honor america day

Though intentionally apolitical nearly to the point of obfuscation and denial, the Fourth of July celebrations held in Washington, DC in 1970 branded as Honor America Day could not ultimately separate themselves from the milieu of war and social injustice and incivility that it tried to rise above.
Richard Nixon’s milquetoast and hardly objectionable gala, orchestrated by hotel magnate J Willard Marriott, secured universal and neutral celebrities like astronaut Frank Borman, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Glen Campbell, et al—though to pull back the curtain a bit all were at least ostensibly supportive of the expanding war in Vietnam that had crept into Laos and Cambodia and had resulted in massacres domestically, at least to the point where they could be reliably trusted not to turn on the hosts and protest.
Unlike the pomp and pageantry of Nürnburger rallies of recent years, this asymmetrically white and mainstream celebration was not meant to cause more division than was already baked into the ongoing tensions but inevitably attracted protests and counter-protests. Conservatives, neo-Nazis, members of the religious-right plus the so called Silent Majority clashed and the event ended in tear-gas.  

american top 40

On this day in 1970, the ABC Radio Network first broadcasted its three-hour block of syndicated programming hosted by radio personality and music historian Casey Kasem (*1932 – †2014), counting down the top of the domestic charts according to Billboard magazine.  Also a veteran voice-actor, Kasem also played the role of Norville “Shaggy” Rogers in the Scooby-Doo franchise throughout most of the incarnations of the characters. The show’s format—which included trivia, predictions, dedications and letters from listeners—was exported around the world and launching several spin-off ranking shows, a version of the Top 40 is still airing today.

out of the closet and into the street

A year to the day after the Stonewall uprising—with several other antecedents including systemic workplace discrimination among civil servants and work-camps for Cuba for homosexual men, the last Saturday of the month, the Chicago Gay Liberation organised the first Pride March from Washington Square Park up Michigan Avenue.
What was to become an annual ceremony was seen as a matriculation for younger members coming to terms with their identity to come together and celebrate a chain of tradition and struggle to understand the past and what was overcome. Other parades, put together by chapters of so-called homophile societies, soon followed across the country, including on the very next day in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia and quickly thereafter proliferated to many places worldwide.

this is my happening and it freaks me out!

Co-written by film critic Roger Ebert (*1942 – †2013) and director Russ Meyer (*1922 – †2004) and originally intended as a sequel to the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, the property’s earlier rejection lead the project to be revived as a satirical pastiche of the commercially successful though critically panned first instalment, the X-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls had its premiere in Los Angeles on this day in 1970.
Applying the same formula as the original screenplay, telling the heroes’ journey of three young women coming to Hollywood to seek fortune and fame—either finding redemption or not, its parody and exploits extend beyond the protagonists’ dreams and aspirations to lampoon conventions of show business and the creative industry in general. The musical melodrama was unflinching with the first screenings continuing even with the recent murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family who had starred in the original film, whose unwillingness to reprise her role—along with that of co-star Patty Duke—caused the development to shift direction in the first place. Lynn Carry, was led signer for the fictitious group the Carrie Nations and wrote some of the songs but no band members actually performed on screen. Below is the opening sequence, Come with the Gentle People, with the full movie plus supplemental material available at this link.

do a turn or return the twenty-five

Courtesy of our faithful chronicler, we learn that on this day—along with many others of good and great report—in 1970 Mungo Jerry (yes, named after the character from Cats) had their seminal summertime hit when the song topped the charts in the UK.

three-fourths of the several states

Inscribed as the nineteenth amendment to the US constitution nearly a half century before once it passed the federal legislature and the requisite threshold of state legislatures and having gone into effect nationwide, Louisiana, one of the three holdouts, held a vote, symbolic but meaningful nonetheless and having previously come out against it 1 July 1920, to affirm the extension of suffrage and enfranchisement to women (see previously here and here). North Carolina followed suit in May 1971, and Mississippi finally ratified the amendment in March 1984.

core values

Eventually reaching a depth of over twelve kilometres in 1989 when further drilling was suspended due to higher than expected temperatures, Soviet scientists commenced operations on the Kola Superdeep Borehole (Кольская сверхглубокая скважина) on the far northwestern peninsula on the Barents Sea on this day in 1970. Despite the impressive depth just barely surpassed by petroleum prospectors, the borehole only penetrated a third of the Earth’s crust—the thickness of the continental shelf ranging between thirty and seventy kilometers. Research continued until 1995 when the borewell was sealed and yielded surprising findings through this keyhole spelunking into the underground including the presence of water and fossil plankton some four miles down.

