Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Today is Tuesday, March 24, the 83rd day of 2009. There are 282 days left in the year. On this date in 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez runs aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and begins leaking 11 million gallons of crude oil.
In 1765, Britain enacts the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers. In 1882, German scientist Robert Koch announces in Berlin that he has discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis. In 1909, Irish author and playwright J.M. Synge (“The Playboy of the Western World”) dies in Dublin at age 37. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill granting future independence to the Philippines. In 1944, in occupied Rome, the Nazis execute more than 300 civilians in reprisal for an attack by Italian partisans the day before that had killed 32 German soldiers. In 1955, the Tennessee Williams play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opens on Broadway. In 1958, Elvis Presley is inducted into the Army in Memphis, Tenn.
March 24, 1984: Dr. John J. Coffelt, who has been on medical leave, will retire as president of Youngstown State University.
Youngstown police have a dragnet for a 27-year-old city man who is the last person seen with Police Sgt. Buddy Taylor before Taylor was found shot to death.
America is in a sad state as far as blacks and the poor are concerned, but there’s still hope, John E. Jacob, national president of the Urban League, tells 350 people at the Youngstown Area Urban League’s annual dinner.
March 24, 1969: Gloster B. Cur-rent, national director of field administration for the National Association for the Advancement of colored People, tells 300 people at Centenary United Methodist Church, that the NAACP is as relevant today as it was when the struggle for Negro equality was in its infancy.
Vandals go on a weekend spree inside Roosevelt Elementary School, ransacking classrooms and spattering cafeteria floors and walls with 18 dozen eggs.
David Kerr, 39, a welder from Youngstown, dies in a Pittsburgh Hospital after being burned in an explosion at the Ohio Edison Co.’s Sammis plant on the Ohio River.
March 24, 1959: Andrew Rerko, operator of a Cities Service gasoline station at Maysville, Pa., just across the Ohio line, tells police the three men and a woman who escaped from the Mahoning County Jail robbed him of $50.
The dean of Central Square’s bookers of bug numbers and horse racing bets, Tony Lucci, 38, is arrested by Youngstown vice squad members for the second time in two days.
Twenty-eight Navy warships, including the heavy cruiser Macon, will visit Ashtabula in the summer as part of a cruise of the Great Lakes in connection with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
March 24, 1934: The responsibility of training new generations in the principles of a better way of living “under our new economic and social order of existence” is entrusted to the parent and teacher, Judge Robert N. Wilkin of the Ohio Supreme Court says during a visit to Youngstown.
Mill operations in Youngstown will dip slightly under the 50 percent mark due entirely to the confusion and uncertainty caused by the Federal Trade Commission report on steel basing points and the unstable labor situation in the Michigan automotive territory.
Ohio legislators are heading home to gauge public sentiment on a proposed state income tax that would produce between $16 million and $25 million.