Years Ago

Years Ago

Today is Monday, July 18, the 199th day of 2011. There are 166 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

A.D. 64: The Great Fire of Rome begins.

1536: The English Parliament passes an act declaring the authority of the pope void in England.

1610: Highly influential Italian baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio dies in Porto Ercole at age 38.

1911: Actor Hume Cronyn is born in London, Ontario, Canada.

1932: The United States and Canada sign a treaty to develop the St. Lawrence Seaway.

1940: The Democratic national convention at Chicago Stadium nominates President Franklin D. Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term in office.

1947: President Harry S. Truman signs a Presidential Succession Act which places the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.

1969: A car driven by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) plunges off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard; his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, drowns.

1981: Six weeks after being paroled from prison, Jack Henry Abbott, acclaimed for his book “In the Belly of the Beast,” fatally stabs waiter Richard Adan. (Abbott is convicted of manslaughter and sent back to prison; he later commits suicide.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Three Ohio companies, Cleveland Electric Illuminating, Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Leaseway Transportation, are among 42 major companies that not only paid no federal income tax on their 1985 profits, but received money from the government under the 1981 tax cut legislation.

LTV Steel Co.’s three Youngstown area plants will continue to operate in the wake of the parent corporation filing for protection under Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

GF Corp. announces a profit of $233,000 on sales of $32.7 million during the second quarter of the year.

Cityfest opens on Federal Plaza East with an international food fair and a variety of ethic singers and dancers.

1971: The Rev. Radoslav Filipovich is appointed the priest at Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox Church, succeeding the Very Rev Uglesha Yetich, who retired.

Chester McPhee, president of the Youngstown Board of Education and Dr. Edwin L. Weaver, former president of the Youngstown Area Council of Church, take out petitions for the Board of Education.

Penn-Ohio Junior College, located in a 2 Ω story white brick building at 3517 Market St., receives accreditation as a two-year business school from the Accrediting commission for Business Schools.

Dr. David Sweet, Ohio director of development, and state Sen. Harry Meshel, D-33rd, plan to meeting with union and management of U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works to discuss what the state can do in relation to the shutdown of the plant.

1961:The Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. is planning about $250 million in expansion and improvements in 1962-64.

A six month study of financial trends in Youngstown government between 1947 and 1959 recommends that the city do a better job of collecting the municipal income taxes it is owed and that it pursue long-range financial planning.

Miss Maude L. Blair of Detroit donates more than 300 volumes of McGuffey readers to the William Holmes McGuffey Museum at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will open an office for the new Youngstown-Warren federal milk marketing area in the Austintown Plaza.

Gov. Michael V. DiSalle sends a special state bomb squad to Youngstown to investigate the bombing murder of racketeer Vince DeNiro. The governor says Youngstown area law enforcement officials should recognize the seriousness of the city’s gangland situation and open a campaign to drive gangsters away from the area.

1936: Nine members of two families, one from Farrell and one from Wheatland, Pa., are killed when the sedan in which they were riding was struck by a passenger train in Dundee, Mich., where they had been visiting. Dead are Mrs. And Mrs. Harry Schuster and their daughters, Vina, 19; Anna, 12, and Sandra Jean, 6-months-old; and Mr. and Mrs. Sam Picano, and their daughters, Betty, 9, and Mary, 6.

Frances Creighton, who poisoned a love rival and delivered her 16-year-old daughter to an elderly lover, is carried unconscious to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison after she faints. She is electrocuted without ever regaining consciousness.

Youngstown furniture stores report low stocks as business is better than it has been for years.

Two adventurous Warren girls, Mildred Standish and Edna Brubaker, coworkers at the Ohio Lamp Plant, set out astride motorcycles on a vacation trip that is to take them some 3,000 miles through the eastern and New England states. They plan on averaging 200 miles a day.