January 17, 1962 (Wednesday)
- United States government workers were given the right of collective bargaining by President Kennedy, in Executive Order 10988.
- Ten former game show contestants, all of whom had testified under oath that they had not been given answers in advance of their appearances, pleaded guilty to perjury. The most prominent was former Columbia University instructor Charles Van Doren, who had won $129,000 on the program Twenty One.
- A furniture warehouse fire in the German city of Nuremberg killed twenty employees, including four who jumped from the fourth story of the building. Police arrested one of the survivors, a paper press operator who had worked in the basement and was believed to have accidentally caused the blaze by throwing a cigarette.
- Frank Sinatra completed the recording of his album All Alone, in Los Angeles.
- Born: Jim Carrey, Canadian-American actor and comedian, in Newmarket, Ontario
- Died: Gerrit Achterberg, 56, Dutch poet
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Famous quotes containing the word january:
“Here lies interred in the eternity of the past, from whence there is no resurrection for the days—whatever there may be for the dust—the thirty-third year of an ill-spent life, which, after a lingering disease of many months sank into a lethargy, and expired, January 22d, 1821, A.D. leaving a successor inconsolable for the very loss which occasioned its existence.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)