On January 2nd, 1969, Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch outbid Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press to take over the famous Fleet Street tabloid, the News of the World. Murdoch, who already controlled a major Australian newspaper, outmaneuvered Maxwell by teaming up with the Carr family, which owned 30% of the paper and felt Maxwell’s offer was far too low. “The shareholders have judged my record in Australia,” Murdoch said, “and they’re hoping I can do the same in this country. ”
The Saturday Evening Post had been around since 1821, and by the 1940s it was one of the most influential magazines in America, famous for Norman Rockwell’s illustrations of everyday American life on its covers.
But during the 1950s and 60s, television and shifting cultural tastes dragged the publication into decline. It lost $5 million in 1968. On January 10th, 1969, the company announced that the February 9th issue would be its last in the original run. Mickey Mantle was one of the most beloved players to ever wear a Yankees uniform.
In 1969, though, his batting average, slugging average, home runs, and runs scored all dropped. On March 1st, after 18 years in the majors, Mantle told the media he was done. “I feel as good as I ever did, but the last two or three years I haven’t been able to run as good as I used to or hit and throw,” he said. “The young kids are just getting a little bit too fast for me.
So I thought it was about time I quit. ”
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death, followed Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier in World War II who becomes unstuck in time. It was the first bestseller written by Kurt Vonnegut, and it blended his own biography with science fiction and anti-war themes. The novel was released to both praise and controversy.
“I think that we are doomed through eternity to repeat this program,” Vonnegut said. “Our lives are somewhat like pendulums that we start at birth and swing to death and back and forth throughout all eternity. ”
In the years since, it’s been banned in schools, removed from libraries, and burned. It’s also come to be widely considered one of the most enduring anti-war novels ever written.
On April 4th, CBS abruptly canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and replaced it with Hee Haw. Officially, the network claimed the move happened because the brothers failed to submit an episode in time for censors to review it before airing. But the real reason was likely their frequent political commentary, which touched on the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement and often proved controversial. Baseball is America’s pastime, and Canada is in North America.
So in 1969, baseball headed north. The first Canadian Major League Baseball team was the Montreal Expos, and on April 8th they played their first game against the Mets at Shea Stadium in New York. Jim “Mudcat” Grant started for the Expos, and the Mets started the seemingly unstoppable Tom Seaver. Grant only made it to the second inning, but the Expos still won 11 to 10.
The franchise would eventually fade. On September 29th, 2004, three hours before the Expos were set to play their 2,786th home game at Jerry Stadium, the world learned it would be their last. The team was moving to Washington D. C.
and rebranding as the Nationals. In 1969, comic actors John Cleese and Graham Chapman were offered their own show by the BBC. At the time, they were big fans of the comedy being done by their friends Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, and animator Terry Gilliam on the series Do Not Adjust Your Set. On May 11th, they all met up at Kashmir Tandoori Restaurant in Hampstead.
They hit it off and decided to join together as the comedy troupe Monty Python. Their show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, debuted on October 5th. On June 3rd, World Publishing Company released the children’s picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, written by former Madison Avenue ad man Eric Carle. The book follows a caterpillar who eats a variety of foods before turning into a butterfly.
That simple 224-word tale has since been translated into 62 languages and sold over 50 million copies. By 1969, public opinion in America had turned hard against the Vietnam War. On June 8th, President Nixon met with South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and announced that 25,000 American troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam in August, attributing the move to progress in training South Vietnamese forces to take over. In 1970, US casualties would be less than half of what they were in 1969, and Nixon would announce the withdrawal of 150,000 more troops.
The first Newport Pop Festival, held in Costa Mesa, California, in 1968, was the first concert ever to have more than 100,000 attendees. June 20th, 1969 brought the follow-up Newport 69 Festival, which drew over twice that many people. It featured artists like Ike and Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, and Jimi Hendrix. The show itself was a success, but hundreds of rioters outside the gates caused $50,000 in damage to nearby homes and businesses.
On June 22nd, actress Judy Garland, best known as Dorothy in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, was found dead of a barbiturate overdose in the bathroom of her London home. At the recommendation of her mother, the former child star had started taking pills for energy as young as 10 years old. MGM executives gave her amphetamines to liven her up in front of the cameras. She battled addiction for the rest of her life.
