Years ago
Today is Thursday, Aug. 27, the 239th day of 2009. There are 126 days left in the year. On this date in 1859, Edwin L. Drake drills the first successful oil well in the United States, at Titusville, Pa.
In 1883, the island volcano Krakatoa blows up; the resulting tidal waves in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait claim some 36,000 lives in Java and Sumatra. In 1892, fire seriously damages New York’s original Metropolitan Opera House. In 1908, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, is born near Stonewall, Texas.. In 1975, Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia’s 3,000-year-old monarchy, dies in Addis Ababa at age 83 almost a year after being overthrown. In 1979, British war hero Lord Louis Mountbatten and three other people, including his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, are killed off the coast of Ireland in a boat explosion claimed by the Irish Republican Army. In 1989, the first U.S. commercial satellite rocket is launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. — a Delta booster carrying a British communications satellite, the Marcopolo 1. In 2006, a Comair CRJ-100 crashes after trying to take off from the wrong runway in Lexington, Ky., killing 49 people and leaving the co-pilot the sole survivor. In 2004, President George W. Bush signs executive orders designed to strengthen the CIA director’s power over the nation’s intelligence agencies and create a national counterterrorism center.
August 27, 1984: A Hermitage man and three other suspects are arrested in a hotel near the Pittsburgh airport with $2 million worth of cocaine, the biggest drug bust in Western Pennsylvania history.
A Youngstown man, Thomas Costello, 34, and a 5-year-old Pittsburgh boy are injured when a fireworks canister landed in box seats at a Pirates baseball game in Three Rivers Stadium.
August 27, 1969: Nicholas Parish, owner of Southern Airways, and a student pilot, Joseph Sudol, die in a crash during a training flight less than a mile from the airport.
The Youngstown Area Development Corp. receives a grant of $52,000 from the Small Business Administration, the first of its type for an Ohio city, says Atty. Nathaniel Jones, president of the YADC.
August 27, 1959: Pennsylvania Gov. David Lawrence tells a dinner crowd in Sharon that work will begin within months on the 100-mile long Pittsburgh-to-Lake Erie highway
Youngstown Park Supt. Edward Finamore says that if the current heat wave continues, city swimming pools will remain open at least a few additional days with skeleton crews.
Struthers opens on bids for construction of a new sewage disposal plant estimated at $1.5 million.
August 27, 1934: Mrs. Benjamin Warner, mother of the four brothers who built the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Corporation, dies in California. She was well-known in the Youngstown district, where she and her husband operated the old Opera House at Niles and built the first Warner Theater after it burned. She is the mother-in-law of David Robbins, who operates the Warner Theater in Youngstown.
Warren police arrest a 17-year-old and 19-year old in the murder of Fred R. Greist during a car theft in the downtown area a month ago. The arrests close the city’s only unsolved murder of the year.