The following events occurred in April 1963:
April 1, 1963 (Monday) The long-running American TV soap opera General Hospital made its début on the ABC network. On the same afternoon, the first episode of NBC's hospital soap opera, The Doctors, premiered. General Hospital, set in the fictional town of Port Charles, New York, would begin its 60th year in 2022, while The Doctors, set in the fictional New England town of Madison, would end on December 31, 1982. The Titan II-Gemini Coordination Committee was established to direct efforts to reduce longitudinal vibration (pogo oscillation) in the Titan II and to improve engine reliability. Died: Quinim Pholsena, 47, the Foreign Minister of Laos, was assassinated by a soldier assigned to guard him. Quinim and his wife had returned home from a reception with the King, when Lance Corporal Chy Kong fired a machine gun at the couple. Minister Quinim was hit by 18 bullets, after which the guard "finished him off with a shot through the head".
April 2, 1963 (Tuesday) Singapore television channel Saluran 5 Television Singapura began the regular service in the Asian nation, with four hours of programming every evening. The Soviet Union launched Luna 4 at 8:04 am UT toward the Moon, using a curving path rather than a straight trajectory. The Beatles began their Spring 1963 UK tour in Sheffield, England. The Navy of Argentina began a revolt against the government of President José María Guido, with the insurrection starting at Puerto Belgrano. The rebellion would quietly end the next day. Testifying before the Subcommittee on Manned Space Flight of the U.S. House Committee on Science and Astronautics, D. Brainerd Holmes, Director of Manned Space Flight, sought to justify a $42,638,000 increase in Project Gemini's actual 1963 budget over that previously estimated. NASA signed an almost half-billion-dollar contract with McDonnell Aircraft Corporation for the Gemini spacecraft, with a cost-plus-fixed-fee estimate of $456,650,062 ($428,780,062 plus fixed fee of $27,870,000). The contract called for 13 flight-rated spacecraft, 12 to be used in space flight, as well as a docking simulator trainer, five boilerplates, and three static articles for vibration and impact ground tests.
April 3, 1963 (Wednesday) Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) volunteers kicked off the Birmingham campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, against racial segregation in the United States, with a sit-in. The Delaware Supreme Court upheld their state's law, unique in the United States, permitting the flogging of criminals. Although the penalty, dating from colonial days, had not been carried out for several years, a 20-year-old man had been given a probated sentence of 20 lashes for auto theft, then violated the probation.
April 4, 1963 (Thursday) All 67 people on board Aeroflot Flight 25 were killed, one hour after the Ilyushin-18 plane had taken off from Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, bound for Krasnoyarsk. Network Ten, the third television network in Australia, began with the granting of a corporate operating license to United Telecasters Sydney Limited. Broadcasting would begin on ATV-0 in Melbourne on April 1, 1964, and on Channel Ten in Sydney on April 5, 1965. The cost of making a long-distance telephone call was lowered throughout the continental United States, with a maximum charge of one dollar for three-minute "station-to-station" calls made between 9:00 pm and 4:30 a.m. The equivalent 50 years later for a 1963 dollar would be $7.50 The Henry Miller novel Tropic of Cancer went on sale legally in the United Kingdom for the first time, after having been banned for thirty years because it had been deemed obscene. The Beatles performed at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, UK, for a fee of £100, having accepted a personal request from schoolboy David Moores, a fellow Liverpudlian (and later chairman of Liverpool F.C.). Died: Gaetano Catanoso, 84, Italian parish priest canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 Sonja McCaskie, 24, British skier and 1960 Olympics competitor, murdered
April 5, 1963 (Friday) Ferdinand Marcos became President of the Senate of the Philippines.