November 1961


The following events occurred in November 1961:

[November 1], 1961 (Wednesday)

[November 2], 1961 (Thursday)

  • Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Emir of Bahrain since 1942, died at the age of 67. At the time, the oil-rich Arab sheikdom was a protectorate of the United Kingdom. Salman's son, Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, became the new Emir and would lead the nation to independence in 1971, reigning as King of Bahrain until his death in 1999.
  • The cover of Oleg Penkovsky, who had passed along top secret Soviet information to American CIA agents operating in the USSR, was blown, after four KGB agents caught a CIA case officer in the act of picking up information that had been dropped off. The CIA man was expelled; the execution of Penkovsky would be announced on May 17, 1963.
  • The musical Kean, based on the life of 18th-century Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, opened at the Broadway Theater in New York City. It would close on January 20 after only 92 performances.
  • Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion received approval to form a new coalition government, with the Knesset approving a vote of confidence, 63–46.
  • Born: k.d. lang, Canadian singer-songwriter; in Consort, Alberta
  • Died:
  • *Harriet Bosse, 83, Swedish-Norwegian actress
  • *James Thurber, 66, American humorist

[November 3], 1961 (Friday)

  • In one of the more unusual finishes in pro football history, the Dallas Texans were trailing the Boston Patriots, 28–21, but had made it down to the one-yard line with one second left. Patriots fans rushed onto the field, and even after being held back by police, one spectator ran into the end zone on the final play, thwarting a pass to the Texans' Chris Burford from Cotton Davidson, then disappeared back into the crowd.
  • After returning from South Vietnam on a factfinding mission for President Kennedy, U.S. Army General Maxwell Taylor submitted a report proposing the commitment of 10,000 American combat troops to defend against the Communist Viet Cong. Kennedy eventually sent 25,000 troops to South Vietnam.
  • The UN General Assembly unanimously elected U Thant, the Ambassador from Burma, as acting Secretary General, to replace the late Dag Hammarskjöld. The other candidate for the position had been General Assembly President Mongi Slim of Tunisia. Thant would serve for two terms, ending in 1971.
  • U.S. Army Major General Edwin A. Walker resigned his commission, after having lost his command of a division in West Germany earlier in the year from controversial comments. Walker told reporters that "I must be free from the power of little men who, in the name of my country, punish loyal service to it."
  • United Artists announced the selection of Scottish actor Sean Connery to portray James Bond in the upcoming film Dr. No. Patrick McGoohan had turned down the role, and Roger Moore was unavailable due to his commitments on the TV show The Saint.
  • The White House Historical Association was created as a result of the efforts of U.S. First Lady Jackie Kennedy to fund the maintenance of the American presidential residence. Money was raised through the sales of the Association's book, The White House: An Historic Guide.
  • The United States Agency for International Development was established to coordinate American foreign aid.
  • Born: David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley, first child of Princess Margaret; at Clarence House, in London. At the time of his birth, he was fifth in line to the British throne, after his cousins Charles, Andrew, and Anne, and his mother.

[November 4], 1961 (Saturday)

[November 5], 1961 (Sunday)

  • A fire killed 106 schoolchildren and four teachers at the Soviet city of Elbarusovo (roughly 15 miles southeast of Novocheboksarsk in the Chuvash ASSR; the disaster would not be acknowledged until 1994, with sculptor Vladimir Nagornov's creation of a monument that was erected on the site. The fire was also acknowledged in news coverage following a 2009 fire at a nightclub in Perm.
  • The remains of Welsh chorus girl Mamie Stuart, who had disappeared in 1919, were located 42 years after her death. Three amateur cave explorers had gone into an abandoned lead mine at Brandy Cove in Wales, and found a sack protruding from a stone slab. Looking for a possible treasure, the three discovered human bones from a body that had been sawed into three pieces. A coroner's inquest concluded that the remains were those of Stuart, whose husband George Shotton could not be charged with murder because her body could not be found.
  • Tropical Storm Inga formed in the Gulf of Mexico, the first time a tropical storm has formed in the Gulf as late as November.
  • Died: Channing H. Tobias, 79, chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP from 1953 to 1960

[November 6], 1961 (Monday)

  • Heinz Felfe, West Germany's chief of counterintelligence for the Bundesnachrichtendienst, was arrested by his own agents. Felfe, a former Nazi, was discovered to have been passing secrets of the American CIA to the Soviet Union and to East Germany since 1959, revealing the identify of more than 100 CIA agents in Moscow.
  • The British freighter Cinn Keith exploded and sank in the Mediterranean Sea off of the coast of Tunisia, killing 62 of the 68 crewmen on board.
  • American actor Michael J. Pollard married actress Beth Howland.
  • Born : Florent Pagny, French singer and actor

