Today in history

Today is Saturday, April 13, the 103rd day of 2013. There are 262 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1613: Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, is captured by English Capt. Samuel Argall in Virginia and held in exchange for English prisoners and stolen weapons. (During a yearlong captivity, Pocahontas converts to Christianity and ultimately opts to stay with the English. )

1742: Handel’s “Messiah” has its first public performance in Dublin, Ireland.

1860: The Pony Express completes its inaugural run from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento, Calif., in 10 days.

1861: At the start of the Civil War, Fort Sumter in South Carolina falls to Confederate forces.

1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the 200th anniversary of the third American president’s birth.

Radio Berlin announces the discovery of thousands of graves of massacred Polish officers in Russia’s Katyn Forest; the Nazis blame the killings on the Soviets, who in turn blame the Nazis. (Post-Soviet Russia has acknowledged the massacre was carried out by Josef Stalin’s much feared secret police.)

1958: Van Cliburn of the United States wins the first International Tchaikovsky Competition for piano in Moscow; Russian Valery Klimov wins the violin competition.

1964: Sidney Poitier becomes the first black performer in a leading role to win an Academy Award for “Lilies of the Field.” (Patricia Neal is named best actress for “Hud”; best picture goes to “Tom Jones.”)

1970: Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, is crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen bursts. (The astronauts manage to return safely.)

1986: Pope John Paul II visits the Great Synagogue of Rome in the first recorded papal visit of its kind to a Jewish house of worship.

1992: The Great Chicago Flood takes place as the city’s century-old tunnel system and adjacent basements fill with water from the Chicago River.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: East Liverpool officials and businessmen are welcoming a proposed satellite of the Columbiana County Small Business Incubator to their city.

An official of the Petro Stopping Centers gives Youngstown and Trumubll County six months to reach an agreement on annexation or another method of providing water and sewer service to the company’s Weathersfield Township site or it will scrap the project.

Some opponents question creation of a Mill Creek Metropolitan Park District, which would replace a 3.4-mill levy on Youngstown residents with a countywide 1.9-mill tax levy.

1973: The Youngstown Planning Commission approves plans for an urban renewal clearance project that will make way for Youngstown State University athletic fields just south of the Madison Expressway and east of Fifth Avenue.

Karen Bode, a junior at Chaney High School, will represent Mahoning and Trumbull counties at the Amvets safe-driving student contest in Columbus.

The former S. Blanche Elliott, 89, and William R. Hamilton, 87, both residents of the Blackburn Home in Poland, are married at Evangel Baptist Church.

1963: A 16-year-old West Side Youth is killed and five other people injured, two seriously, in a two-car crash in Market Street Ext. near Calla Road. Dead is Elliot Gains.

F.H. Strahl, right-of-way supervisor for Division 4 of the State Highway Department, says a shortage of qualified appraisers is delaying acquisition on the Wickliffe Expressway project.

1938: Approximately 350 employees of Ohio Leather Co. reject a proposed labor agreement for the coming year and authorize the National Leather Workers Union to call a strike.

Forty-four Vindicator carrier boys return from New York City on a special car hooked to an Erie train after enjoying two days touring the city as a reward for the salesmanship efforts.

T. Lamar Jackson, president of the Youngstown Chamber of Commerce and counsel for the Ohio Edison Co., argues during a forum at First Unitarian Church that public ownership of public utilities is termed “the death knell of private enterprise.”