Today is Tuesday, March 11, the 70th day of 2009. There are 295 days left in the year. On this date

March 11, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Tuesday, March 11, the 70th day of 2009. There are 295 days left in the year. On this date in 1942, as Japanese forces continue to advance in the Pacific during World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur leaves the Philippines for Australia. (MacArthur, who subsequently vows, “I shall return,” keeps that promise more than 21‚Ñ2 years later.)

In 1861, the Constitution of the Confederate States of America is adopted during a convention in Montgomery, Ala. In 1888, the famous “Blizzard of ’88” begins inundating the northeastern United States, resulting in some 400 deaths. In 1930, former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Bill, providing war supplies to countries fighting the Axis. In 1957, Charles Van Doren’s 14-week run on the rigged NBC game show “Twenty One” ends as he loses to Atty. Vivienne Nearing; Van Doren’s take was $129,000. In 1959, the Lorraine Hansberry drama “A Raisin in the Sun” opens at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater. In 1965, the Rev. James J. Reeb, a white minister from Boston, dies after being beaten by whites during civil rights disturbances in Selma, Ala. In 1977, more than 130 hostages held in Washington, D.C., by Hanafi Muslims are freed after ambassadors from three Islamic nations join the negotiations. In 1985, Mikhail S. Gorbachev is chosen to succeed the late Soviet President Konstantin U. Chernenko.

March 11, 1984: Strikebound Youngstown Steel Door Co., once one of Youngstown’s major employers, may be sold soon to an independent investment group.

Sylvia Sommerfield, historical romance author who lives in Edinburg, Pa., will be one of the featured speakers at the International Booklovers Conference in London.

The opening game of Edward J. DeBartolo’s Pittsburgh Maulers in the United States Football League is a sellout at three rivers Stadium. The Maulers will play the Birmingham Stallions. Cliff Stoudt, former Youngstown State University and Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, is the Stallions quarterback.

March 11, 1969: Mrs. Rose M. Woodrum, district manager of the Youngstown Social Security office, is named deputy director of the Social Security Division of Registration Operations in Baltimore, Md.

Three youths use a loaded and cocked sawed-off shotgun to terrorize three men in a $453 armed robbery at Pete’s Music Co., 546 Market St.

Army Spec. 4 Walter Bruce Hoxworth, 20, of Struthers dies in combat in Vietnam. He held two Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in previous action.

March 11, 1959: John D. Lard, 34, of 621 Joseph St., is killed when he was caught between the door of a coke oven and the extractor of a coke pusher machine at the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.

Nearly a half century of protection in Ohio for the quail is approaching an end. The Ohio House passes and sends to the Senate a bill setting a session and bag limit for the bobwhite, which was placed on a protected list in 1913.

A squad of 10 Youngstown police, detectives and FBI agents surrounds a Lincoln Avenue rooming house after receiving a tip that fugitive bank robber Frank Sprenz has holed up there. The tip was false.

March 11, 1934: Mrs. Thomas Jeffries, Youngstown woman whose husband was killed in a railroad accident in Pittsburgh, says she has been pestered by ambulance-chasing lawyers to such an extent that she has posted a “no lawyers wanted” sign on her front door.

William Randolph Hearst declares that the National Recovery Act is interfering with economic recovery. “Honest business,” the publisher says, “is always anxious to be humanitarian, eager to be patriotic.”

More than 800 people crowd the gymnasium of Buckeye School for the Minstrel Show sponsored by the Dads Club of Buckeye Plat. Ray M. Saunders was interlocutor.