Today is Sunday, May 18, the 139th day of 2008. There are 227 days left in the year. On this date in

Today is Sunday, May 18, the 139th day of 2008. There are 227 days left in the year. On this date in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In 1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorses “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept that is renounced 58 years later with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In 1927, a schoolhouse in Bath, Mich., is blown up with explosives planted by local farmer Andrew Kehoe, who then sets off a dynamite-laden automobile; the attacks kill 38 children and six adults, including Kehoe, who’d earlier killed his wife. In 1967, Tennessee Gov. Buford Ellington signs a measure repealing the law against teaching evolution that was used to prosecute John T. Scopes in 1925. In 1980, the Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state explodes, leaving 57 people dead or missing.

May 18, 1983: Strouss’ announces that it will close its downtown Warren department store May 28. The store has been a downtown fixture since September 1940.

Julian Suso, the new director of the Youngstown Revitalization Foundation, says downtown Youngstown is at a “threshold,” with only one way to go — up.

May 18, 1968: Leslie Emery, a junior majoring in education at Youngstown State University, is crowned Spring Weekend Queen during a semi-formal dance at Yankee Lake.

George Perrault Jr., an executive vice president of E.W. Bliss Co. of Salem, is the new president of Sharon Steel Corp.

May 18, 1958: A U.S. Census Bureau survey shows that the busy Youngstown Metropolitan area, the nation’s fourth largest steel producing district, holds its place as Ohio’s third most important labor and industrial area, behind only Cleveland and Cincinnati.

May 18, 1933: The Columbiana County Rural Mail Carriers Associ–ation elects L.R. Twiss of Salineville the organization’s president.

Youngstown Mayor Mark E. Moore advocates the immediate passage of some kind of state sales tax, noting that 80 percent of people don’t pay any direct taxes.

A 33-year-old Forest Avenue woman, angered when Herman Haas, a weight guesser at Idora Park, who guessed her weight wrong, pulls a switchblade knife and cuts the easy-going guesser,