Years Ago

Today is Friday, May 18, the 139th day of 2012. There are 227 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1896: The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorses “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

1910: Halley’s Comet passes by earth, brushing it with its tail.

1912: Singer Perry Como is born in Canonsburg, Pa.

1926: Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanishes while visiting a beach in Venice, Calif. (McPherson reappears more than a month later, saying she’d escaped after being kidnapped and held for ransom, an account that was greeted with skepticism in some quarters.)

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.

1969: Astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Thomas P. Stafford and John W. Young blast off aboard Apollo 10 on a mission to orbit the moon.

1980: The Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state explodes, leaving 57 people dead or missing.

VINDICATOR FILES

1987: Trumbull County commissioners seclude themselves behind closed doors to work out a budget for the rest of 1987 and to discuss Judge Peter Panagis’ hiring of a maintenance worker.

Robert E. Davis of Youngstown receives the national Whitney M. Young award during the Boy Scouts Council’s annual recognition dinner. Dallas Heson and Henry Sforza Sr. receive Silver Beaver awards.

1972: Three Youngstown area men are rescued from 53-degree water of Lake Erie after their 23-foot cabin cruiser sank in 42 feet of water. In satisfactory condition in Bayview Hospital are Robert Lowe, 28; Thomas Davis, 25, and Clair Reiner, 40.

James Bond Jones, 98, known as “Mr. Canfield” and last surviving member of one of the oldest pioneer families of the Western Reserve, dies at the Sleigh Bell Residences. He was a three-term mayor of Canfield.

1962: Associated Hospital Service (Blue Cross) seeks state approval for higher rates ranging from 25 cents a month to $4.25 a month.

The Diocese of Youngs-town will launch a $1.5 million fund raising campaign in 36 Youngstown district parishes to pay off most of the debt remaining on Cardinal Mooney and Ursuline high schools.

1937: Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and Republic Steel Corp. officials say they will close their plants if the Steel Workers Organizing Committee calls a strike and sets up pickets.

National Leather Workers Association, Local 12, accepts the Ohio Leather Co.’s offer of a 20 percent increase for common labor.

An explosion breaks six windows in the home of Justice of the Peace William Glass at 3036 Wilson Ave., Campbell.