The 1964 World’s Fair was the second such fair not to be approved of by the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE), the organisation in charge of such fairs. (The first was the previous New York World’s Fair, held in 1939.) There were a number of reasons for this, but the most prominent was the decision of the fair’s organising committee to charge rent to exhibitors.
Nonetheless, the Fair went ahead. Robert Moses, the city planner of New York City, was the main force behind it, and he recruited the architect Victor Gruen to design the site and the buildings (thus ensuring that the Gruen transfer would effect Fair-goers as well as mall-shoppers). Many of the world’s more prominent nations – members of the BIE – did not attend the Fair, but other nations from the developing world more than made up for them. By the time the World’s Fair closed its doors eighteen months later, 51 million visitors had visited.
It is one of the most controversial murders in recent history – less that it took place, but the more for how it is remembered.
Kitty Genovese was a 28 year old woman who worked as the night manager of Ev’s Eleventh Hour Sports Bar in Hollis and lived in nearby Kew Gardens (both located in the Queens area of New York City). A little after 3AM on the morning of March 13, 1964, she was attacked by Winston Moseley outside the building where she lived.
Mosely stabbed her repeatedly, and although she managed to escape him at first, he caught her again and stabbed her once more, this time puncturing her lung. Finally, he pursued her into the atrium of her building, where he raped her and stabbed her to death.
Infamously, it was claimed that there were 38 witnesses to the crime, all of whom did nothing, and the murder became one of the best known “proofs” of the apathy and callousness of big city life. In fact, the number was much smaller, several of them did call the police (although their accounts were incomplete) and the police did arrive soon after they were called. No one just watched (although it has been claimed that they did). Many of those who were witnesses heard only the screams of Genovese, and some of these were misinterpreted – only two witnesses actually saw any of the stabbings, one the first and one the last, and of these, the latter did call the police.
Genovese died of her wounds in the ambulance later that night, but her legacy – other than the urban myth version of her attack – is widespread. Reforms to police phone reporting procedures and neighbourhood watch programs were instituted, and a great deal of research into the “bystander effect” (sometimes even called the “Genovese syndrome”) has also taken place. Mosely remains in prison at the time of this writing (for this murder and two others).
Nelson Mandela became one of the leaders of the African National Congress in 1961, and spent the next few months constantly on the move, hiding out from the South African police as he led a bombing campaign as part of the anti-apartheid movement.
In 1962, he and nine other leaders of the ANC were captured and brought to trial for their actions against the state. Convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment on charges of treason, he was later tried again on separate charges two years later in what is now called the Rivonia Trial. Here, on June 12, 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Robben Island, where he would spend the next 18 years (of a total of 27 years he served).
Here, he became something of a martyr to his cause, and a cause celebre in other nations. His dignity and oratorical talent – along with his longevity and unimpeachable political credentials – made him the default leader of the ANC and his freedom became inextricable from the larger issues of political and racial freedom in South Africa. He was eventually pardoned and released in 1990, and later became President of South Africa in the post-apartheid era.
It seemed like an ordinary Good Friday in Alaska, until just after 5:30pm, March 27, 1964.
But then the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America (and at that time, the third most powerful in the world) struck. The quake’s epicenter was 78 miles east of Anchorage, in the ocean. The quake cause massive movements of land – some parts of Alaska were permanently raised 38 feet, others dropped 8 feet. Worse than the damage caused by the quake proper was the destruction and death of the tsunamis that it caused. In the end, a total of 131 people were killed by the quake, although all but 9 of those were killed by the tsunamis (and 16 of those were in Oregon or California), and the bill for the property damage ran to millions.
Hardest hit were Anchorage and Valdez, but many other Alaskan communities, especially coastal ones, suffered damage from the quake or tsunamis. Damage was also reported along the west coast of Canada and the United States, and effects of the quake were noticed as far away as Hawaii and Africa.
The Boston Strangler – assuming it was only one man – was a serial rapist and murderer who terrorised Boston from June 1962 and January 1964. He killed thirteen people, all of them single women (ranging in age from 19 to 85), and all but three of them he also sexually assaulted. Despite his nom du crime, not all of his victims were strangled.
Although a man named Albert De Salvo later confessed to and was convicted of the Strangler’s crimes, there remains some doubt that he was actually responsible for all of the crimes – although he knew many details police had not released to the public, there were some inconsistencies in his testimony. To date, however, no one else has been charged with any of the crimes attributed to the Boston Strangler.
Referenced in:
The Boston Strangler – Macabre
Midnight Rambler – The Rolling Stones
Dedicated to Albert De Salvo – Whitehouse
Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo) – Church of Misery
Born in 1928, Eric Allan Dolphy first came to prominence as a member of Miles Davis’ jazz quintet. He played bass clarinet, alto saxophone and flute. In the early Sixties, he became a recognized jazz leader himself. An exponent of free jazz, Dolphy’s improvisational style was so original and avant garde that he frequently transcended the boundaries of that form.
On June 28, he collapsed into a diabetic coma while in Berlin. Despite being rushed to hospital, he died the next day. A journalist once wrote of his music that it was “too out to be in and too in to be out” – a fitting epitath for a man who recognized few limits in his art.
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner became martyrs to the Civil Rights Movement when they were lynched in Philedelphia, Mississippi. The three had travelled to the town to investigate the burning of a church which had hosted civil rights events, a few days earlier.
Upon their arrival, they were arrested on trumped-up charges by Neshoba County deputee, Cecil Price. Price was himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and detained the three young men – Schwerner was 24, Chaney 21 and Goodman 20 – in the county police station for several hours, during which time they were not given their legally entitled phone calls, and callers to the station in search of them were told they were not there.
Once the Klan’s ambush was in place, Price freed the three men, then led them into it. All three were shot repeatedly, and Chaney, who was also black, was beaten severely. Their bodies were buried and their car hidden and burned.
The disappearance of the three led to a national outcry, and public sentiment swung dramatically towards favouring civil rights, allowing President Lyndon Johnson to push through landmark bills like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (signed into law less than a month later on July 2), and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Referenced in:
He Was My Brother – Simon & Garfunkel
Those Three are On My Mind – Pete Seeger
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