bikini state

Established on this day in 1970 and in use until 2006 before being replaced by a more general and public terror alert status system, the eponymous indicator—which the Ministry of Defence says is a random and meaningless choice by a computer (see also)—was similar to counterparts in other countries though levels were determined by the threat to the institution and organisation itself rather than a generalised contingency plan.
Starting with Code White, the least serious and thus never invoked during the history of the BIKINI state, meaning no information available / “situation stable,” black meaning the possibility of an act with targets being undefined and alternately the potential for civil unrest with public safety questionable, Black Special, an increased likelihood of attack, Amber, a substantiated threat with a specific target or a transition to war, and Red signifying that the UK is at war with attacks imminent. The public became acquainted with the scheme through the 1984 apocalyptic war drama Threads.

wir sind die roboter

Our friends over at Open Culture have assembled a nice retrospective appreciation of the recently departed Florian Schneider-Esleben (RIP, *1947)—co-founder of the formative and highly influential electronic group Kraftwerk, adding to a mounting tributes and eulogies from performers of all genres that owe a debt of gratitude to his music and vision. Much more at the links above.

tin soldiers and nixon coming

In order to quell protests began five days earlier in response to Richard Nixon’s expansive aerial bombing campaign into Cambodia, the US National Guard were deployed to the campus of Ohio State University’s Kent campus on this day in 1970 and opened fire on a group of unarmed demonstrators, killing four and severely wounding nine others.
The immediate aftermath of the massacre solidified anti-US sentiment world-wide for its invasion of Cambodia and prosecution of the Vietnam War in general, coverage precipitating massive protests and a student strike of over four million. Though the war would continue another four more years, it did so to the sharply critical accompaniment of songs inspired the event, including Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio”—possibly the greatest minstrel act telling of the revolution and also how it failed to materialise, and a host of other musicians, including the students Chrissie Hynde, who would go onto found The Pretenders, and her former bandmates (also fellow students), Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, who went on to establish Devo. The Pulitzer Prize winning photograph was taken by photojournalism student John Paul Filo of fourteen-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the dead body of twenty year student protester Jeffrey Miller.

future shock

First in print on this day in 1970, the ethnographical treatise by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler is summarised in the personal experience of too much change over too little time, arguing that society is undergoing an overwhelming and estranging structural change that engenders “shattering stress and disorientation.” Aside from introducing the concept of “information overload,” the book further limns the features of the Information Era to include a throw-away culture, decreasing ownership in favour of sharing and renting, redundancy and frequent career change and digital nomadism. In 1972, after its best-seller success, a documentary was produced, narrated by Orson Welles.

wipo

Successor United Nations speciality agency and successor to the Bureaux Internationaix Réunis pour la Protection de la Propriété Intellectuelle (BIRPI) established by the Berne and Paris Conventions in 1893, the World Intellectual Property Organisation entered into force on this day in 1970, the anniversary since enshrined annually as World Intellectual Property Day. The agency’s agenda is to harmonise international law regarding patent and copyright protection, managing treaties regarding access to knowledge and ensuring proper disposition of protected and registered materials throughout its lifecycle—from extension of trademarks to release into the public domain—arbitrating disputes, and monitoring the global status of said practises and protections.

the east is red one

On this day fifty years ago, carried aloft by a Changzheng (long march, CZ-1) rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre of Inner Mongolia, China became the world’s sixth space-faring nation (see previously, the UK launched Ariel 1 with American cooperation) with the Dongfanghong I (东方红一号, meaning the eponymous national anthem during the Cultural Revolution, 1966 - 1976) which the research vehicle broadcast continuously back to Earth (along with telemetry data) on an ultra-shortwave band during its planned twenty-day life span. Though the tune is used by broadcasters as an interval signal, like the pips, and remained popular with the public, it was dropped later in the decade with the ascension and reforms of Deng Xiaping in favour of the original “March of the Volunteers” for its associations with purges, imprisonment and factional strife. In May 2016, an updated version was circulating on the internet “The East is Red Again,” suggesting that Xi Jingping is the political heir of Mao Zedong, whom while the mentions of the songs went down a memory hole, Xi failed to refute the comparison.

