Today is Thursday, Dec. 26, the 360th day of 2002. There are five days left in the year. This is

Today is Thursday, Dec. 26, the 360th day of 2002. There are five days left in the year. This is Boxing Day, and the first day of the weeklong African-American holiday Kwanzaa. On this date in 1776, the British suffer a major defeat in the Battle of Trenton during the Revolutionary War.
In 1799, former President George Washington is eulogized by Col. Henry Lee as "first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen." In 1893, Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung is born in Hunan province. In 1917, during World War I, the U.S. government takes over operation of the nation's railroads. In 1941, Winston Churchill becomes the first British prime minister to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress. In 1944, in the World War II Battle of the Bulge, the embattled U.S. 101st Airborne Division is relieved by units of the 4th Armored Division. In 1944, Tennessee Williams' play "The Glass Menagerie" is first performed publicly, at the Civic Theatre in Chicago. In 1972, the 33rd president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, dies in Kansas City, Mo. In 1975, the Soviet Union inaugurates the world's first supersonic transport service with a flight of its Tupolev 144 airliner from Moscow to Alma-Ata. In 1996, 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey is found beaten and strangled in the basement of her family's home in Boulder, Colo. (To date, the slaying remains unsolved.) In 2000, Michael McDermott, an employee at an Internet firm in Wakefield, Mass., shoots and kills seven co-workers. (McDermott is later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.)
December 26, 1977: Charlie Chaplin, whose silent movie misadventures as the shuffling, cane-twirling Little Tramp became part of the world's comic folklore, dies at 88 in Switzerland.
Twenty-two Youngstown area high school students participate in a four-day Junior Achievement Management Conference in Bowling Green.
Charles Joseph Barker is the Youngstown area's first Christmas Day baby, born at 12:33 a.m. in North Side Hospital, a son of Charles L. and Mildred Lenhart Barker.
Advertisement: Litton Microwave clearance at Strouss: $100 off the $499 model and $80 off the $579 model.
December 26, 1962: For the second consecutive year, Christmas passes without a traffic fatality in Mahoning County. Youngstown has gone three years without a holiday fatality.
Burglars with a talent for jimmying locks make off with more than $1,000 from Poulakos Bakery, 3660 Shirley Road, over the Christmas holiday.
More than 60 Mahoning County sheriff's deputies, city police, firemen and auxiliary police swoop down on the old West Ave. water works in an unsuccessful hunt for an escaped county jail inmate who had fled from South Side Hospital.
December 26, 1952: The Civil Aeronautics Administration rules that the controversial Air Force water tower at the Youngstown Municipal Airport is not a hazard to air traffic and may remain.
A Mahoning County jail prisoner claims that some jail runners are "stooges" of sheriff's deputies, performing errands and receiving special privileges. That, he claims, was a factor in the recent escape of two prisoners. No one outside of the sheriff's office even knew about that escape until the men were rearrested in New Castle.
Youngstown police are holding a 54-year-old Campbell man on an open charge in connection with an alleged assault on a 9-year-old girl in a downtown store. The man was grabbed by a passerby about a block from the store when the girl's mother shouted "catch that man."
December 26, 1927: The championship of girls basketball teams in Trumbull County is won by the Howland sextet, to the surprise of few since almost the whole squad from the 1926 team returned.
Little does the Sunday afternoon motorist realize as he drives through Vienna in Trumbull County that this peaceful village at one time boasted a population of 2,000, had a half-dozen thriving coal mines, a bank, a dozen flourishing stores and 28 saloons. Its heyday began in 1870 and lasted about 15 years until the coal industry died out.
The estate of Elizabeth W. Hine, widow of Cecil D. Hine, is appraised in Mahoning County Probate Court at $1,129,242. Mrs. Hine owned stock in the G.M. McKelvey Co., General Fireproofing Co., Sharon Steel Hoop Co., Youngstown Sheet & amp; Tube Co. and Republic Iron & amp; Steel Co., as well as liberty bonds and real estate.