Years Ago

August 17, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Tuesday, Aug. 17, the 229th day of 2010. There are 136 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1807: Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat begins heading up the Hudson River on its successful round-trip between New York and Albany.

1915: A mob in Cobb County, Ga., lynches Jewish businessman Leo Frank, whose death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had been commuted to life imprisonment. (Frank, who’d maintained his innocence, is pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986.)

1943: The Allied conquest of Sicily is completed as U.S. and British forces enter Messina.

1960: The newly renamed Beatles (formerly the Silver Beetles), consisting of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and just-hired drummer Pete Best, begin their first gig in Hamburg, West Germany, at the Indra Club.

1969: Hurricane Camille slams into the Mississippi coast as a Category 5 storm that is blamed for 256 U.S. deaths, three in Cuba.

1978: The first successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight ends as Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman land their Double Eagle II outside Paris.

VINDICATOR FILES

1985: The Rev. John O. Hubert, 57, formerly of Niles, is elected general minister of and president of the 1.2 million member Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) during the denomination’s general Assembly in Des Moines.

The Everly Brothers perform at Blossom Music Center.

The Cleveland Browns say Youngstown’s Bernie Kosar will see action in the first exhibition game of the season against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles will also have Youngstown connections, with Ron Javorski at quarterback and Paul McFadden kicking field goals.

1970: Virginia Kirsch, 21, of Brookfield, a Red Cross worker sent to Vietnam two weeks earlier, is found stabbed to death in her quarters near Saigon.

The Youngstown NAACP asks the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Branch to investigate a fire that destroyed a Liberty Township home being build for a Negro family.

1960: Warren Mayor Walter Pestrak orders police Chief Manley English to crackdown on traffic violators “as far as our men and money will permit.”

The U.S. satellite Echo 1 is clearly visible in Youngstown’s night skies, as bright as a first magnitude star.

1935: Three unmasked, armed men escape with $400 during a daylight robbery at the main Isaly Dairy office at 1033 Mahoning Ave.

Quick action by clerks at the Western Auto Supply Co. in Youngstown foils a counterfeiter. City detectives who are summoned to the scene find 26 counterfeit $20 bills in the man’s car.

A group of Struthers’ oldest residents are the first to cross the new North Side Bridge, which was built at a cost of $35,000.