Years Ago

Today is Saturday, June 30, the 182nd day of 2012. 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 defends 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.

1912: Canada’s deadliest tornado on record occurs as a late-afternoon cyclone strikes Regina, the provincial capital of Saskatchewan, killing 28 people and destroying or damaging 500 buildings.

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.

1952: “The Guiding Light,” a popular radio program, begins a 57-year television run on CBS.

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

1982: The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expires, having failed to receive the required number of ratifications for its adoption, despite having its seven-year deadline extended by three years.

VINDICATOR FILES

1987: The 142nd annual Trumbull County Fair opens under a threat of rain.

Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Frederick T. Williams grants a motion for the liquidation of Well Care Health Plan Inc., the Brookfield based health maintenance organization.

Youngstown Police Chief Randall Wellington says he’s confident an in-depth investigation will show accusations of police brutality and racism are mostly without foundation.

1972: William H. Cossler assumes the presidency of the Youngstown Rotary Club, succeeding William F. Zarbaugh.

The Office of Economic Opportunity cuts the budget of the Youngstown Area Community Action Council by $20,000, to $672,000.

Two members of the Youngstown State University police science department, Dr. Jack D. Foster and Istavan T. Domonkos, suggest that the 41 police departments in Mahoning, Trumbull and Ashtabula counties pursue cooperative agreements, including a three-county consolidation of communication and laboratory facilities.

The narrow, ancient Credit Mobiler Bridge connecting Bridge Street and Crescent Street over the Mahoning River, collapses under the weight of a heavy semi-trailer hauling steel. The bridge was posted for 10 tons the truck was carrying 25 tons of steel.

1962: Willie Timpson, 37, is shot to death in a Hubbard Township home, which police say he had broken into previously and had a history of trouble with the occupants.

The Park and Recreation Commission is moving to assume full control over the sale of motorboat fuel and other supplies along lakefront property at Lake Milton.

1937: The National Guard and local police departments are guarding reservoirs and water pipe lines in the Valley, including the Meander Dam, a reaction by attacks on water supplies by strikers in other parts of the country.

President Franklin Roosevelt refuses to say whether he will seek a third term in 1940; Southern Democrats are talking about Ohio Gov. Martin Davey as a possible candidate.

Six Warren and Youngstown steel strikers plead not guilty in Akron to federal charges of obstructing mail trucks outside the gates of struck steel plants.