Years Ago

Today is Thursday, June 7, the 159th day of 2012. There are 207 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1712: Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly votes to ban the further importation of slaves.

1862: William Bruce Mumford, a Confederate loyalist, is hanged at the order of Union military authorities for tearing down a U.S. flag that had been flying over the New Orleans mint shortly before the city was occupied by the North.

1942: The World War II Battle of Midway ends in a decisive victory for American forces over the Imperial Japanese.

1981: Israeli military planes destroy a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.

VINDICATOR FILES

1987: About 100 family and friends gather at the Woodside Avenue home of an aunt to greet Derrick Catley, 20, Youngstown seaman who is home on leave after surviving the May 17 attack on the USS Stark in which 37 sailors were killed.

Professor Paul Luginbill, the late chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering at YSU, is honored posthumously with the Heritage Award at the university’s annual Awards Dinner.

1972: Ten children receive cuts when a car smashed into a Mahoning County School for the Retarded bus on Wetmore Drive in Struthers.

Judge Sidney Rigelhaupt orders that Miss Marian Evanovits be reinstated to her job teaching at Hayes Middle School. The judge said was removed “to pacify the objecting parents and cool an emotionally charged situation.”

1962: An acid explosion in the Liberty High School chemical storage room hospitalizes a teacher, Frank Gasper, 37, and a student, Sam Perry, a sophomore.

Vindicator Spelling Champion Barbara Brugnaux wins third place in the national spelling bee in Washington, D.C., falling in the 15th round on the word “esquamulose.”

Vincent J. Doria is named Youngstown area coordinator of the manpower development and training program.

1937:Napoleon Daig-neau, 61, is struck and killed by an auto in Wilson Avenue a few hours after attending graduation exercises for his daughter at Sacred Heart School. The New York Central Railroad engineer and father of seven is the city’s 27th traffic victim of the year.

Detectives in Akron are trying to find out why the unburied bodies of eight infants were left in the rear of an Akron funeral home to decompose.