Gas rationing began in Sweden, the first Western nation to do so in response to the ongoign crisis caused by the Arab Oil Embargo.
The four-year-long Gombe Chimpanzee War broke out in Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park.
Margaret Queen Adams, née Margaret Queen Phillips, the first female deputy sheriff in the United States died at age 99. She had served in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department from 1912 to 1947. She worked in the evidence department.
In a bizarre response to the ongoing oil crisis, the U.S. began a trial of year around daylight savings time.
I recall it well, as when I walked to grade school in the morning, it was pretty dark. We still walked, however.
Pepsi-Cola hits the spotTwelve full ounces, that's a lot!Twice as much for a nickel, tooPepsi-Cola is the drink for you.
It says something about the quality of Coke, or at least the original recipe of it, that people would in fact pay the same amount for half of what they'd get if they'd bought Pepsi instead. It also says something about soda in general that it's so cheap to make, the added 6 oz of product really doesn't do anything to the economic bottom line.
In 1955, Coke switched to 10 oz bottles and 12 oz bottles and offered a "Family" sized bottle of 26 oz. The move was not without internal company controversy, however. One company executive stated that “bringing out another bottle was like being unfaithful to your wife.”
But that 55 10 or 12 oz bottle isn't gigantic.
When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, when you went to a fast food restaurant and got a soda, large was a 12 oz serving with ice. Starting in the 80s, somehow, that doubled, with stores, particularly convenience stores, advertising what was essentially double that.
24 oz of Coke is a lot.
And it went on from there.
McDonald's, when it was first getting up and running, served Coke in 7 oz cups. After Coke switched, it started serving it in 16 oz cups. In 1980, 7-11 introduced the "Big Gulp" which weighed in at an absurd 32 oz. In 86, 7-11 introduced the 44 oz Super Big Gulp, and everyone went down that road thereafter.
Indeed, now, getting a small or medium soda draught is really what a person should do, and on the rare occasions when I get fast food, I try to get that. But most people don't. Even little kids get the 55 gallon size soda drink.
The National Maximum Speed Law reduced the speed limit on the nation's highways to 55 mph.
While ultimately hated, the law had an immediate impact in reducing highway deaths, which of course was not its actual intent. Reducing the consumption of petroleum was.
The first Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks were mailed in a program designed to address those disabled but unable to qualify for Social Security. The law allowing for this to occur had come into effect the prior day.
The People's Republic of China announced that eight senior military figures were being reassigned in an apparent attempt to disrupt their ability to form a base of power.
Early country music pioneer and actor Tex Ritter died at age 68 of what was believed to be a heart attack. His son, John Ritter, would die in 2003 at age 54 of aortic dissection and its likely that this was actually the cause of his father's death.
On this day in 1973, the Endangered Species Act, having passed by the House of Representatives, 355 to 4, with the only opposing votes coming from Congressmen Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, H. R. Gross of Iowa, Robin Beard of Tennessee and Bob Price of Texas, was signed into law.
The Nixon Administration, now mostly remembered for Watergate, and the duplicitous end to the Vietnam War, had a remarkable record of passing environmental legislation, including this landmark example. Perhaps more remarkable, at this point in time, Wyoming's Congressman, Teno Roncolio, voted for it.
My, how things have changed.
And more amazing yet, Teno Roncalio, was a Democrat, the last Wyoming Democrat to hold that position. For that matter, one of the two Senators from Wyoming, Gale McGee, was as well. McGee is the last member of the Democratic Party to hold that office in Wyoming.
Presently to admit that the ESA is a great piece of litigation is to invite castigation in Wyoming, and the world "Democrat" is nearly slanderous in nature.
On the same day, Nixon signed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) which provided to train workers for jobs in public service.
Whatever else may be the case about him, the country owes a debt to Nixon for legislation passed during his administration.
Solzhenitsyn's tome The Gulag Archipelago was published. The very first published edition on the horrors of the Soviet penal system were in French.
