The Postcard
A postcard bearing no publisher's name with an image that is a glossy real photograph. The card was posted in Ramsgate using a 5d. stamp on Tuesday the 8th. July 1969. It was sent to a recipient who lived at:
18, Denmark Villas,
Hove,
Sussex.
The message on the divided back of the card was as follows:
"San Chu Hotel, 8th. to
12th. Sept. '69, so don't
bother to reply.
Please keep next Mon.
14th. for you and Douglas
to come to tea at the
Royal Crescent Hotel,
Kemptown Brighton.
I will ring youon the 12th.
to arrange the time.
On Saturday we went to
St. Augustine's Abbey
Church for High Mass
(Latin) & Vespers (English),
Weather cool but good.
All the best,
From I. C."
The Commuting of a Double Hanging
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 8th. July 1969, Arthur Nathaniel Aiken and Antonio Nathaniel Wheat were both spared execution.
Antonio Wheat and his crime partner Arthur Aiken were accused of the triple robbing/murder of three separate gas station attendants in 1965, and subsequently sentenced to death.
The double hanging had been set for 12:01 on the morning of Friday, 11th. July at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. The two former airmen would have been the first prisoners to be put to death since Luis Monge in 1967.
Warden Robert Rhay told reporters that Wheat and Aiken would be given the option to decide which one would be executed first, and that if they were unable to agree on the sequence, Rhay would "flip a coin".
However only three days before they were scheduled to be hanged, Aiken was granted a stay of execution by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (who happened to be vacationing at his summer home in Goose Prairie, Washington) less than 72 hours before his trip to the gallows.
Wheat had been given a temporary reprieve the day before.
The United States Supreme Court voided all pending death sentences in 1972, and the two inmates, convicted of triple homicide, served consecutive life sentences instead.
The Accidental Release of Nerve Gas
Also on that day, nerve gas was accidentally released from weapons by a crew of U.S. Air Force members at Kadena Air Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa.
The mishap, which injured 23 troops and a civilian, involved either VX or Sarin, both nerve agents.
Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser to U.S. President Richard Nixon, later blamed the accident on an unidentified Air Force major "whose aesthetic sense exceeded his judgment."
The major had ordered the troops to have the canisters painted white, and some of the drums were punctured during the sandblasting that preceded the painting.
Despite attempts by the military to keep the incident secret (including plans to dump the damaged nerve gas containers into the ocean), the Wall Street Journal exposed the story ten days later in an article headlined:
"Nerve gas accident— Okinawa mishap
bears overseas deployment of chemical
weapons".
The Return of Troops From Vietnam
Also on the 8th. July 1969, the first of 25,000 American troops to be withdrawn from the Vietnam War arrived at McChord Air Force Base in the state of Washington, south of Seattle, at 6:30 in the evening when a C-141 transport plane, one of nine to land at McChord, touched down.
The drawdown, announced a month earlier, was completed in a little more than seven weeks with the departure on the 28th. August of the 25,000th. soldier.
-- 'But You Didn't'
However not everyone returned.
'But You Didn't' is a poem by Merrill Glass. Here it is:
'Remember the time you lent
me your car and I dented it?
I thought you'd kill me...
But you didn't.
Remember the time I forgot to
tell you the dance was formal,
and you came in jeans?
I thought you'd hate me...
But you didn't.
Remember the times I'd flirt with
other boys just to make you jealous,
and you were?
I thought you'd drop me...
But you didn't.
There were plenty of things you did
to put up with me, to keep me happy,
to love me, and there are so many
things I wanted to tell you when you
returned from Vietnam...
But you didn't'.
Hannsheinz Porst
Also on that day, West German millionaire Hannsheinz Porst was convicted of espionage by a court in Bonn.
Porst had been arrested on the 23rd. October 1967 for passing West German documents to the Communist government of East Germany from his chain of photography supply stores,
He was sentenced by a court in Karlsruhe to 2½ years in prison.
