Years Ago

May 5, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Wednesday, May 5, the 125th day of 2010. There are 240 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1821: Napoleon Bona-parte, 51, dies in exile on the island of St. Helena.

1862: Mexican forces loyal to Benito Juarez defeat French troops sent by Napoleon III in the Battle of Puebla.

1925: Schoolteacher John T. Scopes is charged in Tennessee with violating a state law that prohibits teaching the theory of evolution. (Scopes is found guilty, but his conviction is later set aside.)

1942: During World War II, Japanese forces land on the Philippine island of Corregidor.

1955: The baseball musical “Damn Yankees” opens on Broadway.

1961: Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. becomes America’s first space traveler as he makes a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

VINDICATOR FILES

1985: Three of six Youngstown Board of Education members who traveled to a convention in Anaheim, Calif., stayed two extra days at taxpayers’ expense.

A year after Union Savings and Trust Co. in Warren joined three other area banks to form Bank One of Eastern Ohio, the organization necessary to bring them all under one operations system is essentially complete.

1970: One of the four students killed by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University is identified as Sandra Scheuer, 20, a Boardman girl described as a vivacious honor student looking forward to a career in speech and hearing therapy.

More than 25,000 voters, two thirds of them Democrats, cast ballots by 1 p.m. as Mahoning County citizens make choices in three party primaries.

A Mahoning Township man, Ronald Reed, 36, of Lowellville, and two of his four sons, Robert, 11, and David, 9, drown while on a fishing outing on Crystal Lake near Hillsville, Pa.

1960: The preliminary count for the 1960 census shows Mahoning County, excluding the city of Youngstown, has a population of 133,542.

Youngstown Smoke Control Engineer Walter I. Rauh embarks on a smoke elimination program that could cost Youngstown district steel mills $42 million for new equipment.

1935: Mahoning County schools place first and Trumbull County third in district scholarship tests held at Kent.

Betty Zeigler, 13-year-old Boardman school girl, is the Mahoning County spelling champion after winning the Vindicator Bee, and will compete in the National Bee at Washington, D.C.

Members of local garden clubs plant 100 flowering crab apple trees in Crandall Park. City Park Commissioner Lionel Evans says the Garden Forum is attempting to establish the tree as the symbol of Youngstown.