Years Ago

Today is Tuesday, April 16, the 106th day of 2013. There are 259 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1862: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia.

The Confederacy conscripts all white men between the ages of 18 to 35.

1912: American aviator Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to France in 59 minutes.

1947: The French ship Grandcamp blows up at the harbor in Texas City, Texas; another ship, the High Flyer, explodes the following day (nearly 600 people are killed).

1962: Bob Dylan debuts his song “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City in New York; Walter Cronkite succeeds Douglas Edwards as CBS-TV’s principal anchorman.

1963: Martin Luther King Jr. writes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responds to a group of local clergymen who’d criticized him for leading street protests.

2007: In the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history, student Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech before taking his own life.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: Angelo “Big Ange” Lonardo tells a Senate subcommittee investigating organized crime that he and Cleveland mob boss James Licavoli urged Youngstown mob figures Jimmy Prato and Joey Naples — and their Pittsburgh superiors — to spare the life of Mahoning Valley Mobster Charles Carabbia, but they wanted him dead. Carabbia disappeared in December 1980.

Production and maintenance workers at General Extrusions Inc. are returning to work after reaching an agreement to end a two-month labor dispute.

1973: For the third time in a month, burglars hit a downtown Youngstown jewelry store, ransacking Marty Ditts’ store at 322 W. Federal St.

GF President Robert E. Williams tells shareholders General Fireproofing Co. will show a profit in the first quarter, compared with a loss of 3 cents a share in the first quarter of 1972.

1963: William D. Holt, 52, Mahoning County recorder since 1952 and a former Youngstown City Council president, is found dead, apparently of a heart attack at his Himrod Avenue home.

Ohio Congressman-at-large Robert A. Taft Jr. tells more than 200 at a Youngstown Area Chamber of Commerce breakfast that “the Kennedy administration apparently is not relying on a tax cut but on a spending program to solve unemployment and economic problems,” a tactic which Taft says has been used before and does not work.

1938: Michigan state police are on their way to Youngstown to question Norman Smith, 19, who has confessed to a triple homicide in North Lima, about the year-old slaying of Mr. and Mrs. J.H. David, 76 and 74, and Mrs. Lydia Hildebrant, 72, on a farm near Fenton, Mich.

William H. Loller, secretary of the Youngstown Auto Club, says that 1938 license plates are flimsy and going to pieces and several sets of plates have been brought back. The plates are adorned with an ox wagon in honor of the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Northwest Territory.