The Week That Was – June 29 to July 5, 1969

A Popular Song From That Week

In The Year 2525  by Zager & Evans

Some Events of the Week^1,2

• June 29 – First test of the “Mailgram” – mailgrams transmitted messages directly to the selected post offices which would then print them out and send them by a letter carrier the same day to the intended address.

Western Union Mailgram

• June 30 – Nigeria blocked most humanitarian aid to the starving residents of the breakaway Republic of Biafra by telling the International Committee of the Red Cross and 19 other relief agencies that they would no longer be permitted to send planes to relief planes to the starving Biafran population
• July 1 – The formal investiture of the United Kingdom’s Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales took place at Caernarvon Castle in Wale.
• July 2 – The International Hotel in Las Vegas opened to guests. Barbra Streisand performed the first concert date to inaugurate the 1,510 room hotel, at the time the tallest building (30 stories) and newest and largest casino and resort in Nevada.
• July 3 – The The Soviet Union’s race to land a man on the Moon, already far behind the American program, ended with the explosion after launch of its N1 rocket, the Soviet counterpart to the American Saturn V.  The explosion was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions in human history.
• July 4 – Michael Mageau, 19, became the first person to survive a murder attempt by a man who would become known as the “Zodiac Killer”, and the first to provide a description to the police.
• The crew of Apollo 11 told a press conference in Houston that they had given names to the two lunar spacecraft: Eagle and Columbia.

1. June 1969. Wikipedia. most recent edit: July 03, 2019. Accessed July 06, 2019.
2. July 1969. Wikipedia. most recent edit: May 29, 2019. Accessed July 06, 2019.
3. Barbra Streisand. Wikipedia. most recent edit: June 26, 2019. Accessed July 06, 2019. 1966 promotional photo of Barbra Streisand is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice.