Years Ago

Today is Sunday, Jan. 9, the ninth day of 2011. There are 356 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1788: Connecticut becomes the fifth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1793: Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard, using a hot-air balloon, flies between Philadelphia and Woodbury, N.J.

1861: Mississippi becomes the second state to secede from the Union, the same day that the Star of the West, a merchant vessel bringing reinforcements and supplies to Federal troops at Fort Sumter, S.C., retreats because of artillery fire in Charleston Harbor.

1945: During World War II, American forces begin landing at Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines.

1951: United Nations headquarters in New York is officially opened.

1960: On his 47th birthday, Vice President Richard Nixon becomes a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

1968: The Surveyor 7 space probe makes a soft landing on the moon, marking the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface.

1972: Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, speaking by telephone from the Bahamas to reporters in Hollywood, says a purported biography of him by Clifford Irving is a fake.

1995: In New York, the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and 11 other defendants accused of conspiring to wage holy war against the United States begins. (All the defendants are convicted of seditious conspiracy, except for two who reached plea agreements with the government.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: The Full Employment Action Council says in Washington that although Ohio’s official unemployment rate for October was 9 percent, the “real” level of joblessness is 16.2 percent.

Nicholas M. Wolsonovich, superintendent of Youngstown Diocese Schools, is held at gunpoint and threatened after interrupting a burglary at the home of his father-in-law, Charles B. Cushwa Jr., on Tod Lane.

1971: A Warren couple, Frank DeCeglie, 19, and Kathleen Fasulo, 18, die of carbon monoxide poisoning in a car at the Skyway Drive-In Theater on N. Leavitt Road.

Room rates at St. Elizabeth and Youngstown Osteopathic hospitals increase by 20 percent for private rooms and $5 for semiprivate and ward accommodations.

Youngstown City Council approves a budget for 1971 that has a $100,000 surplus in the general fund.

Kay Sittig, Canfield High School music teacher, is honored as Canfield’s “Citizen of the Year” by the Canfield Community Club at its sixth annual awards dinner.

1961: Three bandits rob the F.W. Woolworth Co. store in the Struthers Plaza at 8:30 in the morning, escaping with an undetermined amount of cash.

Marvin Gooden, 43, and Raymond Foster, 32, shoot each other to death in a feud over Gooden’s estranged wife. The shootings gave Youngstown its first homicide of the new year.

The Erie-Lackawanna Railroad announces a $1.6 million program to repair 725 box cars at its new Meadville, Pa., car shop.

1936: The Oles Market, closed for a week after a dispute between the owner and employees, will reopen with all non-union workers.

State liquor agents and Struthers police arrest six alleged bootleggers and two lottery number writers.

Mahoning County juvenile court authorities, alarmed by the large increase in delinquency cases, call on city relief authorities to help rehabilitate indigent families. Petty theft has increased along with poverty, says William Cleaver of juvenile court.

Youngstown Mayor Lionel Evans says he has inherited a city that had been operating on debts and overdrafts and is about $3 million in the hole.