Curated playlist
1967 deaths
- Bill WeisbandBill Weisband carried a secret that may have set back American codebreaking by years, and he carried it to his grave. Born in Odessa in 1908, he arrived in the United States sometime in the 1920s, became a naturalized citizen in 1938, and…
- Vivien LeighVivien Leigh died on the night of the 7th of July 1967, alone on the floor of her Eaton Square flat in London. Her companion John Merivale had left her, as usual, to perform in a play. When he returned just before midnight and found her…
- Roger B. ChaffeeRoger Bruce Chaffee was thirty-one years old when he climbed into the Apollo 1 command module on the afternoon of the 27th of January, 1967. He was the youngest American astronaut ever assigned to a spaceflight mission, and he had never…
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- Ed White (astronaut)Ed White took his last step back inside a spacecraft on the 27th of January 1967, and by that evening, he was gone. But the moment that defined his life came nearly two years earlier, on the 3rd of June 1965, when he floated free of his…
- Langston HughesLangston Hughes died on the 22nd of May 1967, and beneath the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, his ashes rest under an African cosmogram titled Rivers. At the center of that design is a single line…
- Gus GrissomGus Grissom was born in Mitchell, Indiana, on the 3rd of April 1926, the son of a railroad signalman and a homemaker. His nickname came from a friend who misread "Griss" upside down on a scorecard. That accidental name would one day be…
- Che GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna signed Cuba's paper currency with a single word: "Che." His long-time friend Ricardo Rojo said that the day he signed the bills, he "literally knocked the props from under the widespread belief that money…
- John ColtraneJohn William Coltrane was born on the 23rd of September 1926, in his parents' apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue in Hamlet, North Carolina. He died at 40, of liver cancer, on the 17th of July 1967. In the four decades that followed his death,…
- Clement AttleeClement Attlee walked into Buckingham Palace on the 26th of July 1945 to be appointed Prime Minister. King George VI stood waiting. Both men were famously reluctant talkers. A silence stretched between them until Attlee finally offered:…
- Konrad AdenauerKonrad Adenauer was elected the first chancellor of West Germany on the 15th of September 1949 by what observers called a majority of one vote, his own. He was 73 years old. Most assumed he would be a caretaker. Instead he held the office…
- Mohammad MosaddeghMohammad Mosaddegh, born on the 16th of June 1882, became the most popular politician in Iran's modern history by doing something no Iranian leader had dared before: he seized the oil fields. In 1951, as prime minister, he nationalised the…
- Brian EpsteinBrian Epstein walked into the Cavern Club on the 9th of November 1961, squeezing past a line of fans in the narrow stairwell of a Liverpool cellar venue he had visited many times before. What he found was a leather-jacketed group who…
- V. A. SundaramV. A. Sundaram was 19 years old when he heard Mahatma Gandhi speak in Madras in April 1915, and made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. He abandoned his studies at Pachaiyappa's College on the spot and followed Gandhi to…
- Ike DuffeyIsaac Walker Duffey built something that no professional basketball league had ever seen in the small city of Anderson, Indiana. Born on the 31st of May, 1906, he would go on to own the team that won the very last championship the National…