Years Ago

Today is Sunday, May 5, the 125th day of 2013. There are 240 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1821: Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, dies in exile on the island of St. Helena.

1862: Mexican troops defeat French occupying forces in the Battle of Puebla. (Cinco de Mayo now commemorates Mexico’s victory.)

1925: Schoolteacher John T. Scopes is charged in Tennessee with violating a state law that prohibits teaching the theory of evolution. (Scopes is found guilty, but his conviction is later set aside.)

1936: The Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, falls to Italian invaders.

1941: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie returns to Addis Ababa after the Italians are driven out with the help of Allied forces.

1942: Wartime sugar rationing begins in the United States.

1955: West Germany becomes a fully sovereign state.

1961: Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. becomes America’s first space traveler as he makes a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7, a Mercury capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

1973: Secretariat wins the Kentucky Derby, the first of its Triple Crown victories.

1981: Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands dies at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland in his 66th day without food.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. lashes out at LTV Corp. for announcing a reorganization plan that assumes the agency will ultimately have to foot the bill for three LTV Steel Co. pension plans.

The J.C. Penney Co. plans to replace its Mahoning Plaza store with a state-of-the-art retail showplace in the former Strouss/Kaufmann Austintown Plaza location.

Ohio Sen. Harry Meshel, D-Youngstown, chairman of Democratic presidential front-runner Michael S. Dukakis’ successful campaign in Ohio, says U.S. Sen. John Glenn of Ohio would be a fine vice presidential candidate, but he denies a report that U.S. Reps. James A. Traficant Jr., D-17th, and Douglas Applegate, D-18th, will have much to say about the choice.

1973: Hubbard voters will decide a 1.07-mill bond issue that would finance construction of a $750,000 community swimming pool.

The 7th District Court of Appeals is asked to stay an order by Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Sidney Rigelhaupt that declared unconstitutional Youngstown’s residency rule for city employees.

James Dinsio, 43, of Calla Road, and Ronald Barber, 31, formerly of Youngstown, are convicted of conspiracy and larceny in the $5 million “super burglary” of a bank in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

1963: Dan Luce, 13, of Hubbard Junior High School wins The Vindicator’s 30th Annual Spelling Bee, besting runner-up Patricia Kennedy of St. Charles School, Boardman, on the words “binnacle” and “pillory.”

While the Youngstown district is struggling with serious unemployment problems, district industrial firms are simultaneously facing a shortage of qualified higher skilled employees, such as physicists, metallurgists, engineers and proven executives.

Demand for steel products will boost Youngstown district steel production with 12 blast furnaces, 49 open hearths, one basic oxygen converter and one Bessemer plant in operation.

Chateaugay, a bay colt from Ohio’s Darby Dan Farm, wins the $151,400 Kentucky Derby for John W. Galbreath, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

1938: The Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority purchases the first two parcels on Griffith Street and Morrsion Avenue for construction of a $3.6 million low-cost housing project that will accommodate about 650 families.

The Youngstown Steel Door Co. expects to get a considerable share of a Southern Railway contract for 5,500 railcars. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. is expect to provide about 1,800 tons of strip steel for the cars.

There are 43 pupils at Boswell School three miles north of Damascus and eight of them are twins, Anna and Arthur Bradt, Elizabeth and Kenneth Kinser, Esther and Marian Callatone and Richard and June Von Kaenal.

A citizens committee that wants to make Austintown Township “dry” rejects a proposal by the Mahoning County Liquor Dealers Association to “put out of business” the Rendezvous Villa night club if the group abandons a plan to put a townshipwide prohibition issue on the ballot in August.