YEARS AGO

Today is Thursday, July 28, the 209th day of 2011. There are 156 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1540: King Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, is executed, the same day Henry marries his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.

1609: The English ship Sea Venture, commanded by Adm. Sir George Somers, runs ashore on Bermuda, where the passengers and crew found a colony.

1794: Maximilien Robespierre, a leading figure of the French Revolution, is sent to the guillotine.

1821: Peru declares its independence from Spain.

1914: World War I begins as Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

1932: Federal troops forcibly disperse the so-called “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans who had gathered in Washington to demand money they weren’t scheduled to receive until 1945.

1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces the end of coffee rationing, which had limited people to one pound of coffee every five weeks since it began in November 1942.

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Warren Community Development Director John C. Foley says the city could be in the international spotlight if a proposed $225 million coal liquification plant becomes a reality.

Crime in Youngstown increased by 2.2 percent in 1985, largely due to a dramatic rise in car thefts in the city, says Police chief Randall Wellington. The city had 22 homicides, one less than in 1984.

1971: The Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority receives a $200,000 grant to construct a central office building on Wood Street, east of Champion Street in Youngstown.

The Ohio Leather Co. in Girard is quitting business, victim of the same economic malady that is killing jobs in the steel business, foreign competition. President R.F. Pleatman says about 280 employees will lose their jobs. The company once had as many as 700 workers.

New claims for unemployment compensation in Mahoning County jump from 417 to 2,458 in a week, representing layoffs by area steel companies in preparation for a threatened strike.

1961: A four-year-old Niles boy, Ronnie Greene, dies in a fire in a shed on Fenton Street where he and a brother, Ricky, 5, and friend, John Claypool, 4, had been playing.

Long-distance communications throughout northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania are curtailed after a transcontintental cable is accidentally cut near Pittsburgh. At The Vindicator, Associated Press and United Press International newswires go dead.

A 13-year-old Crescent Street girl is in St. Eliza-beth Hospital with cuts and bruises and a 33-year-old neighbor who accused the girl of dating her husband is being held for questioning in the attack.

1936: Pennsylvania state police sweep down on the Shenango Valley’s largest numbers headquarters in the basement of the Eagles Club in Farrell and arrest 17 people, including the alleged operators, Frank and Jerry Pandolfi.

George T. Ladd, chairman, president and general manager of United Engineering & Foundry Co., inspects the company’s Youngstown plant and declares, “Business is good, and it looks better.”

Col. Leonard P. Ayres, vice president of Cleveland Trust Co., spends nearly two hours with Republican Gov. Alf Landon in Topeka, Kansas, filling the governor in on the business climate in the Mahoning Valley durable goods industries.