By 1967, every young American man knew the draft could sweep him off to Vietnam. Beach Boy Carl Wilson was scheduled to appear before his local draft board on January 3rd, but he never showed up. Seventeen days later, he filed for conscientious objector status, which didn’t work out the way he hoped. He was indicted, arrested, and sentenced to community service, which he also failed to attend.
A woman who phoned in a complaint said he was “painted up like an Indian. ”
On January 14th, between 20,000 and 30,000 people crowded into San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In. The event was meant to ease tensions between anti-war activists, free speech advocates, and the growing hippie movement. Speakers like Timothy Leary told the crowd to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” and bands like the Grateful Dead played.
The massive turnout stunned the nation, turning Haight-Ashbury into a destination for young people and kicking off the Summer of Love. The Rolling Stones were set to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show on January 15th, planning to perform their hit “Let’s Spend the Night Together. ” Producers thought the lyrics were too risqué and asked them to change them to the blander “Let’s Spend Some Time Together. ” Despite their bad boy reputation, the Stones agreed, but Mick Jagger made sure to roll his eyes at the camera every time he sang the altered line.
The Doors, however, weren’t so cooperative. They appeared on the show on September 17th to play “Light My Fire. ” Sullivan asked them to change the line “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher. ” Singer Jim Morrison agreed, but when the time came, he sang the original lyric anyway.
Sullivan banned the band from the show for life. The first low-orbit test for the Apollo program was scheduled for February 21st, but it never happened. During a rehearsal on January 27th, a fire broke out in the cabin, destroying the module and tragically killing crew members Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee.
Investigators found the fire started with an electrical problem. The men were breathing pure oxygen. “They, in a sense, were part of this millisecond disaster,” one official said. “If there is anything that can be rationalized about their deaths, it undoubtedly was instantaneous.
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On Valentine’s Day, Aretha Franklin headed to Atlantic Recording Studios to record a cover of Otis Redding’s 1965 hit “Respect. ” A fan of the original, she had been performing it in concerts for a few years. With help from her sisters Emma and Carolyn, she gender-flipped the lyrics and reworked the rhythm to fit her personal style of stop-and-stutter syncopation. By June 3rd, it was number one in the US, her first hit.
In 1922, an unidentified woman recovering from a suicide attempt in Germany claimed she was the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, believed dead. The woman known as Anna Anderson was dismissed as an impostor by Anastasia’s family but supported by some acquaintances. On February 28th, 1967, a Hamburg court rejected her claim. Decades later, a DNA test showed Anderson was actually Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker with a history of mental illness.
On March 9th, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, made headlines by defecting to the United States. After my father’s death, she said, “I have lost maybe a lot of faith. ” She made the decision in India, where she had traveled to spread the ashes of Kunwar Brajesh Singh, the man she loved but was legally forbidden to marry. She contacted the American Embassy, and Ambassador Charles Bowles reminded her she still had children in Russia.
She threatened to tell the world the US had refused her, and he quickly granted her request. The Beatles had begun work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in November of 1966. For the cover, they turned to pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, who came up with the idea of photographing the fictional band posing with an audience.
The photo, depicting the group in front of a collage of famous faces including Mae West, Aleister Crowley, Lenny Bruce, Laurel and Hardy, and former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, was taken on March 30th. “If you look closely at the album cover, you’ll see two people who are flying and two who aren’t. That’s just a little in joke. ”
On April 20th, the New York Mets got their first win from rookie pitcher Tom Seaver, who had been available because a lottery awarded his contract after the Atlanta Braves’ deal was voided.
Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu on May 1st. The wedding lasted just eight minutes and took place in a private suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. Elvis wore a black tuxedo, and Priscilla wore an off-the-rack organza gown and a rhinestone tiara. About 100 guests attended the reception, where the couple danced their first dance to “Love Me Tender.
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The 1967 Stanley Cup final saw the Toronto Maple Leafs face the Montreal Canadiens. It was the last final of the original six era, and the Leafs won four games to two. At an average age of 31, they became the oldest lineup ever to win the Cup. The team hasn’t made it back to the final since.
On May 30th, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was first published in Buenos Aires. The novel, which follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, became a landmark of magical realism and a key reason Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. In 1959, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Loving, a woman of Native American and African-American ancestry, had been convicted of violating a Virginia law that criminalized marriage between whites and non-whites. The couple appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court.
On June 12th, 1967, the court unanimously struck down the law for violating the Equal Protection Clause, ending all race-based restrictions on marriage in the US. The Monterey Pop Festival, held in California from June 16th to 18th, turbocharged the Summer of Love. Most of the world got its first introduction to hippies and flower power there. The lineup included the Steve Miller Band, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Canned Heat, The Byrds, Simon and Garfunkel, The Mamas and The Papas, and the Grateful Dead.
It also featured the first major US performances by The Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and a large-scale show by Janis Joplin. On June 25th, the first multinational, multi-satellite television production, called Our World, went live. Fourteen countries participated, and the audience ranged from 400 to 700 million people. The highlight was a live recording session with The Beatles, who performed their now-classic tune “All You Need Is Love.
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The first real ATM was invented by a team led by John Shepherd-Barron, who said, “I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash. ” His first machine was installed at Barclays Bank in Enfield, North London on June 27th. To drum up publicity, the first person to use it was English actor Reg Varney. On July 4th, Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act 1967, legalizing consensual adult homosexual acts in England and Wales, where they had been illegal since the Middle Ages.