She was 47 years old. At 1:21 a. m. on June 28th, police raided the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
The inn, popular with the LGBT crowd, was used to raids, but they were usually tipped off in advance, and the raids typically happened on slow nights. This time there was no tip, and the place was packed. Police quickly lost control, and the situation became a riot. The Stonewall riot, which continued into a second night, is now considered a landmark moment in the gay rights movement.
A national monument commemorating the event was installed at the site in 2016. Around 11:15 p. m. on July 18th, Senator Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne left a party on Chappaquiddick Island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Along the way, the senator’s car skidded off a one-lane bridge and into a pond. Kennedy fled the scene and did not report the accident until 10:00 a. m. the next morning.
He later claimed he had tried to free Kopechne but failed. “I made immediate and repeated effort to save Mary Jo by diving into the strong and murky current,” he said. He subsequently pleaded guilty to leaving the scene. The incident effectively ended his dream of running for president.
On July 21st, the decade-long space race reached its climax when astronaut Neil Armstrong descended from Apollo 11 to the lunar surface, becoming the first human to walk on the moon. He delivered the now-famous line: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. ” The quote doesn’t exactly make sense, since man and mankind mean the same thing. According to Armstrong, he actually said “a man,” but a static glitch muted it out of the transmission.
In 1969, UCLA music teacher Gary Hinman became friends with an informal family led by a man named Charles Manson. Manson wrongly believed Hinman had inherited a fortune and wanted it. Several family members went to Hinman’s home and held him hostage for three days. Eventually, Manson himself arrived and slashed Hinman with a sword before ordering Bobby Beausoleil to kill him and use his blood to write “Political Piggy” on the wall.
With that, the Manson family murder spree, which would include the infamous Tate-LaBianca killings of August 9th, had begun. It would continue until December 1st and claim at least nine victims. As early as 1951, Walt Disney and his Imagineers wanted to build a Haunted Mansion. It was originally planned to stand across the street from the Disney studio.
Those plans changed after Disneyland opened in 1955. In 1961, visitors were given handbills advertising the mansion and claiming it would open in 1963. But due to Disney’s work on the New York World’s Fair and his subsequent death in 1966, only the exterior would be completed by then. The mansion wouldn’t open until August 9th, 1969.
With the possible exception of the moon landing, the most defining moment of the 1960s was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which began in Bethel, New York on August 15th. An audience of nearly 500,000 people braved unprecedented traffic jams and overcast skies to see performances from acts like Joan Baez, Santana, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Jimi Hendrix, who closed the show with his now iconic rendition of the national anthem. Given Woodstock’s place in pop culture, it was inevitable someone would try it again. A festival celebrating the show’s 25th anniversary was staged in 1994.
Then came Woodstock ’99, held in Rome, New York from July 22nd to 25th. It was a very different event. Headlined by bands like Metallica, Korn, and Limp Bizkit, it suffered from poor sanitation, looting, vandalism, arson, violence, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and three deaths. Now remembered as an all-out disaster, it proved to be the death of Woodstock festivals.
On September 1st, the Free Officers Movement, led by Arab nationalists in the Libyan army, staged a coup d’état to overthrow the nation’s monarch, King Idris the First, whose mismanagement of the government had made him unpopular. The bloodless coup, which became known as the El Fateh Revolution, was praised by the public, who embraced newly installed leader Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi would remain in power until his execution during an uprising in 2011. By 1969, the Beatles were falling apart.
The death of manager Brian Epstein and John Lennon’s growing heroin addiction left Paul McCartney in charge, and the others found him too pushy. At the same time, George Harrison was feeling increasingly stifled by Lennon and McCartney’s dominance, and the band’s business interests were a mess. The last recording session to feature all four took place on August 20th. A month later, on September 20th, John informed Paul and Ringo he was leaving the band.
The four Beatles would never play together again. On September 24th, eight anti-war activists charged with conspiracy and inciting violence at 1968’s Democratic National Convention went on trial in Chicago. The Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven after defendant Bobby Seale, who spent days bound, gagged, and chained to a chair by order of the judge, was given a mistrial. The remaining seven repeatedly disrupted the proceedings by chanting Hare Krishna and reading poems.
