Years Ago

Today is Saturday, Sept. 24, the 267th day of 2011. There are 98 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1869: Thousands of businessmen are ruined in a Wall Street panic known as “Black Friday” after financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk attempt to corner the gold market.

1929: Lt. James H. Doolittle guides a Consolidated NY-2 Biplane over Mitchel Field in New York in the first all-instrument flight.

1955: President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffers a heart attack while on vacation in Denver.

1961: “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” premieres on NBC (it succeeds Disney’s anthology series on ABC).

1976: Former hostage Patricia Hearst is sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in a 1974 bank robbery in San Francisco carried out by the Symbionese Liberation Army. (She is released after 22 months after receiving clemency from President Jimmy Carter.)

1991: Children’s author Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as “Dr. Seuss,” dies in La Jolla, Calif., at age 87.

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Youngstown State University expands its emergency loan program to accommodate hundreds of students whose federally subsidized student loans are bogged down in red tape.

A state official tells Youngstown Mayor Patrick Ungaro and Mahoning County commissioners that the state will provide financial backing for construction of a city-county jail.

1971: FBI agents and Howland police arrest three men in the armed holdup of a Howland Township stamp collector and recover about 95 percent of the loot, including 58 albums of stamps worth thousands of dollars.

George Finnie, a native of Youngstown and managing partner of Wilson, Finnie & Co., certified public accountants, cuts the ribbon for the new $1.3 million George Finnie Stadium at Baldwin-Wallace College.

The Rev. William J. Kennedy, 47, pastor of St. Joseph Church in Alliance and a former director of the Newman Club at Youngstown State University, dies of injuries suffered in a one-car crash near Canton.

1961: Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. is joining with the nation’s independent supermarkets to promote the sale of food in “tin” cans, which are actually 99 percent steel.

Thiel College will inaugurate Dr. Chauncey G. Bly, M.D., Ph.D., as the 13th president of the college.

1936: Earl Browder, Communist candidate for president, makes two speeches in Youngstown as part of his nationwide tour, one at Central Auditorium and one at WKBN radio.

Francis Schmidt, coach of the Ohio State University Buckeyes, has his eye on a national football championship.