Today is Wednesday, Jan. 21, the 21st day of 2009. There are 344 days left in the year. On this date

Today is Wednesday, Jan. 21, the 21st day of 2009. There are 344 days left in the year. On this date in 1793, during the French Revolution, King Louis XVI, condemned for treason, is executed on the guillotine.

In 1858, Felix Marma Zuloaga becomes president of Mexico upon the ouster of Ignacio Comonfort. In 1861, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and four other Southerners resign from the U.S. Senate. In 1915, the first Kiwanis Club is founded, in Detroit. In 1924, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin dies at age 53. In 1950, former State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of being part of a Communist spy ring, is found guilty in New York of lying to a grand jury. (Hiss, who always proclaimed his innocence, serves less than four years in prison.) In 1954, the first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus, is launched at Groton, Conn. (However, the Nautilus does not make its first nuclear-powered run until nearly a year later.) In 1958, Charles Starkweather, 19, kills three relatives of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, at her family’s home in Lincoln, Neb. (Starkweather and Fugate go on a road trip which results in seven more slayings.) In 1959, Ohio sees widespread flooding caused by heavy rain and melted snow. Movie producer-director Cecil B. DeMille dies in Hollywood at age 77. Former child actor Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer is shot and killed during an argument in Mission Hills, Calif.; he was 31.

January 21, 1984: The latest blast of arctic air drops temperatures to record lows in the Mahoning Valley, with the mercury dropping to 16 below zero at the Youngstown Municipal Airport.

The trouble-plagued Zimmer Nuclear Power Plant at Moscow, Ohio, on the Ohio River will be converted into a coal powered electric generating plant.

Mrs. Myron Steinberg is elected president of the Heritage Manor, the Jewish home for the aged, succeeding Atty. Phillip A. Millstone.

January 21, 1969: An $8 million village of 1,200 to 1,800 homes and 300 townhouses is planned for Lordstown Township at the western end of the Meander Reservoir to house workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown.

Mayor Anthony B. Flask asks City Council to authorize the board of control to spend up to $10,000 for consultants to re-evaluate the city’s urban renewal program in light of the Federal Housing Act of 1968.

The G.M. McKelvey Co. will call for bids to adapt space in the Parkade to needs of the Mahoning County Welfare Department as soon as the state gives final approval for moving welfare offices to the Parkade.

January 21, 1959: One of the worst January rainstorms on record dumps more than 2 inches of rain on the Mahoning and Shenango valleys causing floods throughout the area.

Atty. Eugene B. Fox narrowly escapes death when a former mental patient attempts to kill him with a defective .32 caliber revolver in a parking lot at Boardman and Walnut streets. He shoved the pistol into Fox’s abdomen and pulled the trigger, but a defective firing pin spared the 30-year-old lawyer’s life.

Whether the state builds a Lake-to-River highway in eastern Ohio will depend on how traffic evolves from the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, says Guy E. Neeper, deputy state highway director for planning.

January 21, 1934: CWA work in Mahoning County will be virtually at a standstill and county projects will be idle while city and county officials arrange to reduce workers and work hours to conform to the new curtailed schedule. Altogether, 1,727 men must be dropped and all schedules must be reduced.

A “marked indifference” of high city officials is cited by Capt. Fred E. Smith, state director of aeronautics, as a major obstacle in the path of any efforts to provide Youngstown with a modern airport.

John F. Cantwell, real estate and insurance man, is appointed a member of the advisory council of the National Rivers and Harbors Congress, joining two other local men, J.C. Argetsinger and E. N. Nemenyi, on the council.