June 1977

Month of 1977

The following events occurred in June 1977:

Vincent van Gogh's painting Poppy Flowers (Stilleven met viscaria), worth an estimated U. S.$55,000,000, was stolen from Cairo's Khalil Museum in Egypt. Recovered 10 years later, the painting would be stolen again in 2010 and has not been seen since then. A court in Cyprus dismissed murder charges against the two members of the terrorist group, EOKA B, Ioannis Ktimatias and Nepotolemos Leftis. The two had been indicted for the 1974 assassination of U. S. Ambassador Rodger Davies and a Greek Cypriot secretary to the ambassador, Antoinette Varnavas. Ktimatias and Leftis were found guilty of the lesser offense of illegal use of firearms and rioting, with Ktimatias getting a seven year sentence and Leftis five years. Marvin Mandel, Governor of the U. S. state of Maryland, stepped aside and appointed Lieutenant Governor Blair Lee III as ""Acting Chief Executive", after Mandel was indicted along with five co defendants of the crimes of mail fraud and racketeering. After being convicted, Mandel would be sentenced to the federal prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Mandel would rescind Lee's powers on January 15, 1979, after his conviction was overturned on appeal, and serve the remaining two days of his elected term. Died: František Michl, 75, Czech artist who had been incarcerated by the Nazi German government for being anti fascist, and by the Czechoslovakian government for being anti Communist.

A bloodless coup overthrew the government of President James Mancham while he was out of the country, and installed France Albert René as President of the Seychelles. Mancham was in the UK at the time, attending the British Commonwealth meeting. Elections were held in Turkey for all 450 seats of the unicameral Grand National Assembly of Turkey, referred to in Turkey as the Meclis. With 226 seats needed for a majority, the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi or CHP) of former Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit increased its strength from 185 to 213 seats, while the right wing "Nationalist Front" coalition of Premier Süleyman Demirel was forced out of office. The Portland Trail Blazers beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 109 to 107, to win the championship of the National Basketball Association, taking Game 6 of the best 4 of 7 series in Portland. With four seconds to play, George McGinnis of the 76ers missed a jump shot that would have sent the game into overtime.

Plans for a conversion of U. S. roadway signs to the metric system were canceled. Director William M. Cox of the Federal Highway Administration informed Iowa Congressman Charles E. Grassley that regulations published on April 27 for public notice and comment had received enough negative comment and protest to merit withdrawing the proposal. Cox explained later that "More than 5,000 comments were received, and about 98% of them were negative." The Sri Venkateswara Temple, the first Hindu temple to be built in the United States, was inaugurated in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The daily Spanish newspaper for a Basque audience published its first issue. The paper, published by Editorial Iparraguirre, had some articles written in the Basque language as well. It would celebrate its 45th anniversary in 2022. Former U. S. President Gerald R. Ford hit a hole in one while playing golf, the year after losing the 1976 presidential election. Ford, who was participating in the pro am Danny Thomas Memphis Golf Classic for charity, was only the second American president to accomplish the feat. The other one was Richard M. Nixon, who hit a hole in one on September 4, 1961, one year after losing the 1960 presidential election. Died: Nathan H. Knorr, 72, Jehovah's Witness administrator as president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society since 1942. He would be succeeded on June 22 by Frederick W. Franz.

James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, where he was in the ninth year of a 99 year prison sentence. He and the other escapees would be recaptured on June 13. Ray then had his sentence extended by three years, from 2068 to 2071. He would die in 1998, 30 years and 19 days after Dr. King's murder. The first Apple II series computers went on sale.

The Kingdom of Spain held its first democratic elections since 1936, as it continued its transition to democracy from the rule of Francisco Franco. Voting was for all 350 seats in the Congress of Deputies and all 207 seats in the Senate of Spain, with 14 political unions competing. The Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD) coalition of 15 parties, led by incumbent Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, won 165 seats in the Congress and a majority (106 of 207 seats) in the Spanish Senate.

High school teacher Jill Jacobs married U. S. Senator Joe Biden of Delaware at the Chapel at the United Nations in New York City. The wedding was the second for both, after Biden's first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, had been killed in a car accident on December 18, 1972, and after Jacobs had divorced her first husband, Bill Stevenson, in 1975. In 2021, Mr. and Mrs. Biden would become the President and the First Lady of the United States. The Soviet Union conducted what a U. S. Department of Defense spokesman said was a successful test of a "killer satellite", as Kosmos 918 was launched against a specific target, Kosmos 909, which had been put into orbit on May 20. Although there was no actual destruction of 909, the DOD said that its own data "allows for a close approach and a probable successful mission occurred." After the fall of the USSR, archives showed that the test had failed and that 918 had been de orbited; a first successful test would occur on October 26, 1977. The U. S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case of Dobbert v. Florida ruled, 6 to 3, that a person convicted of murder could be legally executed even though the crime for which he received the death penalty took place under a law that was later found unconstitutional. Ernest John Dobbert had brutally murdered two of his children in 1971, but was not indicted until 1974. All U. S. death penalty laws enacted before 1972 had been declared unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia. Dobbert, who was white, would die in the electric chair on September 7, 1984.

Former U. S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell reported to Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery, located on the grounds of Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Mitchell was the 25th, and last person to be imprisoned in connection with Watergate, and the first former U. S. Attorney General to go to prison. Walt Disney Productions theatrically releases its 23rd animated feature film, The Rescuers. Died: Marston Morse, 85, American mathematician known for the Morse theory in differential topology, as well as the Morse–Palais lemma and the Thue–Morse sequence.

The U. S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Nixon v. Administrator of General Services Administration, 7 to 2, that former U. S. President Richard Nixon had no right to White House tape recordings and documents as private property, and upheld the 1974 Presidential Records and Materials Preservation Act. The Albert Einstein Society was founded at Bern in Switzerland by Dr. Max Flückiger to honor individual scientists who had contributed to furthering Einstein's work. The first Einstein Medal presented by the Society would be awarded to British astrophysicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking in 1979. The Society also restored Einstein's former home at Kramgasse 49 in Bern and would open it to the general on March 14, 1979, the centennial of Einstein's 1879 birth.

U. S. President Jimmy Carter ordered a halt to any further production of the controversial B 1 bomber, based on its unprecedented cost of 102 million dollars for each aircraft and the U. S. Air Force goal of 244 B 1s in its arsenal. Carter's successor, U. S. President Ronald Reagan, would revive the project and 100 B 1B bombers would be manufactured by Rockwell International between 1983 and 1988. Nine years after the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia's Communist Party and government granted amnesty to almost all of its 75,000 citizens who had fled the country after the 1968 invasion by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact forces, dropping charges and in absentia convictions for having left the country illegally. The only dissidents denied amnesty were those who publicly criticized Czechoslovakia after their departure. Brazil's President Ernesto Geisel, who had been granted dictatorial powers, issued a decree removing his chief political opponent from office. Alencar Furtaco of the Chamber of Deputies, leader of the opposition to Geisel's military regime, was barred from office for 10 years by Geisel's order.