Years Ago

Today is Tuesday, Feb. 15, the 46th day of 2011. There are 319 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1879: President Rutherford B. Hayes signs a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

1898: The U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously blows up in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260 crew members and bringing the United States closer to war with Spain.

1933: President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt escapes an assassination attempt in Miami that mortally wounds Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak; gunman Giuseppe Zangara is executed more than four weeks later.

1961: Seventy-three people, including an 18-member U.S. figure skating team, en route to the World Championships in Czechoslovakia, are killed in the crash of a Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 in Belgium.

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Peter Jennings, senior editor of ABC-TV’s “World News Tonight,” speaking at Edward W. Powers Auditorium as a Junior League lecturer, says the United States has been spared from terrorism, compared to much of the rest of the world.

1971: Roger Kyes, an East Palestine native, who served as an executive vice president of General Motors Corp. and was a former U.S. deputy secretary of defense, dies at the Sciota Country Club in Franklin County while attended a wedding reception for his niece.

1961: A 26-year-old Massillon woman said to be the driver for a ring of bank robbers who worked the Youngstown area is captured by the FBI.

Two children, Rosemary Wheeler, 16, and Samuel Wheeler, 11, die when fire sweeps through the family home in Fowler Township, Trumbull County.

1936: The Vindicator’s straw poll shows that President Roosevelt is gaining popularity, even in some traditionally Republican wards.

Steel output in the Youngstown district advances by another percent to 63 percent of capacity, the highest rate in six years.