The year was 1964

A look at the news ... the Eiffel Tower celebrates its 75th Birthday ... Britain celebrates the birth of Queen Elizabeth's fourth child, Prince Edward, and the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare ... the Pan Am building is completed in Manhattan ... the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King wins the Nobel Peace Prize ... the Baby Boom reaches its peak with 4,027,000 births ... in January, the IX Winter Olympic Games open in Innsbruck, Austria; Pope Paul VI visits the Holy Land ... ... in February, The Beatles make their US debut on the Ed Sullivan Show; an Eastern Air Lines DC-8 crashes into Lake Pontchartrain near New Orleans with a loss of 58 lives; Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston to win the world's heavyweight boxing title ... in March, a Good Friday earthquake and several Tidal Waves hit Alaska causing massive damage and more than 100 deaths; Jack Ruby is found guilty and sentenced to death for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald ... in April, the Ford Mustang is introduced at the New York World's Fair ... in May, Luther and Hello Dolly! win the Tony Award for Best Play and Best Musical ... in June, three Civil Rights workers are slain in Mississippi ... in July, Ranger 7 returns the first close-up pictures of the Moon's surface; Senator Edward Kennedy suffers a broken back after his plane crashes en route to the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention; President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ... in August, an unprovoked North Vietnamese attack on a US Destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin brings a US bombing retaliation in what will become the start of major US involvement in Vietnam ... in September, the Warren Commission issues their report stating that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in his assassination of President Kennedy... in October,

the XVIII Olympiad opens in Tokyo, Japan; Aleksi Kosygen & Leonid Brezhnev replace Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet Premier and Party Chief; Communist China explodes their first atomic bomb; three Soviet Cosmonauts orbit the earth in the world's first multi-man space flight; the Star of India, world's largest sapphire, is stolen from New York's Museum of Natural History ... in November, Lyndon B. Johnson defeats Barry Goldwater to become 36th President of the United States ... in December, Cuban Minister of Industry, Ernesto Che Guevara addresses the UN General Assembly.