[November 7], 1961 (Tuesday)

[November 8], 1961 (Wednesday)

  • The crash of Imperial Airlines Flight 201/8 killed 77 of the 79 people on board. The Lockheed L-049E Constellation, had been chartered to carry U.S. Army recruits from Baltimore, to basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, crashed while attempting an emergency landing at Richmond, Virginia. The plane caught fire after coming down in a wooded ravine at 9:24 p.m. Subsequent investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board determined that most of the people on board had survived the impact, but died of smoke inhalation after panicking in their rush toward the exits. The crew of the plane was blamed for allowing the fuel tank for one of the engines to empty, causing the stall; for failing to use an emergency valve to deploy a malfunctioning landing gear, which would have made an emergency landing possible at the airport; and for failing to instruct the passengers about what to do in the event of a crash. There was no attempt by the recruits to open any of the three emergency exits.
  • U.S. Amateur golf champion Jack Nicklaus, a 21-year-old senior at Ohio State University announced at a press conference that he was turning professional. Nicklaus would go on to win 19 major championships, including six Masters tournaments and six PGA Championships.
  • Born: Seán Haughey, Irish politician, Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1989 to 1990; in Raheny, County Dublin, as the son of future Taoiseach Charles Haughey and Maureen Haughey Lemass

[November 9], 1961 (Thursday)

[November 10], 1961 (Friday)

  • What would become the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Griswold v. Connecticut began nine days after Estelle Griswold of the Planned Parenthood League and Dr. C. Lee Buxton opened a clinic in New Haven, providing the means for birth control to patrons, in defiance of a Connecticut state law prohibiting the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception". Ms. Griswold and Dr. Buxton were arrested and would take their challenge to the law all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which would rule in 1965 that laws that infringed upon marital privacy were unconstitutional.
  • The Soviet city of Stalingrad, site of the Soviet defense of the Nazi invasion, was renamed Volgograd in honor of the Volga River, and in keeping with the Communist Party's reassessment of former leader Joseph Stalin. Two other cities named in honor of the dictator — Stalinsk in western Siberia, and Stalino in Ukraine — were renamed Novokuznetsk and Donetsk, respectively.
  • The classic novel Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, was first put on sale by Simon & Schuster, after favorable advance reviews in October. The book's title, which became a phrase to refer to a no-win situation, had originally been Catch-18, but was changed because of a 1961 novel by Leon Uris, Mila 18.
  • An Atlas missile, launched from the United States with a squirrel monkey on board, exploded 30 seconds after liftoff while being tested for a flight. The body of "Goliath", the passenger, was found in the wreckage two days later.

[November 11], 1961 (Saturday)

[November 12], 1961 (Sunday)

  • Retired USAF Captain Julian Harvey, operating the chartered yacht Bluebelle for the family of Wisconsin optometrist Dr. Arthur Duperrault, murdered the Dupperrault family by sinking the boat and escaping from it as it sank between the Bahamas and Florida. Rescuers found Harvey and the body of the youngest of the three Duperrault children, whom he had taken off the boat before it went down. Harvey thought he was the sole survivor of the seven persons on board, but four days later, the merchant ship Captain Theo spotted 11-year-old Terry Jo Duperrault, clinging to a cork raft. The next day, after learning that there was a survivor, Harvey checked into a Miami motel and killed himself. Investigators soon discovered that Harvey had taken out a $20,000 double-indemnity life insurance policy on his wife, and had almost gotten away with multiple murder.
  • Born: Nadia Comăneci, Romanian gymnast who became the first person to win a perfect score of 10 in Olympic gymnastics; gold medalist in 1976 and 1980; in Oneşti

[November 13], 1961 (Monday)

  • World-famous cellist Pablo Casals, who had fled his native Spain and vowed in 1938 not to perform in any nation that recognized the regime of Francisco Franco, played the cello at the request of the President and Mrs. Kennedy. The occasion was a state dinner at the White House in honor of Puerto Rico's Governor Luis Muñoz Marín. Casals, 84, had last performed at the White House 57 years earlier, for President Theodore Roosevelt on January 15, 1904.
  • Ten days after pressure blew the cap from a natural gas well in the Sahara Desert in Algeria, the "world's biggest fire" started, sending flames high. Firefighting expert Red Adair would extinguish the blaze on April 29, 1962, with of dynamite.
  • During heavy storms, the Norwegian fishing vessel Peder Vinje disappeared off Norway's north cape, with 13 men on board, while the Danish motorship Teddy sank in the Baltic Sea on the same evening, taking with it 12 of its 16 men.
  • Vladimir Semichastny succeeded Alexander Shelepin as head of the KGB. Semichastny would be replaced on May 18, 1967, by future Soviet head of state Yuri Andropov.
  • The airline MADAIR was created.
  • Born: Kim Polese, American inventor and computer entrepreneur; in Berkeley, California
  • Died: Herman Smitt Ingebretsen, 70, Norwegian politician who had led the Conservative Party, and was later imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp from 1943 to 1945.

