Years Ago

Today is Thursday, April 18, the 108th day of 2013. There are 257 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1775: Paul Revere begins his famous ride from Charlestown to Lexington, Mass., warning American colonists that the British are coming.

1906: A devastating earthquake strikes San Francisco, followed by raging fires; estimates of the final death toll range between 3,000 and 6,000.

1923: The first game is played at the original Yankee Stadium in New York; the Yankees defeat the Boston Red Sox 4-1.

1955: Physicist Albert Einstein dies in Princeton, N.J., at age 76.

1978: The Senate approves the Panama Canal Treaty, providing for the complete turnover of control of the waterway to Panama on the last day of 1999.

1983: Sixty-three people, including 17 Americans, are killed at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, by a suicide bomber.

1988: An Israeli court convicts John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker from Cleveland, of committing war crimes at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. (However, Israel’s Supreme Court later overturns Demjanjuk’s conviction.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: State Auditor Thomas E. Ferguson announces that the Warren Township clerk and several other former township officials are being held responsible for nearly $170,000 owed the township for numerous infractions including salary overpayments and use of township funds for personal business.

The Youngstown Air Base in Vienna Township will receive about $3 million for capital improvements, including construction of a medical training facility, if Congress passes the 1989 defense authorization bill without major amendments.

1973: David R. Gundry, a former Youngstowner, has been named manager of Ohio Edison Co.’s Youngstown Division, succeeding Charles B. Olds, who is retiring after 44 years in the electric utility industry.

In a bipartisan 6-3 vote, an Ohio Senate Committee kills a vote to ratify the proposed equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

1963: Mrs. Mary “Grandma” Harris of 612 Arlington St., Youngstown, who celebrated her 106th birthday in February, dies of a stroke at her home after a week’s illness. In good health almost to the end, she had no trouble recalling her girlhood on a southern plantation during the Civil War.

Mrs. Paul McCann, 50, of Poland dies of injuries suffered in a crash on the Ohio turnpike as she was returning from the University of Notre Dame, with two students, her son, John McCann, and Arthur Menaldi. Both students were injured.

1938: Youngstown churches of all denominations are crowded for Easter Sunday services, some so much so that extra services had to be added.

Mahoning County commissioners rescind a resolution that had named 388 “approved” grocers for filling relief orders. The county has over 1,000 grocery and meat purveyors and hundreds had protested about the list.