Years Ago

Today is Friday, Aug. 21, the 233rd day of 2009. There are 132 days left in the year. On this date in 1959, Hawaii becomes the 50th state as President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order, five months after signing the Hawaiian statehood bill.

In 1609, Galileo Galilei demonstrates his new telescope, capable of magnifying images of objects ninefold, to a group of officials atop the Campanile in Venice. In 1831, Nat Turner leads a violent slave rebellion in Virginia resulting in the deaths of at least 55 white people. (He is later executed.) In 1858, the first of seven debates between Illinois senatorial contenders Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas takes place. In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. (The painting turns up two years later, in Italy.) In 1983, Philippine opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr., ending a self-imposed exile in the United States, is shot dead moments after stepping off a plane at Manila International Airport.

August 21, 1984: The LTV Steel Co. announces it will indefinitely shut down its seamless pipe stretch reduction line at its Campbell Works, laying off 250 workers in the Youngstown area.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, a registered Democrat who was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations by President Reagan, got high marks from the Ohio delegation to the Republican National Convention for her speech in which she said Democrats treated foreign affairs as an afterthought. “She brought enthusiasm to the crowd,” says Dr. William Binning.

August 21, 1969: A young Sharpsville teacher, his infant daughter and a Kent man are killed in a two-car crash near Orangeville. Dead are Jack Layman, 25, a teacher at Sharon Junior High, and his daughter, Kimberly Sue, 5 months old, and Kermit Taylor, 59, of Kent.

Trumbull County commissioners Robert E. Hagan and Gary Thompson refuse to support a motion by Commissioner Lamar Young that the county implement a permissive sales tax.

The mercury at the Youngstown Municipal Airport drops to 43 degrees overnight, tying the record low for the date registered in 1950.

August 21, 1959: Plans for a multimillion-dollar residential development on the Agnew property between Market Street and Hitchcock Road are announced by real estate man Ralph Hartenstein.

Held over at the Paramount, Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

August 21, 1934: Arthur Gundry, chairman of the city council utilities committee, launches a fight to bring to Youngstown benefits of a new rate offered by Ohio Edison Co. to Akron that could save customers nearly a million dollars.

Two masked bandits rob the manager of the Southern Hills Country Club of $1,100 while trustees of the club played bridge and ping pong on the second floor of the clubhouse, unaware of the robbery.