Years Ago

Today is Thursday, Aug. 6, the 218th day of 2009. There are 147 days left in the year. On this date in 1945, during World War II, the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare.

In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire goes out of existence as Emperor Francis II abdicates. In 1809, one of the leading literary figures of the Victorian era, poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. In 1859, the Australian passenger ship SS Admella, en route from Port Adelaide to Melbourne, strikes a reef off South Australia and breaks apart; of the 113 people on board, only 24 survive. In 1890, convicted murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed in the electric chair as he is put to death at Auburn State Prison in New York. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle of New York becomes the first woman to swim the English Channel, arriving in Kingsdown, England, from France in 141‚Ñ2 hours.

August 6, 1984: A 34-year-old inmate in the Mahoning County Jail plunges 50 feet to a concrete parking lot when a rope fashioned from a knotted blanket snaps during an escape attempt. He is in guarded condition in South Side Hospital.

Chief Justice Warren Burger tells the nation’s lawyers that their crowded profession has become marred by attorneys who sell their services like ad men and solicit clients in disaster cases wherein liability is “either clear or in no great doubt.”

Winds fanned a barn fire at the Bernet farm on state Route 30 near Hanoverton that killed 17 dairy cows.

August 6, 1969: A 34-year-old Youngstown man was robbed and then shot when he fled a group of bearded men who were digging a grave for him near the city dump in Weathersfield Township. He is in satisfactory condition in St. Elizabeth Hospital.

A Boardman police captain is demoted to patrolman after trustees find that he had been sleeping in his cruiser while on duty.

The Ohio Senate passes a bill 17-15 that will allow local option votes on Sunday sales of liquor in precincts that are already wet.

August 6, 1959: The Cleveland Post Office announces that a letter mailed before 5 p.m. is virtually certain of delivery the next day anywhere within a 16-county area of northern Ohio.

Youngstown Area Community Chest sets a goal of $1.2 million for its fall campaign.

Youngstown District Girl Scouts who were at the Rockwood Camp, the national Girl Scouts camp in Bethesda, Md., visit Congressman Michael J. Kirwan at the U.S. Capitol.

August 6, 1934: Judge Louis T. Farr, 69, who served four terms on the Ohio appellate court, dies after being stricken with a heart attack on the porch of his home on Lincoln Way in Lisbon. Just a week earlier, he had been campaigning at Idora Park for a fifth term on the court.

The Newton Steel Co. plant in Newton Falls, a subsidiary of the Corrigan-McKinney Steel Co. of Cleveland, closes down for an indefinite time, putting 700 men out of work.

Arthur Webber, 25-year-old stunt pilot from Unity, crashes to his death near Columbiana when a wing tears from his old mail plane during a power dive.