Souza, 47, India soccer football team striker in the 1956 Olympic Games; from a brain hemorrhage.

March 17, 1980 (Monday)

March 18, 1980 (Tuesday)

March 19, 1980 (Wednesday)

March 20, 1980 (Thursday)

March 21, 1980 (Friday)

  • The U.S. television show Dallas set up a mystery that would captivate TV audiences around the world with its final episode of the season, raising the question of "Who shot J.R.?". The episode itself, which set a precedent for cliffhanger endings for a TV season, was called "A House Divided". For the next eight months, viewers debated the answer to the mystery of who shot the star character of Dallas, J. R. Ewing, Brazilian soccer football midfielder and national team member; in Porto Alegre
  • *Deryck Whibley, Canadian-born American rock musician, frontman of Sum 41, in Scarborough, Ontario
  • Died: Marcel Boussac, 91, French textile magnate and multimillionaire

March 22, 1980 (Saturday)

March 23, 1980 (Sunday)

  • After nearly 10 months of leaking petroleum into the Gulf of Mexico, the Ixtoc I oil spill was finally capped by engineers of Petróleos Mexicanos, Mexico's government-operated oil company, who sealed the well by pouring gallons of cement into it, under pressure, to form three plugs. Two relief wells added to the main well had lowered the oil pressure enough by May 21 to begin the final three deposits to create cement plugs, starting at 4:00 in the afternoon. The first batch of 200 sacks of wet cement was pushed to a depth of below the sea floor and hardened into a plug. After a second plug was sent to a depth of, the third and final plug was poured shortly before midnight to a depth of forming a mass long. The offshore well had been spilling oil since a blowout on June 3, 1979, and placed 3.3 million barrels of oil, the largest amount in history up to that time.
  • The Totonero scandal, a match-fixing scheme implicating 27 players in Italy's top two levels of professional soccer football, was revealed partway through the season after two investors filed a complaint with the national prosecutor. Eleven players of defending Italian Serie A champion, A.C. Milan were arrested in their locker room after their 1–0 win over visiting Torino, along with the club president, Felice Colombo. Four players for S.S. Lazio were arrested at the end of the matches played that day. Eight of the 16 Serie A clubs were implicated, and although the accused players were acquitted, five of the Serie A teams were penalized at the end of the 1979–1980 season. Notably, A.C. Milan were relegated to the second-division Serie B, a fate normally reserved for the three teams with the worst records. Lazio, finishing 13th out of the 16 teams, were demoted as well.
  • Voters in Sweden chose the slowest of three options for the phasing out of nuclear power in a non-binding referendum that attracted more than 75% of the eligible electorate.
  • With only two nations in the world ready to bring him within their borders, the former Shah of Iran ended 100 days of exile on Panama's Contadora Island and flew with his family to Egypt in order to receive surgery. The Shah departed Panama City on a chartered DC-8 jetliner operated by Evergreen International Airlines, a contractor for the American CIA. Since leaving Iran on January 16, 1979, the Shah had lived in Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States and, since December 15, in Panama. The Shah's arrival in New York City on October 22 had triggered the Iran Hostage Crisis.
  • Single candidate elections were held in Poland for approval of the 460 seats in the Sejm, Poland's parliament, but for the first time, secret balloting was allowed. "A surprisingly high proportion" of voters chose the option of going into curtained booths in order to strike out the names of candidates they didn't want, although, as a UPI report noted, "The orthodox thing to do was to drop the slips without any changes into a ballot box." The Polish United Workers' Party, the nation's Communist Party led by First Secretary Edward Gierek, had allotted itself 261 seats, while approving the candidates for other 169 seats for the United People's Party and the Democratic Alliance.
  • The Old Dominion University Lady Monarchs defeated the University of Tennessee Lady Volunteers, 68 to 53, to win the women's college basketball championship, sponsored since 1972 by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.
  • Born: Russell Howard, English comedian, TV host and actor; in Bristol

March 24, 1980 (Monday)

March 25, 1980 (Tuesday)

