Today is Tuesday, May 13, the 134th day of 2008. There are 232 days left in the year. On this date

Today is Tuesday, May 13, the 134th day of 2008. There are 232 days left in the year. On this date in 1918, the first U.S. airmail stamps, featuring a picture of a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, are introduced with a face value of 24 cents. (On a few of the stamps, the biplane was printed upside-down; the “inverted Jenny,” as it came to be called, instantly became a collector’s item.)

In 1607, English colonists arriveby ship at the site of what became the Jamestown settlement in Virginia. (The colonists went ashore the next day.) In 1846, the United States declares that a state of war already exists with Mexico. In 1917, three children near Fatima, Portugal, report seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary. In 1940, in his first speech as prime minister of Britain, Winston Churchill tells the House of Commons, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” In 1954, President Eisenhower signs into law the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Act. In 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, are spat upon and their limousine battered by rocks thrown by anti-U.S. demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1981, Pope John Paul II is shot and seriously wounded in St. Peter’s Square by Turkish assailant Mehmet Ali Agca. In 1985, a confrontation between Philadelphia authorities and the radical group MOVE ends as police drop an explosive onto the group’s headquarters; 11 people died in the resulting fire.

May 13, 1983: Youngstown Commerce Park, a project aimed at reawakening the Mahoning Valley’s industrial economy, is getting an unexpected grant of $470.000 from the federal government.

Mayor Joseph Cicero’s plan to rezone portions of Robbins Avenue from residential B to commercial is rejected by the City Planning Commission after property owners protested.

A federal appeals court upholds the extortion, bribery and racketeering convictions of former Mahoning County Sheriff Ray T. Davis and one of his sergeants.

First Federal Savings of Youngstown offers a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 10.95 percent for those with a 20 percent down payment.

May 13, 1968: Melvin D. Johnson is elected scout executive of the Mahoning Valley Boy Scout Council, filling the position left by H.E. Katschke, who retired.

Seventy feet of new curbing in Vindicator Square is torn up at a cost of between $300 and $600 after the city provides flawed drawings to the Parella Construction Co.

E. Ray Davis, an Austintown Township trustee, officially announces his candidacy for chairman of the Mahoning Country Republican Party.

111The Austintown Board of Education delays hiring an architect for a new junior high school after one board member points out that one of the prime contenders, Kling & Frost of Youngstown, gave the board an appreciation dinner at the Youngstown Club.

May 13, 1933: More than a railroad car of spoiled canned fruit is seized by City Food Inspector C.S. Deibel The food was being offered for sale to area grocers.

City Relief Superintendent Peter J. Corll, says 800 families have been cut from the city soup kitchen lists because of improved business conditions.

Dr. Herman A. Kling is appointed an assistant city physician and Dr. W.O. Mermis is promoted to chief of the staff of city physicians.