The Week That Was — July 6 to July 13, 1969

A top 20 song that week

Crystal Blue Persuasion by Tommy James and the Shondells

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Some Events of the Week¹

• July 6 – One of the Soviet Central Television networks gave viewers “their first look at nude movies and sex magazines”, unprecedented in the network’s broadcasting and a shock to Russian society’s normally prudish attitudes toward sex. Western observers concluded that the late evening show was intended for propaganda purposes, and that “Its apparent aim was to put America in a bad light by shocking puritanical Russians”. Nude scenes from the recently produced off-Broadway play Oh! Calcutta! were shown, along with the recent film Che!, along with photographs of “sex magazine covers with unclad men and women” that “appeared to have been photographed through the windows of midtown bookshops in New York City”. The show’s narrator informed viewers that “The American public loves this.”
• July 7 – French joined English as one of the two official languages of Canada as the House of Commons approved the Official Languages Act on its third and final reading.
• July 8 – The first of 25,000 American troops to be withdrawn from the Vietnam War arrived at McCord Air Force Base in state of Washington, south of Seattle at 6:30 in the evening, with a C-141 transport plane, one of nine to land at McCord, arrived.
• July 10 –
  • At 8:00 p.m., the countdown began at five days, 13 hours and 32 minutes for the 9:32 a.m. launch on July 16 of the Apollo 11 mission.
  • The first parade for Vietnam War veterans took place, with the men of the 3rd Battalion, 60th Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division of the United States Army marching through Seattle to the cheers of supporters and the booing of demonstrators from the Seattle Anti-War Action Movement.
• July 11 – David Bowie’s song “Space Oddity” (about a fictional astronaut, “Major Tom”), was released by Philips Records in conjunction with the expected launch of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. The song had been recorded three weeks earlier.
• July 12 – Nearly four months after its cancellation by the American NBC TV network, Star Trek was introduced to British television viewers.
• July 13 – The Soviet Union launched the unmanned lunar spacecraft Luna 15, three days before the scheduled liftoff of the American Apollo 11 manned mission to the Moon, with the objective of performing a sample-return mission and bringing back the first lunar soil (a “Moon rock”) ahead of the United States.  Course corrections were done to place Luna 15 into lunar orbit at 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) altitude and on a different orbital plane than the Apollo 11 16.9 kilometres (10.5 mi) altitude above the lunar surface, and to land at the Mare Crisium after the American lunar module’s landing at the Mare Tranquillitatis to depart first. The Luna 15 lander crashed into the Moon at 15:50 UT, hours before the scheduled American lift off from the Moon..

1. July 1969. Wikipedia. most recent edit: July 9, 2019. Accessed July 09, 2019.