  • Delegates of the British Olympic Association voted to send a team to the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, declining to joining the boycott of the games.
  • U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy won his first challenge against President Carter for the Democratic Party nomination, winning the primary elections in New York and Connecticut.
  • The unmanned Soviet transport spacecraft Soyuz T-1 returned to Earth, two days after being undocked by remote control from the Salyut 6 space station. T-1 had docked successfully with the station on December 19.
  • Died:
  • *Erminio Macario, 77, Italian comedian and film actor
  • *Walter Susskind, 66, Czech-born British conductor
  • *James Wright, 52, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet
  • *Milton H. Erickson, 78, American psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis
  • *Roland Barthes, 64, French philosopher and pioneer in semiology; 30 days after being struck by a van in Paris

March 26, 1980 (Wednesday)

  • An attempt by the three Hunt brothers to own most of the world's silver failed after Texas billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt announced in Paris that he and four investors planned to issue bonds for sale, backed by their combined holdings of 200 million ounces of silver. Hunt's partners in the venture were introduced as Prince Faysal Ben Abdallah al-Saud, Sheik Mohammed al Amoudi and Mahmoud Fustok of Saudi Arabia, and Naji Nahas of Brazil. The next day, the price of silver dropped steeply when the London Commodities Exchange opened, and fell to $10.50 at the New York Comex.
  • Born: Sammy Flex, Ghanaian journalist, newspaper editor and TV show host.
  • Died: Roland Barthes, 64, French semiotics pioneer

March 27, 1980 (Thursday)

  • A landslide buried the village of Ayvazhacı in Turkey's Kayseri Province, killing at least 64 people.
  • The Eikefet Tunnel, at the time the longest road tunnel in Norway, was opened to motorists on Norway's highway E39. Rated as one of the most unsafe tunnels in Europe, the route was bored through Mount Kjellrusen between the villages of Eikefet and Odnåstjørni.
  • Thirty-one miners were killed in the plunge of an elevator, more than a mile down a shaft at South Africa's Vaal Reefs gold mine. The group— 28 black and three white miners— had boarded a double decker elevator cage and were being lowered when one of the supporting cables broke. The elevator plunged roughly 6,200 feet — — killing everyone on board, and the high cage was compressed to a height of less than on impact. While the death toll was originally reported as 23, 31 bodies were identified from the wreckage.
  • The first Aston Martin Bulldog, intended to be one of the fastest production cars ever, was introduced to the public at the English village of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. Although the Aston Martin company planned to build 25 of the vehicles, the company would shelve the project in 1981. The company claimed that the car was capable of a speed of. In time trials in 1979, it had been timed at.
  • The Alexander L. Kielland, an accommodation platform built offshore as living quarters for oil company employees working on the Edda 2/7C oil rig, collapsed during a storm in the North Sea, killing 123 of the 212 people there. At 6:30 in the evening local time, the rig tilted 30° as five of the six anchor cables on one of its supports, trapping many of the workmen in their rooms, in a dining hall and in a theater where some were watching a film. Over the next 23 minutes, the rig continued to tilt until the final cable snapped. The disaster would be traced to metal fatigue in one of the six bracings and a crack that had started from "a 14-inch hole drilled in the brace to accommodate a hydrophone."
  • The Silver Thursday market crash occurred in the United States commodity markets after brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt, William Herbert Hunt, and Lamar Hunt attempted to corner the silver market, after months of buying and selling using futures to pay a particular price for silver on a future date. The day before, the Tiffany's jewelry store chain took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, condemning the Hunt Brothers and stating, "We think it is unconscionable for anyone to hoard several billion, yes billion, dollars' worth of silver and thus drive the price up so high that others must pay artificially high prices for articles made of silver."

March 28, 1980 (Friday)