[November 14], 1961 (Tuesday)

[November 15], 1961 (Wednesday)

[November 16], 1961 (Thursday)

[November 17], 1961 (Friday)

[November 18], 1961 (Saturday)

  • West German pediatrician Widukind Lenz of Hamburg delivered his findings at a meeting of the German Pediatric Society, making the link between the morning sickness pill thalidomide and phocomelia, a birth defect causing missing limbs. Dr. Lenz found that in 17 out of 20 cases of defects that he had investigated in Hamburg, the mothers had used the medicine, marketed there under the name Contergan. By contrast, there had been only one case of phocomelia out of 210,000 births in Hamburg between 1930 and 1955. A reporter at the meeting broke the story the next day in the German national Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag.
  • Eddie Arcaro, who had more wins in U.S. Classics than any other jockey, finished third in what would prove to be his final horse race, showing with Endymion in the Pimlico Futurity at Aqueduct Racetrack in New York City. Arcaro retired before the 1962 racing season, having ridden 24,092 races and winning 4,779 of them, as well as 807 second place and 3,302 third-place finishes. Finishing first in the race was Willie Shoemaker, who would later hold the records.
  • Barry Goldwater, U.S. Senator from Arizona, spoke out in Atlanta against President Kennedy and big government. Although he was a member of the NAACP, the man who would become the Republican nominee for president in 1964, said that states, rather than Washington, should enforce school desegregation, offering "I wouldn't like to see my party assume it is the role of the federal government to enforce integration of schools."
  • The funeral of longtime House Speaker Sam Rayburn was held in Bonham, Texas. Two former American Presidents and one future one joined President Kennedy sitting together at the services in the small northeast Texas town.
  • Born: Anthony Warlow, Australian opera singer; in Wollongong

[November 19], 1961 (Sunday)

[November 20], 1961 (Monday)

  • İsmet İnönü became the Prime Minister of Turkey, heading a government for the first time since 1950, when he had last served as President. İnönü had formed a coalition government with ministers from his own Republican People's Party and the Justice Party).
  • The last 27 members of the Trujillo family departed the Dominican Republic, where the relatives of the late Rafael Trujillo had ruled for 30 years. Rafael had been assassinated on May 30. Three of his brothers joined Rafael, Jr., who had left the previous day. The group departed on a chartered Pan American DC-6 to Miami from the soon to be renamed Dominican capital, Ciudad Trujillo.
  • Manned Spacecraft Center directed North American Aviation to proceed with Phase II-A of the Paraglider Development Program, an eight-month effort to develop the design concept of a paraglider landing system and to determine its optimal performance configuration., after a NASA working group had reviewed the problems posed by an orbital rendezvous, essential for future missions, and concluded that "a vigorous high priority rendezvous development effort must be undertaken immediately."

[November 21], 1961 (Tuesday)

  • The first revolving restaurant in the United States, "La Ronde", opened on the 23rd floor of the Ala Moana Building on 1441 Kapiolani Boulevard in Honolulu.

[November 22], 1961 (Wednesday)

[November 23], 1961 (Thursday)

  • Thalidomide was withdrawn from sale in West Germany, five days after Dr. Widukind Lenz told a medical conference about the deformities that it caused. According to a report six years later, pharmaceuticals in other nations withdrew the drug from the market "and within nine months the wave of malformations subsided", but that "estimates of the world-wide number of crippled babies run up to 6,500, the figures compiled a few years ago by an international parents association."
  • At the request of Dominican Republic President Joaquín Balaguer, the name of the capital was changed from Ciudad Trujillo after 35 years, by unanimous approval from the Dominican Congress. The city reverted to its former name of Santo Domingo.
  • Andy Warhol wrote gallerist Muriel Latow a check for $50, thought to have been payment for coming up with the idea of soup cans as subject matter for his art.
  • Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight 322 exploded shortly after takeoff from São Paulo, Brazil, killing all 40 passengers and the crew of 12.
  • Born: Merv Hughes, Australian cricketer, national team bowler from 1985 to 1994; in Euroa, Victoria
  • Died: Princess Elisabeth of Waldeck and Pyrmont, 89, member of German royalty before 1918

[November 24], 1961 (Friday)

[November 25], 1961 (Saturday)

[November 26], 1961 (Sunday)