Five were convicted, and all, including lawyer William Kunstler, were held in contempt. An appeals court would later reverse those outcomes. The Weathermen were a militant student organization determined to overthrow the US government. To protest the violent police action at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the group called for four days of rage starting October 8th.
That evening, roughly 300 protesters, far fewer than expected, showed up to Chicago’s Lincoln Park. At 10:25 p. m. , they began a charge south, smashing windows as they went.
Police managed to quell the riot quickly, and by the time the Days of Rage were over, nearly 300 Weathermen, including all of their leaders, had been arrested. The 1969 World Series started on October 11th, with the Baltimore Orioles facing the New York Mets. Led by slugger Frank Robinson, the O’s dominated the regular season and looked all but unbeatable heading into the series. The Mets, however, had never finished higher than ninth place since joining the league in 1962.
They still pulled off one of the biggest upsets in baseball history, beating the O’s in five games and earning the nickname the Miracle Mets. On October 11th, doctoral student Paul Stine was driving his cab when a fare asked to be taken to San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood. When the cab arrived, the passenger fatally shot Stine in the head and stole his wallet and keys. Three teenagers got a clear look at the killer, who left two partial fingerprints in the cab before fleeing.
Despite being questioned by two police officers only blocks away, the killer managed to disappear. He later revealed to the media that he was the Zodiac. Despite evading capture, it would be his last confirmed murder. At 10:30 p.
m. on October 29th, UCLA student Charley Kline used a university computer to connect to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute using the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET. Kline tried to type the word login, but his system crashed after the first two letters. After programmer Bill Duvall made some adjustments, Kline tried again and successfully logged in.
Due to the earlier mishap, the first message successfully transmitted over ARPANET, one of the key forerunners of the internet, was “lo. ”
If you were in Columbus, Ohio on November 15th and wanted a burger, one of your options was a new place called Wendy’s. Founded by former KFC exec Dave Thomas, who named the franchise after his daughter, Wendy’s quickly became famous for its square hamburgers. According to Thomas, the angular patty stuck out of the bun, giving the impression of more meat.
It was clever, but it wasn’t his idea. Thomas based Wendy’s burgers on similar ones made by Kewpie Hamburgers in his hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Edson Arantes do Nascimento, also known as Pelé, is widely considered one of the greatest soccer players of all time. On November 19th, he faced Vasco da Gama at Rio’s Maracanã Stadium.
The only thing the media or the 100,000 fans in attendance cared about was the milestone the legendary Brazilian athlete was likely to hit that night. At 78 minutes into the game, it happened. Pelé casually kicked a penalty shot into the right corner of the net, good for the thousandth goal of his career. Created by Fujiko F.
Fujio and Fujiko A. Fujio, pen names of Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko, Doraemon is a Japanese manga that first appeared in December 1969. The series, published in six separate magazines simultaneously, followed Doraemon, a robot cat who travels back from the 22nd century to help schoolboy Nobita Nobi. It became a massive success, later adapted into a hit anime, a feature film, a musical, dozens of video games, and commercials featuring celebrities like Jean Reno and Bruce Willis.
California’s Altamont Speedway free festival on December 6th featured the Rolling Stones and drew roughly 300,000 attendees. The Stones hired the Hells Angels to work security and paid them in beer. As they got drunk, they became aggressive with fans, and things got out of control. It all came to a head when 18-year-old Meredith Hunter tried to get on stage with a revolver while the Stones were playing “Sympathy for the Devil.
” Hells Angel Alan Passaro spotted the gun, drew a knife, and stabbed Hunter 16 times, killing him instantly. Finally, on December 21st, the world received a sobering vision of things to come thanks to a New York Times story called “Scientists Caution on Changes in Climate as Result of Pollution. ” The article reported on a speech by the RAND Corporation’s J. O.
Fletcher, who claimed the Earth was warming and substantial environmental changes were already happening. According to Fletcher, natural processes were responsible for half of the change, but within another generation, man-made carbon dioxide would accelerate the problem. That was how 1969 ended. The Beatles were no more, America’s slow withdrawal from Vietnam had begun, the space race put a man on the moon, the hippie movement peaked at Woodstock, and Mickey Mantle rode off into the sunset.
Looking back, the 1960s turned out to be a chaotic showcase for all the best and worst humanity has to offer.