  • The Talpiot Tomb, claimed in a 2007 documentary to be "The Lost Tomb of Jesus", was discovered by construction workers who were excavating a site to build an apartment complex in East Jerusalem. Identified by archaeologists as a Jewish family tomb that existed during the time of the Second Temple, the tomb had six ossuary caskets, including one that appeared to be inscribed with the name "Yeshua bar Yehosef", a reference to "Jesus, son of Joseph".
  • A stolen Havana transit bus crashed through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Cuba, carrying a group of Cubans anxious to flee the country and starting the events that would lead to the Mariel Boatlift. By April 1, there were 24 asylum-seekers on the embassy grounds after a second bus crashed the embassy and a Cuban guard was killed. After the Cuban government withdrew its protection on April 4, over 10,000 Cuban citizens occupied the embassy's grounds and the Cuban government announced that it would grant diplomatic protection to the occupiers and would allow them to peacefully emigrate.
  • Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran, received cancer surgery in Egypt, delayed for several months after he was ordered to leave the United States and a week after Houston surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey had concluded that facilities in Panama were inadequate. Upon removing the Shah's cancerous spleen, surgeons found that the cancer had spread to his liver. The Shah died four months later, on July 27.
  • The Jetstream 31, a turboprop airliner built by the nationalized British Aerospace company's subsidiary, Scottish Aviation, made its first flight.
  • "Strawberry Shortcake", a cartoon character originally invented in 1973 by the American Greetings card company and the Kenner toy company to sell merchandise, was introduced to young girls with "The World of Strawberry Shortcake", a 30-minute syndicated program, seen on 90 U.S. television stations. The cartoon was popular enough that five sequels, each telecast in the spring, were produced, followed by a television series.
  • Died:
  • *Dick Haymes, 61, Argentine-born American actor and singer
  • *Helena Bochořáková-Dittrichová, 85, Czech illustrator and graphic novelist

March 29, 1980 (Saturday)

  • Iraq and Iran fought their first border skirmish, ultimately leading to the eight-year long Iran-Iraq War. Iraq's state-operated Radio Baghdad gave no details but said that Iranian aggression took place at an Iraqi border post and that, after encountering resistance, the Iranians "fled with their tails between their legs."
  • Pars News Agency, the state-controlled Iranian press organization, alleged that U.S. President Carter had offered to apologize to Iran in return for the release of the U.S. Embassy hostages, and released the text of what it said was a "text of a conciliatory message" sent on March 26 from President Carter to the Ayatollah Khomeini, and read a text over state radio at 9:00 in the evening local time. According to the text, Carter said that "a very sensitive international situation... made us all make mistakes in the past" and that "The great advantage of American democracy is that it always could recognize its mistakes or condemn them." White House Press Secretary Jody Powell told reporters, "The president has sent no message to Khomeini. Period."
  • Born: Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, Crown Prince of Jordan from 1999 to 2004 until his status was rescinded by his older half-brother King Abdullah II; in Amman
  • Died:
  • *Annunzio Paolo Mantovani, 74, Italian-born British classical composer and recording artist known simply as "Mantovani"
  • *Vicente López Carril, 37, Italian cyclist who won various stages of several Grand Tours ; from a heart attack suspected to be a consequence of performance-enhancing drug use

March 30, 1980 (Sunday)

  • The Tony Award winning play Children of a Lesser God, the first major theatrical production to feature a deaf actor in the leading role, began a successful run on Broadway. Critics' reactions were mixed. Walter Kerr of the New York Times called the play "the season's unexpected find" while Douglas Watt of New York's Daily News said of author Mark Medoff's approach to the problems of the deaf, "His concern and understanding are clear, but he hasn't bothered to present their story in any but the most elementary dramatic terms. Instead, he has relied on our obvious sympathies and the novelty of his subject to carry the evening..."
  • Delegates of the Canadian Olympic Committee voted to send a team to the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, declining to joining the boycott of the games.
  • Syria changed its flag for the fifth time in 34 years since becoming independent in 1946, after changes made in 1958, 1961, 1963 and 1972. The sixth flag, which was a return to the flag it had adopted in 1958, had remained the state's banner for 44 years until the collapse of the Ba'athist Syria in 2024.
  • For the first time, West Germany and East Germany simultaneously set their clocks ahead one hour in the spring to observe for Central European Summer Time. West Germany's government had voted in 1978 to reintroduce summer time, but had waited until an agreement could be reached with East Germany on simultaneous implementation.
  • Died:
  • *Ton Duc Thang, 91, the oldest president in the world. He had succeeded Ho Chi Minh as President of North Vietnam in 1969, and unified Vietnam from 1976 onward. Ton was succeeded by Vice President Nguyen Huu Tho, who had administered South Vietnam after the conquest of that nation to by North Vietnam in 1975.
  • *David Sharpe, 70, American film actor and stuntman

March 31, 1980 (Monday)