Stuff that happened in the country and world 50 years ago this month.
Marxist Salvador Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile on November 3. He had been selected by Chile’s congress after winning a narrow plurality of 36.2 percent of the vote, beating the second-place finisher by 1.3 percentage points. Elected to a six-year term, Allende would die in a military coup less than three years later.
Aerosmith played its first concert on November 6. The band appeared at Nipmuc Regional High School in Massachusetts.
Tom Dempsey, field goal kicker for the New Orleans Saints, set an NFL record on November 8 by kicking a 63-yard field goal on the last play of the game to beat the visiting Detroit Lions, 19-17.
More than 300,000 people were killed on or about November 13 when a cyclone hit East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Three days after the cyclone struck, Radio Pakistan said 13 densely populated islands had lost their entire populations. The dead toll could have been as high as 500,000 people.
A plane carrying 37 members and five coaches of the Marshall University football team crashed into a hillside on November 14 as it made its approach to a West Virginia airport. Thirty-three other passengers and crew also died. The team was returning from Greenville, N.C., after losing to East Carolina University, 17-14.
The Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, the company’s version of the jumbo jet, made its first flight on November 16, flown by test pilots. The L-1011 was to compete with the Boeing 747 and McDonnell-Douglas Dc-10.
In “Operation Ivory Coast,” a joint U.S. Air Force and Army team entered North Vietnam on November 20 to rescue American service members thought to be prisoners at the Son Tay camp. Upon arriving at the camp, the raiders discovered the prisoners had been relocated.
On November 25, a bank in Buffalo, N.Y., became one of the first U.S. banks to offer its customers access to 24-hour Automated Teller Machines (ATMs). The Marine Midland Bank-Western attached two of the devices to the exterior wall of two branches. Customers could take out $25 or $50 as a loan on a credit account rather than as withdrawals from their own accounts.
The U.S. Census Bureau announced its final count of the 1970 decennial census on November 30. The bureau reported that on April 1, 1970, the U.S. population was 204,765,770 persons. It was the first census since 1800 in which New York did not have the largest population, California having become the most populous state in 1962. (U.S. population in 2019 was estimated to be 328.2 million people.)