History for today

Today is Sunday, July 16, the 197th day of 2006. There are 168 days left in the year. On this date in 1945, the United States explodes its first experimental atomic bomb, in the desert of Alamogordo, N.M.
In 1790, the District of Columbia is established as the seat of the United States government. In 1862, David G. Farragut becomes the first rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. In 1918, Russia's Czar Nicholas II, his empress and their five children are executed by the Bolsheviks. In 1935, the first parking meters are installed, in Oklahoma City. In 1951, the novel "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger is first published. In 1969, Apollo 11 blasts off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon. In 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly reveals the existence of President Nixon's secret taping system. In 1979, Saddam Hussein becomes president of Iraq. In 1981, singer Harry Chapin is killed when his car is struck by a tractor-trailer on New York's Long Island Expressway. In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, die when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunges into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard, Mass.
July 16, 1981: General Motors Corp.'s automobile assembly line at the Lordstown complex will operate two shifts in an effort to catch up with the backlog of orders for Chevrolet Cavaliers and Pontiac J-2000s.
Israel says it will strike "crueler blows" at Palestinian guerrillas who rained dozens of Soviet-made rockets from Lebanon into Galilee, killing three civilians.
The Lordstown Planning Board of Appeals approves a permit for Cardinal Industries to build a 40-unit apartment complex on 6.2 acres at the corner of Salt Springs Roads and Virginia Street.
The Warren Women's Junior League will sponsor an appearance by television personality Phil Donahue at Packard Music Hall.
An increase in illegal parking, coupled with a shortage of manpower in the Youngstown Police Department, has detectives issuing parking tickets, something they have never done before.
Mahoning County Common Pleas judges decline to order county commissioners to provide more funding for Sheriff James A. Traficant Jr. and says the sheriff and commissioners will have to work out funding issues between themselves.
Youngstown's 1982 preliminary budget, which projects a $6 million deficit, is presented for public comment at a budget hearing. The public consisted of one person, Robert Barnett of Gypsy Lane, who wants the city to address flooding problems on the North Side at times of heavy rain.
July 16, 1966: Trustees of Mahoning Community College hire a Houston, Texas, architect to design a $20 million campus on a 300-acre site in Canfield.
Western Union Telegraph Co., a landmark at 42 Central Square for at least a half century, will move to the Youngstown Office Supply Co. building at 211 W. Boardman St.
A statewide teacher shortage is reflected in Youngstown district schools, which need about 100 more teachers by September. Youngstown city schools need 50 junior and senior high school teachers.
The crippling airline strike, in its ninth day, has left part of the usually crowded Youngstown Municipal Airport into "ghost" areas, while other sections are enjoying an unprecedented boom.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, 67, takes his fourth bride, a 23-year-old blonde, blue-eyed college sociology major from Portland, Ore.
July 16, 1956: Mahoning County will auction off about 9,500 pieces of property in a forfeited land sale of parcels on which taxes have not been paid for years.
Nearly 900 antique molds, some of them nearly a century old and used in making fancy milk glass pieces, are lost in a $300,000 fire of undetermined origin that destroyed the Kemple Glass Works in E. Clark St., East Palestine.
Production is halted and 6,500 workers are idle by what union leaders term an unauthorized strike at the huge transformer division of Westinghouse Electric Corp. in Sharon.
July 16, 1931: Charles H. Courim, 58, well-known Niles carpenter, is fatally injured when he slips over an embankment and falls against a moving B & amp;O freight train.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed about 75 percent of the field work for a survey of the proposed Mahoning-Shenango-Beaver rivers canal.
The public is warned against women going from house to house soliciting money for the Allied Council. The council receives funding from the Community Corp. and no one is authorized to make a special collection for it.
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