A Popular Song From That Week
Love Theme from “Romeo and Juliet” by Henry Mancini
Some Events of the Week1
- June 22
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- The Cuyahoga River at Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire after an oil slick floating on the river ignited. Factories along the Cuyahoga had regularly dumped their waste products into the waters for decades. Before it was extinguished, the floating blaze burned two wooden railroad trestles and warped the tracks, with an estimated repair cost of $50,000. Cleveland Mayor Carl B. Stokes, citing that the city of Cleveland had no legal jurisdiction over the river, called upon the state of Ohio to take action against the licenses of industries that polluted the river.
- Actress and singer Judy Garland was found dead of a drug overdose in her London home on Cadogan Lane.
- June 23 – Warren E. Burger was sworn in as the new Chief Justice of the United States. Retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath of office to his successor.
- June 24 – After white voters in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) voted to make their nation a republic, the last ties with the United Kingdom were severed as the British Governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, tendered his resignation.
- June 26 – A former NASA official told reporters in Houston that lunar module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin had been originally been scheduled to become the first man to set foot on the Moon during the upcoming Apollo 11 mission, but that mission commander Neil Armstrong was “not unaware” of the importance of being first and that Armstrong decided to supersede Aldrin. “It shouldn’t be that he pulled rank,” said Paul Haney, the former public affairs officer for the Manned Spacecraft Center, “but I think he was not unaware of the importance of the first man who stepped onto the moon and he looked at it very carefully and decided that perhaps it should be the commander’s prerogative.” Haney added that the decision for Armstrong to be first had been made in mid-April, “Precisely why the change, I don’t know, but I do know that it caused quite an upset.”
- June 27 – Criminal penalties against homosexuality and against abortion were eliminated in Canada, subject to certain conditions, as royal assent was given to the C-150 bill that had passed the House of Commons on May 14 and the Canadian Senate on June 13.
June 28 – The Stonewall riots, a milestone in the modern gay rights movement in the United States, began in New York City when an angry crowd of bystanders began throwing bottles, rocks and even a parking meter at NYPD patrolmen who were carrying out a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn2, a gay hangout at 53 Christopher Street in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan. At 1:28 in the morning, seven policemen came in to the Stonewall Inn, locked the doors, arrested the employees, and began lining up the patrons to transport them to a detention center and then releasing them, the usual practice for roundups. As one author would note later, “On that night, though, the customers did not slink off into the darkeness. On that night, they stayed, gathering outside the Stonewall Inn. These raids— and the horrible treatment of gay people— had to stop.” The trigger, on one of the hottest and most humid days of the summer, was when the police were forcing their way through the angry crowd to put one of the last customers into a police van (accounts differ as to whether it was a lesbian who resisted arrest or a transvestite man who was violently shoved into the van.
- “June 1969.” Wikipedia. Accessed June 28, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1969.
- Image credit: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Stonewall Inn” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 29, 2019. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e3-57e3-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
