1972 was an interesting year. I was only born in 1977 so I have no recollection of this year personally but I’ve read up a lot about this year in history.
In a previous post on my other blog, I talked about Wimpy in the good old days and featured a photo of the popular South African fast food chain’s menu from 1972.
Here are 24 Notable Events in 1972
1. Hewlett Packard introduced the world’s first pocket scientific calculator, the HP-35 in this year.
2. Rose Heilbron became the first woman judge at the Old Bailey in London in the United Kingdom in 1972.
3. In Denmark Margaret II succeeded her father, King Frederick IX as the Queen regnant of the country.
4. In 1972,the Boston Marathon was officially opened to women. Official races like the Boston Marathon, the most famous marathon outside the Olympics, were off-limits to women until 1972. In the 1970s, as the sport of running became more popular, calls for women to run official marathons grew.
On Monday, the 17th of April 1972, the Boston Marathon was won by Nina Kuscsik at 3:10:26. After 1972, women all over the world with the dream of a marathon officially qualified for the marathon. Women are increasingly running marathons and winning their own marathon medals.
5. Shoichi Yokoi (a Japanese soldier) was discovered on the island of Guam in 1972. He had spent 28 years in the jungle. He was the third last Japanese soldier to surrender after the end of the 2nd World War in 1945.
6. Yugoslavian air stewardess Vesna Vulović was the only survivor when her plane crashed in Czechoslovakia. She survived after falling 10,160 meters in the tail section of the aircraft.
7. The Winter Olympics were held in Sapporo, Japan in 1972 and the Summer Olympics were held in Munich, Germany in the same year. American Swimmer Mark Spitz won a record 7 gold medals in the Summer Olympics in this year.
8. The Munich Massacre occured on the 6th of September 1972. Eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics were murdered after 8 members of the Arab terrorist group Black September invaded the Olympic Village in Munich. 5 guerillas and 1 policeman was also killed in a failed hostage rescue. This massacre later became the subject of the Steven Spielberg film Munich in 2005.
9. Mariner 9 sent back pictures from the planet Mars. In the same year, Pioneer 10 (the first man-made spacecraft to leave the solar system) was launched from Cape Kennedy in the United States in the same year.
10. Volkswagen Beetle sales exceeded those of the Ford Model-T when the 15,007,034th VW Beetle was produced.
11. The Soviet unmanned spaceship Luna 20 landed on the Moon. The spacecraft returned with 55 grams of lunar soil.
12. In February 1972 US President Richard Nixon made an unprecedented 8-day visit to the People’s Republic of China and met with Chinese leader Mao Zedong.
13. The Club of Rome (a global think tank) published its Limits of Growth report (a book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies).
14. The French Connection won the Oscar for Best Picture. Gene Hackman also won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in the film and William Friedkin (who went on to direct 1973’s The Exorcist) won the Oscar for best director.
15. The 968.9-carat Star of Sierra Leone diamond was discovered. It ranks as the 3rd largest gem-quality diamond and the largest alluvial diamond ever discovered.
16. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney co-founded Atari in 1972. They released Pong in the same year which would go on to be the first commercially successful video game in history.
17. George Carlin was arrested by Milwaukee, Wisconsin police for public obscenity, for reciting his “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” at Summerfest.
18. A Fairchild FH-227D passenger aircraft (Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571) transporting a rugby union team crashed at about 14,000 ft (4267 m) in the Andes mountain range near the Argentina / Chile border. 16 of the survivors were found alive. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.
19. The British Army killed 13 unarmed Roman Catholic civil rights marchers in Derry, Ireland. The incident is referred to as “Bloody Sunday” by future generations. This was the inspiration behind the protest song Sunday Bloody Sunday by Irish rockers U2.
20. Five White House operatives were arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee. This was the beginning of the Watergate Scandal.
21. Don Mclean released “American Pie”.
22. On the 23rd of December 1972, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake struck Nicaragua’s capital city (Managua). 5000 – 11 000 people were killed.
23. On the 10th of April 1972, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Southern Iran. The quake had the maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (violent). 5,374 people were killed in the province of Iranian province of Fars.
24. Hurricane Agnes tormented the Eastern Cost of the USA between the 14th and 23rd of June 1972. 117 people were killed.
Well, there you have it, 24 notable events that happened in 1972.
Which important event did I skip? Leave a comment below and let me know.
Watch this space for regular updates in the History category on Interesting Facts.
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