Announcer: Back home, smokers got some non unexpected bad news. Cigarette smoking is not only bad for you, it can take years off your life. The Surgeon General of the United States, pipe smoking Luther Terry, released statistics showing smokers die younger than non smokers. Cigarette sales dropped for a few weeks.
In March, Dallas Night Club owner Jack Ruby was convicted for the nationally televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, alleged assassin of President Kennedy. Later the Warren Commission reported that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the young President, and that Ruby was also a loner in killing Oswald.
On March 27th, an earthquake struck Alaska and isolated the 49th state for hours. As word came filtering through, the toll ran to 26 dead and 103 missing. The tidal waved spawned by the quake swept down the Pacific Coast, 26 more were either dead or missing.
On April 22nd the New York Worlds Fair opened for a two summer run.
In June Senator Edward Kennedy was injured in a light plane crash in Massachusetts. He spent six months in the hospital with a broken back. Also in June, Jim Bunning of the Philadelphia Phillies pitched a perfect game. The first in 84 years of National League Baseball.
On July 16th an off duty policeman shot and killed a Negro youth on the streets of New York City. That weekend, thousands of Negroes poured into the streets for 5 days of rioting.
Police fired thousands of rounds of ammunition into the air to control the mob, rocks, bottles, bricks and garbage rained down in the streets of Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant in section of Brooklyn. Before the shell casing were picked off the streets, three days of rioting broke out in the Negro section of Rochester in Upstate New York. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania followed in suite.
On July 3rd, Ranger 7, a spaceship launch from Cape Kennedy three days earlier started taking pictures of the moon’s surface.
Speaker: "10 Seconds, excellent signals, receiving pictures to the end. Impact has occurred."
Pie Chamberlain: It sent back thousands of clear close up pictures. On August 2nd, PT boats identified as North Vietnamese, attacked US Destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next day President Johnson gave the word to shoot back if attacked in the future. Another attack by PT boats in the Gulf, brought retaliation by US Planes, which hit 25 PT boats and their bases in North Vietnam.
The bodies of three missing Civil Rights workers were found, August 4th, in a red clayed dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi, by Federal agents. All three men had been shot. Another Civil Rights worker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was honored for his leadership in a non violent Civil Rights struggle. He accepted the Nobel peace prize for 1964 in Oslo, Norway.
Martin Luther King: “I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind”