The law was later extended to Scotland in 1980 and Northern Ireland in 1982. On August 14th, celebrity hairdresser Vidal Sassoon was rushed to the Paramount lot to give Mia Farrow the trend-setting pixie cut she wore in Rosemary’s Baby. He made $5,000 for his work. After his death in 2012, Farrow claimed she had given herself the haircut days earlier and Sassoon merely neatened it.
Turns out the whole thing was a publicity stunt cooked up by director Roman Polanski. The Fugitive finally came to an end on August 29th, when Richard Kimble and Lieutenant Gerard confronted the one-armed man who killed Kimble’s wife. “You killed my wife, didn’t you? You killed her.
” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I killed her. Why? ‘Cause she wouldn’t let me go. ” The episode drew 78 million viewers, or 46% of all American households.
Only the finale of Roots and the series finales of Cheers and MASH have drawn larger audiences since. In 1967, no person of color had ever been nominated to the US Supreme Court. President Lyndon Johnson was determined to solidify his civil rights legacy, so when a seat opened up, he nominated Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who won Brown v. Board of Education.
He was confirmed on August 30th. Johnson’s wife Lady Bird had suggested nominating a woman instead, but the court wouldn’t get its first female justice until Sandra Day O’Connor was confirmed in 1981. On September 17th, the night Jim Morrison defied Ed Sullivan, Keith Moon blew out Pete Townshend’s ear. The Who was appearing on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to play “My Generation.
” Moon planned to end the song by blowing up his bass drum with gunpowder. It wasn’t the first time, but he used more powder than usual for the TV audience. When the charge detonated, Townshend was only a meter away. The explosion set his hair on fire and permanently damaged his hearing.
The Cunard Line replaced its aging flagships, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, with the smaller QE2, launched on September 20th and christened by Queen Elizabeth II. Despite this, Cunard insists the ship isn’t named after her, but is rather just the second ship to bear that name. On October 20th, filmmakers Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were shooting a pseudo-documentary about cowboys hunting Bigfoot in northern California when they spotted the creature itself. They captured shaky footage of the alleged Sasquatch, which would receive decades of publicity from believers and skeptics alike, boosting the legend to unheard-of attention.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had been the Shah of Iran since 1941, but he wasn’t coronated as Shahanshah, or king of kings, until October 26th, 1967. He claimed he didn’t feel he deserved the title before because his country was so impoverished. The country’s growing oil wealth changed that, and he was finally crowned. October 26th was also the day future presidential candidate John McCain flew his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam and was shot down.
He was captured and imprisoned at the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp, where he was tortured to the point of attempting suicide and even agreed to record a propaganda video. He was released after five and a half years on March 14th, 1973. On November 9th, the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine hit the stands. It was founded in San Francisco by Jann Wenner and Ralph J.
Gleason with $7,500 borrowed from Wenner’s parents and future in-laws. The first issue featured John Lennon on the cover and cost 25 cents. Mel Brooks made his directorial debut with The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. Studio executives found it in bad taste and initially refused to release it, especially after it bombed at its Pittsburgh premiere.
Peter Sellers, originally booked to play the role Wilder took, saved the release by taking out an ad in Variety endorsing it. Decades later, music mogul David Geffen convinced Brooks to revive it as a Broadway musical, which opened in 2001, ran over 2,500 performances, and won a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards. On December 3rd, Dr. Christiaan Barnard made medical history by transplanting the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into 54-year-old Louis Washkansky.
It was the first successful human-to-human heart transplant. Washkansky’s immune system was weakened by the procedure, and he died just 18 days later. Barnard declared it a success because the heart was beating on its own without a machine. “It was really heartbreaking at autopsy to see how beautiful this heart looked,” he said.
“It was normal in size. He did not die from the condition that we treated him for. ”
The Concorde, a supersonic airliner capable of twice the speed of sound, was unveiled in Toulouse, France on December 11th. Its maiden voyage wouldn’t come until March 2nd, 1969, and commercial transatlantic service didn’t begin until 1976.
On December 15th, the Point Pleasant Bridge, known as the Silver Bridge, collapsed during rush hour over the Ohio River in West Virginia, killing 46 people. Investigators attributed the disaster to a single fractured I-bar. Author John Keel later tied the collapse to the mythical Mothman in several of his books, including 1975’s The Mothman Prophecies. The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate seduced by an older woman, Mrs.
Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft, opened December 21st. It became the highest-grossing movie of 1967, received seven Oscar nominations, and won Best Director for Mike Nichols. Simon and Garfunkel provided the soundtrack, including the now-iconic “Mrs. Robinson.
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Finally, on December 31st, motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel attempted to jump his bike 141 feet over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace Casino. The heavily hyped stunt drew a huge crowd and, for a moment, appeared to go off without a hitch. His rear wheel snagged on the edge of the landing ramp, flipping him over the handlebars and slamming him into the asphalt. He survived, but the accident left him with a concussion and severe fractures in his pelvis, femur, wrist, and ankles.
And that’s how 1967 ended. Rolling Stone was on its way to becoming a major force in music, Mel Brooks was on his way to becoming a comedy legend, and Evel Knievel was on his way to the hospital. But the ’60s still had plenty more in store.
