December 1968

Things in the “real world”we may have missed, and found out about only later.

Elvis Presley made his comeback appearance on television on December 3. The show included a performance in an intimate, informal setting, with Elvis being joined by a couple of his original band members and surrounded by a small number of fans. It was the highest rated holiday season TV special that year and later became known as the “Comeback Special.”

Seventeen crew members of the US Coast Guard Cutter White Alder were killed on December 7, when their buoy tending ship was sheared in half by a Taiwanese freighter off the shore of Louisiana.

Graham Nash of the British group, The Hollies, decided December 8 to join Stephen Stills and David Crosby of Buffalo Springfield to form Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Fans of the Philadelphia Eagles NFL team, watching the final home game on December 15 in a season with only two wins, were so upset that they booed, and then threw snowballs at Santa Claus, earning the city a reputation as having the most boorish sports supporters in the nation. Frank Olivo, the man recruited to portray Jolly St. Nick and to walk around the field during halftime of the game against the Minnesota Vikings, would laugh years later about being pelted by snowballs. The incident became a part of the franchise’s history.

Apollo 8 became the first manned space vehicle to break out of Earth’s orbit on December 21, and the three American astronauts on board— Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders — went further from Earth than anyone in history.

North Korea released the 82 members of the USS Pueblo on December 22, after 11 months of captivity that had started when the American ship was seized by North Korea on the previous January 23rd. The handover of the men, along with the body of Seaman Duane Hodges (who had been killed when the Pueblo had been fired upon), took place at the border at Panmunjom. The Pueblo itself was kept by the North Koreans and would later be put on display as a tourist attraction. The freed crewmen were flown to Naval Air Station, Miramar, near San Diego, on Christmas Eve for a reunion with their families.

On Christmas Eve, Apollo 8 astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders flew past the Moon, became the first people to see its far side,. After making minor course corrections, they fired the engines of the craft to begin mankind’s first lunar orbit. Over the remainder of the day, the men circled the Moon 10 times, each trip around taking about two hours, took photos of potential landing sites, and made two television transmissions to earth. Apollo 8 left Moon orbit and began its trip back to Earth on Christmas Day, returning successfully on December 27.

Army Major James Rowe, who had been held for more than five years as a prisoner by the Viet Cong, managed to escape his captors on December 31 after finding an opportunity to overpower and disarm his guard. Major Rowe, a Green Beret, had been a Special Forces adviser to a South Vietnamese Army unit when he was captured on October 29, 1963. Since then, he had been held in South Vietnam in the Mekong River delta.