Years Ago

Today is Friday, April 26, the 116th day of 2013. There are 249 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1607: English colonists go ashore at present-day Cape Henry, Va., on an expedition to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.

1865: John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, is surrounded by federal troops near Port Royal, Va., and killed. (Just before dying, Booth looks at his hands and gasps, “Useless, useless.”)

1913: Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker at a Georgia pencil factory, is strangled; Leo Frank, the factory superintendent, is convicted of her murder and sentenced to death. (Frank’s death sentence is commuted, but he is lynched by an anti-Semitic mob in 1915.)

1933: Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police, the Gestapo, is created.

1945: Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France’s Vichy government during World War II, is arrested.

1952: The destroyer-minesweeper USS Hobson sinks in the central Atlantic after colliding with the aircraft carrier USS Wasp with the loss of 176 crew members.

1986: A major nuclear accident occurs at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine.

1993: Conan O’Brien is named to succeed David Letterman as host of NBC’s “Late Night” program.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: The nation’s leading consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, tells a crowd of 500 at the Shenanqgo Valley Campus of Penn State University that the American public needs to mobilize if it wants better treatment at the hands of government and big corporations.

The Warren YWCA opens “Kidworks,” the area’s first fitness center aimed at children from the age of 10 months to 10 years.

Stephen A. Rendick, 37, of Hermitage is found guilty of first degree murder in the shooting death of Denise Snyder, 16, and wounding of another girl and a woman in a rampage that started a shopping plaza in Hermitage.

1973: The re-election of Frank Leseganich as director of District 26, United Steel Workers of America, becomes official as results show him winning with 8,874 votes, 398 votes more than his closest opponent, Frank L. Trainor, in a four-man race.

Two separate arson fires destroy the old Smith-Crawford Feed & Grain Co. buildings on Youngstown’s East Side and severely damage the Zanzibar Tavern in Market Street.

Hubbard High School’s music department is staging “Hello Dolly” with a cast of more than 40 under the direction of Robert Paterniti .

1963: Twenty-four cars of a 103-car Cleveland-New Castle freight train derail in the Baltimore & Ohio’s Ohio Junction Yard just west of the U.S. Steel Co.’s Ohio Works.

Police Chief William R. Golden issues orders for Youngstown police to shoot stray, untagged dogs in the wake of increasing complaints from citizens and the biting of Bradley Slaven, 5, while he was playing in front of his Hazelwood Avenue home.

Pauline Frederick, NBC correspondent at the United Nations, speaks to more than 1,200 people at Stambaugh Auditorium. In an address sponsored by the Youngstown YWCA, she says here is a growing belief that the UN’s admission of Red China is inevitable.

1938: The 1938 Community Chest campaign is launched at the Youngstown YMCA gymnasium with a dinner attended by 900 people, a near record crowd.

A 12-day strike by 500 workers at the Ohio Leather Co. in Girard ends with a contract that assures workers of seniority rights but does not provide the preferential shop sought by the National Leather Workers Association.