Years Ago

March 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Sunday, March 14, the 73rd day of 2010. There are 292 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1743: A memorial service is held at Faneuil Hall in Boston honoring Peter Faneuil, who had donated the building bearing his name.

1794: Eli Whitney receives a patent for his cotton gin, an invention that revolutionizes America’s cotton industry.

1900: Congress ratifies the Gold Standard Act.

1923: President Warren G. Harding becomes the first chief executive to file an income tax report.

1951: During the Korean War, United Nations forces recapture Seoul.

1964: A jury in Dallas finds Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, and sentences him to death. (Both the conviction and death sentence are later overturned, but Ruby dies before he could be retried.)

1980: A Polish airliner crashes while making an emergency landing near Warsaw, killing all 87 people aboard, including 22 members of a U.S. amateur boxing team.

1990: The Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies hold a secret ballot that elect Mikhail S. Gorbachev to a new, powerful presidency.

VINDICATOR FILES

1985: Bernie Kosar announces that he will leave the University of Miami football team, where he has a year of eligibility left, and will play for the Cleveland Browns. The Boardman graduate made his announcement at a press conference at the VIP Entertainment Center in Niles.

Hearings begin in Columbus on a bill sponsored by Rep. Thomas P. Gilmartin, D-Youngstown, that would require legislative approval to close any state hospital.

1970: John C. Conley, 47, and his daughter, Joyce, 17, of Warren, the father and sister of a sailor coming home for a visit, are killed when a truck hits their car minutes after they picked up John E. Conley, 20, at the Ohio Turnpike. The younger Conley, who hitchhiked home to see his hospitalized mother, is in fair condition.

The future of the Mahoning Valley Regional Mass Transit Authority rests in the hands of Trumbull County commissioners, who have failed to pledge $5,274 as their share to obtain a $65,000 federal grant for a study.

1960: An estimated 4,000 people, many of them curiosity seekers, file past the bronze casket of S. Joseph “Sandy” Naples during calling hours at the Schiavone Funeral Home.

Youngstown Psychiatrist Dr. Merill D. Evans testifies that the book “Sex Life of a Cop” is obscene, with “no message, just a reiteration of various sexual descriptions” during a trial in the packed courtroom of Judge Erskine Maiden.

About 100 Youngstown University students and amateur astronomers gather on roof of the main building to watch a total eclipse of moon through a hazy sky.

1935: Dr. George W. Wilcox, president of the Youngstown Metropolitan Area Citizens’ Association, cites an angry father’s report that two sons of high school age lost large sums of money in a wide-open gambling joint on W. Federal Street as evidence that police are not cracking down on vice.

Youngstown Water Commissioner Dan C. Parish says he declined an offer of an engineering job in Russia that would have paid $1,000 a month for four years to oversee construction of ore bins near Moscow.