we have met the enemy and he is us

First observed on this day fifty years ago and now celebrated in every polity around the globe as the largest secular holiday of them all, organisers in colleges and universities brought out roughly twenty million individuals into the spring sunshine to peaceful demonstrate for environmental reform.
The original impetus was a devastating oil spill of the coast of Santa Barbara, California that was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of marine creatures during the previous winter with city solemnly marking the one-year anniversary of that disaster in January with an Environmental Rights Day, further advancing the idea for a day of action generally for ecological responsibility and justice. For the occasion, illustrator Walt Kelly created an anti-pollution poster with his comic strip character declaiming the above quotation, parodying a missive sent by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (older brother of Commodore Matthew Perry) to General William Harrison on his victory, more confident and less contrite, in the Battle of Lake Erie—another environmental mess we are trying to remediate—“We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

dum spiro spero

With a total land area of some seventy-five kilometres—making the micronation larger than some recognised microsates—the Principality of Hutt River (originally called a province) was founded when Leonard Casley (*1925 - †2019) declared his farm to be an independent entity on this day five decades ago and seceded from Australia over a dispute concerning wheat quotas, banding together with four other families who worked the land of the floodplain, lodging a formal objection with the state’s governor.
One item of corres- pondence inadvertently addressed Casley as the “administrator of the Hutt River Province,” which Casley asserted as recognition of his sovereignty. Believing that styling himself as prince would legally shield him from charges of treason as well as levy punishment on those who would interfere with discharging his duties as leader, based on his reading of a thirteenth century law, the principality further claimed that outside of Australian jurisdiction, subjects were not required to pay Australian taxes. After a reign of forty-five years in 2017, Prince Leonard abdicated in favour of his son, Graeme. The principality has no legal status under Australian law and has no diplomatic representation. The title refers to the Principality’s motto—“While I breath, I hope.”—attributed to Andrew the Apostle.

avtomobilny

Sold domestically as the Zhiguli (Жигули, after the mountain range bordering the Volga) and branded as the “Lada” for export (see previously, the designation being an earlier variation for the region in reference to the pirate gangs encamped in the valleys), the automotive manufacturer introduced its VAZ-2101, the initialism standing for Volga Automotive Plant. With seven models in the series, some seventeen million cars were produced until the line was discontinued in 2012—manufacturing at an Egyptian factory continuing until 2014.

light and tuneful

Even as sporting events are being postponed for another time, we can still appreciate some of the great riveting power theme tunes for big tournaments and regular shows, like this first track by composer Sam Fonteyn (*1925 – †1991) for BBC Sport called Pop Looks Bach (1978)—whose countless works have also been sampled for the intros and incidental music for SpongeBob, Ren & Stimpy and Family Guy.
The second and third track are from Keith Mansfield with the former called Light and Tuneful (1970) and of course announces the Wimbledon Championships and the later the theme to sports round-up Grandstand (1958). Even if not a fan oneself, they still invoke a feeling of nostalgia, even if it was to signal to leave as televised sports coverage was about to start.

daisy-cutter

On this day in 1970, under the auspices of the programme Commando Vault to develop and deploy progressively more destructive conventional explosives in the war effort, the United States Army first dropped the BLU-82 (Bomb Live Unit) on troops in North Vietnam and Laos, so nicknamed the above as it was designed not for combat but to clear helicopter landing zones in dense jungle and due to its broad but shallow explosive capabilities, it did not leave a crater. The type and stronger iterations were used up until 2008 (the last live ammunition practise pictured) in various campaigns before being replaced by the MOAB.

大阪万博

On this day fifty years ago, the World’s Fair Expo ‘70 (previously here and here) held its opening ceremonies in Suita, Osaka Japan.
Orchestrated by architects and civil engineers Kenzo Tange and Uzo Nishiyama, the overarching theme was to be strength in diversity and plurality, and the event that lasted through September was staged as more of a celebration rather than technical exhibition though there were plenty of innovative displays among the pavilions, including early mobile telephony, the first showing of an IMAX film and a maglev train. The area will once again be the venue for the 2025 World’s Fair.

a kind of spouge

Dalton Sinclair Bishop (also known by his stage name Jackie “Manface” Opel), of Bridgetown, Barbados (*1937) had his promising career as a song-writer and performer tragically cut short this day in 1970, killed in an auto accident in his hometown. Though his discography and legacy with standards like Higher and Higher, You’re No Good, and When a Man Loves a Woman are in themselves unimpeachable, Opel is most famous for his invention of a genre of music called Spouge (sometimes spelled Spooge) as a fusion of ska and calypso styles that was very popular in the mid-1960s, both regionally and further abroad, influencing hymns, gospel music and sea-shanties amongst the diaspora. Instrumentation was originally limited to cow bell, bass guitar and steel drums but eventually expanded to trombones and trumpets—and even synthesizers with the style’s perennial rediscovery and homages.