[November 27], 1961 (Monday)

  • U.S. brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson; their cousin Mike Love; and their friend Al Jardine, who had created a band called "The Pendletones", saw the release of their first recorded song, "Surfin'". For the single, record distributor Russ Regen renamed the group, The Beach Boys, and their first song peaked at #75 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
  • Four days after the #2 Ohio State Buckeyes American football team had closed its season unbeaten, with a record of 8 wins and one tie and the championship of the Big Ten Conference, the faculty council at Ohio State University voted 28–25 to reverse the OSU Athletic Council's 6–4 decision to accept an invitation to the Rose Bowl. Objections to the post-season game, and a chance at the mythical national championship, were that OSU's academic prestige had been hurt by its image as "a football school".

[November 28], 1961 (Tuesday)

  • After Morocco's King Hassan II agreed to allow the Arab nation's Jewish minority to leave, the first group of 105 Jews was allowed to fly out to Israel. By the end of the year, 11,478 had left, and over the next two years, the 85,000 members of the community had emigrated.
  • U.S. President Kennedy dedicated the new CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. Kennedy praised outgoing Director Allen W. Dulles, saying, "Your successes are unheralded; your failures are trumpeted." John A. McCone would succeed Dulles the next day.
  • Nuclear test ban talks resumed in Geneva between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the USSR. Thirteen meetings would be held over the next two months.
  • Representatives of the Space and Information Systems Division of North American, Langley Research Center, Flight Research Center, and the Manned Spacecraft Center agreed that paraglider research and development would be oriented to the Mercury Mark II project.
  • Born:
  • *Tom Homan, American immigration official and political commentator, in West Carthage, New York**Florian Vijent, Dutch-Surinamese football goalkeeper; in Amsterdam

[November 29], 1961 (Wednesday)

  • The United States successfully placed a chimpanzee, Enos, into orbit around the Earth, clearing the way for the first American astronaut to break the pull of Earth's gravity. Enos lifted off from Cape Canaveral on board Mercury-Atlas 5 at 9:07 a.m. for the second and final orbital qualification of the spacecraft prior to crewed flight. Scheduled for three orbits, the spacecraft was returned to earth after two orbits due to the failure of a roll reaction jet and to the overheating of an inverter in the electrical system. Both of these difficulties could have been corrected had an astronaut been aboard. Enos was recovered safely at 12:28 p.m. in the Atlantic Ocean, southeast of Bermuda, by the. During the flight, the chimpanzee performed psychomotor duties and upon recovery was found to be in excellent physical condition. The flight was termed highly successful and the Mercury spacecraft well qualified to support crewed orbital flight. John Glenn was selected as the pilot for the first crewed orbital flight, although Donald "Deke" Slayton had been announced as the second choice after Glenn. Scott Carpenter was chosen as the backup if Glenn was unable to fly. The remaining astronauts concentrated their efforts on various engineering and operational groups of the Manned Spacecraft Center in preparation for the mission.
  • New York City's iconic Carnegie Hall hosted country music's legendary Grand Ole Opry for the first time in the history of either organization, in a benefit concert for the Musicians Aid Society. A sellout crowd of 2,700 New Yorkers came out to see Patsy Cline, Grandpa Jones, Minnie Pearl, Jim Reeves, Bill Monroe, Faron Young, Marty Robbins and The Jordanaires. Prior to the concert, theater critic and columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote in her syndicated gossip column, "Remember when Carnegie Hall was associated with MUSIC?"
  • The UK government published a white paper accepting most of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London.
  • Born: Gilberto Román, Mexican boxer, world super flyweight champion from 1986 to 1987; in Mexicali

[November 30], 1961 (Thursday)

  • U.S. President Kennedy authorized Operation Mongoose, the secret funding of Cuban groups to overthrow Cuba's new revolutionary socialist government led by prime minister Fidel Castro. Brigadier General Edward Lansdale was put in command of the project, which had 4,000 operatives on its payroll between 1961 and 1963.
  • In the UN Security Council, the Soviet Union vetoed Kuwait's application for United Nations membership, in alliance with Iraq. After the Arab League withdrew its forces from the sheikdom, the Security Council, including the USSR, approved Kuwait's membership.
  • All 15 people on Ansett-ANA Flight 325 were killed when the Vickers Viscount Type 720 turboprop broke up in mid-air turbulence and crashed into Botany Bay, shortly after taking off from Sydney on a flight to Canberra.
  • Atlas launch vehicle 109-D for the Mercury 6 mission of February 20, 1962, which would make John Glenn the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth, was delivered to Cape Canaveral.
  • Died: Winifred Lawson, 69, English opera and concert soprano