Years Ago

April 16, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Friday, April 16, the 106th day of 2010. There are 259 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1862: President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia.

1879: St. Bernadette, who’d described seeing visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, dies in Nevers, France.

1917: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returns to Russia after years of exile.

1935: The radio comedy program “Fibber McGee and Molly” premieres on NBC’s Blue Network.

1947: The French ship Grandcamp blows up at the harbor in Texas City, Texas; another ship, the High Flyer, explodes the following day. The blasts and resulting fires kill nearly 600 people.

1960: Shortly before midnight, rock-and-roll performer Eddie Cochran, 21, is fatally injured in a taxi crash in Chippenham, Wiltshire, England; he dies the next day.

1996: Britain’s Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah, the Duchess of York, announce they are divorcing.

2007: In the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, student Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech before taking his own life.

VINDICATOR FILES

1985: Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp.’s board of directors votes to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy after failing to win concessions from creditors owed $500 million.

Gov. Richard F. Celeste tells a gathering of Mahoning and Trumbull county elected officials that if the Reagan administration eliminates the federal revenue sharing program, Ohio and its communities will lose $150 million.

U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti rules that John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland autoworker, can be extradited to Israel to stand trial on charges that he was a Nazi death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

1970: Binama Realty Corp., a specialist in revitalizing major downtown properties, is sold to Warren interests in a $1 million transaction. The sale is confirmed by Martin Lackey, a former partner in Binama.

Irvin J. Nisonger retires as superintendent of Boardman schools and the board of education appoints Grant F. Kibbel to succeed him.

Mahoning County sheriff’s deputies and a Boardman police narcotics officer conduct a raid on a E. Western Reserve Road home and arrest four people and confiscate a large quantity of drugs.

1960: A 17-year-old East German girl circus acrobat practicing her act for the Mills Brothers Circus in Jefferson, Ashtabula County, falls 40 feet to the ground. Doris Opoalka is in critical condition at the Cleveland Clinic after undergoing five hours of surgery. The circus is scheduled to perform next in Canfield.

Two flim flam men con John Turner of Fairview Avenue out of $600, promising him a four-fold return on his money.

Youngstown police arrest two 16-year-old youths for breaking into four business firms.

Census reports for the 19th Congressional District climb to 339,703, or nearly 80 percent of the estimated number of resident in Mahoning County and southern Trumbull County.

1935: A record cold wave brings ice, snow and a killing frost to the Youngstown area, with the temperature dipping to 18 degrees in Canfield.

Mahoning County surveyor George M. Montgomery says that if all local road jobs receive federal funding from a $1 billion fund being proposed in Washington, many of the county’s indigent could be put to work on projects.