Years Ago

June 30, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Thursday, June 30, the 181st day of 2011. There are 184 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1859: French acrobat Charles Blondin walks back and forth on a tightrope above the gorge of Niagara Falls as thousands of spectators watch.

1860: The famous Oxford University Museum debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution takes place as Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce leads his side in denouncing the concept, while biologist T.H. Huxley rises to defend it.

1908: The Tunguska Event takes place in Russia as an asteroid explodes above Siberia, leaving 800 square miles of scorched or blown-down trees.

1921: President Warren G. Harding nominates former President William Howard Taft to be chief justice of the United States, succeeding the late Edward Douglass White.

1934: Adolf Hitler carries out his “blood purge” of political and military rivals in Germany in what comes to be known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”

1936: The epic Civil War novel “Gone with the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell is first published by The Macmillan Co. in New York.

1958: The U.S. Senate passes the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.

1963: Pope Paul VI is crowned the 262nd head of the Roman Catholic Church.

1971: A Soviet space mission ends in tragedy when three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11 are found dead of asphyxiation inside their capsule after it had returned to Earth.

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Youngstown police say a new state law that is supposed to regulate the sale of fireworks will do little to prevent the illegal discharge of fireworks in the state.

The 141st Trumbull County Fair opens with country music in the grandstands, rides and games on the midway and the crowning of the 4-H king and queen.

1971: Atty. Gen. John Mitchell says the Justice Department has reached a consent agreement with eight oil companies forbidding them from fixing gasoline prices.

The Youngstown Catholic Diocese Board of Education approves a sex education curriculum, “Becoming a Person,” for use in elementary schools.

Richard P. Shorts of 165 Newport Drive, former president of Asphalt Products Co. and a long time civic leader, dies of a stroke in South Side Hospital at the age of 73.

1961: Paul L. Strait, director of the Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority since its inception in 1933, is retiring at the age of 68.

Youngstown realtors are contemplating a ban on Sunday real estate business activity similar to that taken by the Cleveland Real Estate Board.

1936: Neighbors say loud radio music masked the sound of gunfire that took the life of Mrs. Ethel Harris, 24, in her N. Hine Street home. Police are seeking her husband for questioning.

Robert Burke, well-known Youngstown amateur boxer and president-elect of the junior class of Columbia University in New York, is refused readmission to the college because he participated in a demonstration in front of university President Nicholas Murry Butler’s home.

Ohio Attorney General John W. Bricker rules that school boards do not have to pay the 3 percent sales tax on materials purchased for construction of a stadium or a playground for a school.