Years Ago

Today is Wednesday, Aug. 12, the 224th day of 2009. There are 141 days left in the year. On this date in 1909, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home to the Indianapolis 500, first opens.

In 1859, poet and English professor Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the words to “America the Beautiful,” is born in Falmouth, Mass. In 1867, President Andrew Johnson sparks a move to impeach him as he defies Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. In 1898, fighting in the Spanish-American War comes to an end. In 1944, during World War II, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, is killed with his co-pilot when their explosives-laden Navy plane blows up over England. In 1953, the Soviet Union conducts a secret test of its first hydrogen bomb. In 1978, Pope Paul VI, who had died Aug. 6 at age 80, is buried in St. Peter’s Basilica. In 1981, IBM introduces its first personal computer, the model 5150. In 1985, the world’s worst single-aircraft disaster occurs as a crippled Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashes into a mountain, killing 520 people.

August 12, 1984: Dr. Robert Zorn, superintendent of Poland local schools, says he will recommend that the board vote to close the 120-year-old Union Elementary School in a district reorganization and ask for a bond issue to pay for a football and soccer field.

Most new car dealers in the Youngstown area have been rolling in cash during one of the hottest sale booms in memory, but now some are facing a shortage of cars to sell.

Youngstown Health Commissioner Neil Altman vows to fight any board action to remove him from the post he has held for four years.

NRM Corp. of Columbiana is training 14 Chinese technicians for six months on how to operate truck tire production equipment valued at $6 million, which is part of the industrialization of the Peoples Republic of China.

August 12, 1969: Wilbur Love Sr., 53, operator of the Riverside Auto Body Shop on Petrie Street, is killed when a drum he was working on with an acetylene torch explodes.

A break in an 8-inch water line on W. Federal Street in front of the Strouss-Hershberg store floods the street and cuts water service to businesses in the block.

Donald A. Weber is named by General Motors to its public relations staff and is named assistant manager of public relations for Northern Ohio.

August 12, 1959: Ohio Turnpike Commission officials arrest a 30-year-old Youngstown man on charges that he embezzled at least $4,000 in collections from the Turnpike’s Eastgate Terminal.

Mayor Frank X. Kryzan says Youngstown’s parking free-for-all will end at the close of the week, and he will submit a new plan to City council.

Several hundred Youngstown district residents are among 1,973 taxpayers in northeastern Ohio who have tax refund checks waiting for them, says Melvin J. Burton, district director of the Cleveland Internal Revenue Service district.

August 12, 1934: The Youngs-town Junior Chamber of Commerce launches a movement to place a Mahoning County home rule charter issue on the ballot.

The Rev. William S. Nash, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church of Willoughby, is appointed pastor of St. Edward’s Church in Youngstown.

The Republic Steel Corp. advises the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers during a meeting in Washington that it will comply with wages, hours and working conditions set forth in the union’s scale for Warren, Ohio.