Bobby Darin (Walden Robert Cassotto) died at age 37 following a surgery to repair artificial heart valves he had received three years prior.
Darin had been a major Ameican entertainer of the 50s and 60s. Of Sicilian descent, his early life was complicated, having had a grandfather that was a member of the mafia. He was raised believing that his mother, who had borne him out of wedlock at age 17, was his sister, something she did not reveal to him until he was 32.
I can't read this one as the paywall subscriber thing applies to it.
Office Hours: Are today’s campus protests against the war in Gaza as justified as were campus protests against the Vietnam War?
Here's the thing, though. The headline presupposes the Boomer Generation protests on campuses during the Vietnam War were "justified", at least in some fashion.
Perhaps they were, but it is a presupposition, not something that is necessarily automatically a fact.
Which is not to say every protest on campus today regarding the Hamas War is justified, although it isn't to state that ones which are not anti-Semitic, but based on something else (if there are any), do not have some justification.
The Palestinian terrorists in Rome ordered a Lufthansa plane to fly to Kuwait, where the remaining hostages were freed. A year later, Kuwait turned them over to the PLO, which promised to put them on trial. Their fate is unknown.
Palestinian terrorists killed 32 people at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport near Rome by seizing a terminal and then throwing grenades in the open doors of a Boeing 707.
Because killing innocent people is a mature and rational way to get what you want . . .
Canada and Denmark signed a treating delineating their territorial waters.
The United States Coast Guard accepted its first regular female members, Chief Warrant Officer Alice T. Jefferson, Yeoman First Class Wanda May Parr and Yeoman Second Class Margaret A. Blackman.
This came about due to the elimination of the Coast Guard's Women's Reserve.
Jefferson had jointed the SPARS in 1943 and remained in the Coast Guard until 1984, when she retired. She passed away in 2019 at age 96.
The world's most dangerous airline, Aeroflot, crashed is Flight 964 at Moscow's airport, killing 16 out of 75 people on board.
Convicted child murderer Lester Eubanks was released for unsupervised Christmas shopping in Ohio and disappeared. He remains a fugtive.
Reinstated the death penalty and brought in no-fault divorce.
What a bunch of boofadors.
Oh yeah. . . that's also the year we turned out Gale McGee for Malcolm Wallop around here.
Well, that was two years before Coors introduced Coors Light, and you could still drink and drive legally in the state at that time. We must have been doing too much of it.
I was surprised to see this article by Reich, and I thought it would be on the late stages of the Vietnam War, but I'll note that I too am not a Kissinger fan.
Vice President Gerald Ford was sworn into that office. Only three votes were cast against his appointment.
The Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act was signed into law in order to allocate petroleum distribution and control prices. This came about, of course, due to the Arab Oil Embargo.
The effort at price control and allocation would prove to be a failure, as generally such measures prove to be.
The House of Representatives passed a bill to put the US on Daylight Savings Time year around. A similar bill recently passed the Senate, and then went nowhere.
This act passed and went into effect in 1974, and very rapidly it went from being popular to unpopular. I can remember the reason why. As a kid, we now went to school in darkness.
It escapes me why these bills always choose Daylight Savings Time over natural time.
Mary Woods testified in Federal Court that she's accidentally caused part of the 18-1/2-minute gap in a White House tape.
Japan, which had not yet come under the Arab oil embargo, dropped its support for Israel and joined the United Nations in calling for a separate Palestinian state. In doing so, it was seeking to avoid the oil sanction.
Saudi Arabia warned the US that it would reduce oil production by 80% if the US did not stop supporting Israel, and that the country would destroy its oil wells if attacked.
Today In Wyoming's History: November 16: 1973 President Richard M. Nixon signed the Alaska Pipeline measure into law.
Washington state lowered its speed limit to conserve gasoline. Coincidentally, highway mortality drooped 11%.
Israel and Egypt exchanged POWS taken during the Yom Kippur War.
