Years Ago

Today is Friday, March 23, the 83rd day of 2012. There are 283 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1775: Patrick Henry delivers an address to the Virginia Provincial Convention in which he is said to have declared, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

1806: Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, having reached the Pacific coast, begin their journey back east.

1912: Wernher von Braun, the scientist who helped develop the V-2 combat rocket for the Nazis and the Saturn V booster rocket for NASA, is born in Wirsitz, Germany.

1919: Benito Mussolini founds his Fascist political movement in Milan, Italy.

1933: The German Reichstag adopts the Enabling Act, which effectively grants Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers.

1942: The first Japanese-Americans evacuated by the U.S. Army during World War II arrive at the internment camp in Manzanar, Calif.

1956: Pakistan becomes an Islamic republic.

1965: America’s first two-person space flight begins as Gemini 3 blasts off with astronauts Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young aboard for a nearly five-hour flight.

1983:Dr. Barney Clark, recipient of a Jarvik permanent artificial heart, dies at the University of Utah Medical Center after 112 days with the device.

1994: Luis Donaldo Colosio, Mexico’s leading presidential candidate, is assassinated in Tijuana.

2010: President Barack Obama signs a $938 billion health care overhaul, declaring “a new season in America.”

2011: Academy Award-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen persona, stormy personal life and enduring fame and glamour made her one of the last of the classic movie stars, dies in Los Angeles of congestive heart failure at age 79.

VINDICATOR FILES

1987: The Ohio Department of Education lists average teacher salaries for all school districts in the state, and Howland Local School District, with an average salary of $30,070, has the highest average in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties.

Independent Radio Taxi Inc. says it will be forced to move from downtown Youngstown to Boardman if it does not receive a raise in rates from 60 cents a mile, which has been in effect since 1969.

1972: The National Labor Relations Board in Detroit files an unfair labor practice charge against General Motors Corp. for alleged failure to bargain in good faith in labor disputes at Lordstown and Norwood.

Mayor Jack C. Hunter says two Youngstown fire stations, one on Falls Avenue and one on Poland Avenue, will be closed permanently within a week.

The Mahoning County Board of Elections votes to hire 812 additional workers, two for each precinct, because of the need for paper ballots in the Democratic presidential primary

1962: Dorothea Bohne Aulin, 68, dies in a fire that destroyed the Hoffman Department Store in downtown Niles. Damage was estimated at $300 in the fire, which at one point threatened an entire city block.

The former Mahoning Valley Green Cross Hospital, a 35-bed osteopathic hospital in the old W.D. Packard estate on Mahoning Avenue in Warren, is sold to a group of local investors for $75,000.

General Fireproofing Co. reports a substantial increase in sales, new orders and operating profits in January and February over the same period a year earlier. Sales were up 21 percent and new orders 24 percent.

1937: John H. Clarke, the only living retired Supreme Court Justice and a man with strong Youngstown ties, tells the nation in a radio address from California that President Roosevelt’s plan to add justices to the court is constitutional.

Sitdown strikers at the Ohio Leather Co. in Girard are packing their bags to end eight days of occupation of the plant after agreement is reached on wages and hours in a contract between management and the CIO.