Years ago

February 18, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Thursday, Feb. 18, the 49th day of 2010. There are 316 days left in the year. On this date in 1885, Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is published in the U.S. for the first time (it had been published in Canada and England the previous December).

In 1564, artist Michelangelo dies in Rome. In 1735, the first opera presented in America, “Flora, or Hob in the Well,” is performed in present-day Charleston, S.C. In 1861, Jefferson Davis is sworn in as the provisional president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Ala. In 1930, photographic evidence of Pluto (now designated a “dwarf planet”) is discovered by Clyde W. Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. In 1960, the 8th Winter Olympic Games are formally opens in Squaw Valley, Calif., by Vice President Richard M. Nixon. In 1970, the “Chicago Seven” defendants are found not guilty of conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic national convention; five are convicted of violating the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 (those convictions are later reversed). In 2001, auto racing star Dale Earnhardt, Sr. dies from injuries suffered in a crash at the Daytona 500; he was 49.

February 18, 1985: Warren’s first radial keratotomy, a surgical procedure that corrects near sightedness, is conducted in St. Joseph Hospital by Dr. Richard D. Shapiro, the hospital’s chief of surgical specialities.

David H. Brown, 44, of Columbiana, and his 4-year-old son, Robert, escape injury when their single-engine plane crashed into a snow drift at Elser Airport on Sharrott Road.

Perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche Jr. is attempting to block the dismantling of blast furnaces in the Campbell Works and has asked for support by U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. and Campbell Mayor James Vargo.

February 18, 1970: The Warren Avenue Market in Youngstown is robbed for the second time in a week by an armed bandit who escaped with $290.

Sylvan H.D. Einstein, 70, a Youngstown State University professor and former merchandising manager for Strouss, dies in North Side Hospital. He was 70.

As of June 1, Cleveland policemen and firemen with two years of service will make $10,044 a year.

February 18, 1960: A dispute over relatives of Boardman officials on the township payroll explodes just before the end of a meeting after Trustee Faye C. Heintzelman complains that his 18-year-old nephew should get a $10 supplement to his $240 per month salary because he is working night turn as a police and fire desk operator. Heintzelman says relatives of other trustees have received favorable treatment.

A 9-year-old West Side boy accidentally shoots his 5-year-old sister in the leg with a gun their father thought was unloaded.

M. Sgt. John A. Simchick, who served with the 32nd Infantry, 7th Division, is assigned as an instructor in the department of military science at Youngstown University.

February 18, 1935: Police Chief Leroy Goodwin says there will be no change in the personnel of the detective squad despite a weekend during which there were no vice arrests in Youngstown.

Mark H. Shank, an Akron attorney under a death sentence for poisoning an associate and three members of the associates family in Arkansas, loses his fourth appeal in the state courts, apparently exhausting his avenues of appeal in Arkansas.

An American Oil Co. truck, bound for Youngstown from Baltimore with 1,300 gallons of oil in drums is virtually melted into junk when it catches fire 30 miles north of Pittsburgh. The driver, Gilbert C. Mellinger of Barberton, escapes uninjured.