Years Ago

Today is Tuesday, Dec. 3, the 337th day of 2013. There are 28 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1810: British forces capture Mauritius from the French, who had renamed the island nation off southeast Africa “Ile de France.”

1818: Illinois is admitted as the 21st state.

1828: Andrew Jackson is elected president of the United States by the Electoral College.

1833: Oberlin College in Ohio — the first truly coeducational school of higher learning in the United States — begins holding classes.

1910: Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, dies in Chestnut Hill, Mass., at age 89.

1925: George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F” has its world premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall, with Gershwin at the piano.

1947: The Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opens on Broadway.

1967: Surgeons in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard perform the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lives 18 days with the new heart.

1979: Eleven people are killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.

1980: Bernadine Dohrn, a former leader of the radical Weather Underground, surrenders to authorities in Chicago after more than a decade as a fugitive.

1984: Thousands of people die after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escapes from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.

1992: The first telephone text message is sent by British engineer Neil Papworth, who transmits the greeting “Merry Christmas” from his work computer in Newbury, Berkshire, to Vodafone executive Richard Jarvis’ mobile phone.

2003: A U.N. tribunal convicts and sentences a radio news director and a newspaper editor to life imprisonment for their role in promoting the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: Prudential Insurance Co. announces that it will repay 50 local investors more than $3 million for their losses in a security scam allegedly run by one of the company’s brokers in Cortland.

The newly appointed trustee in the Ponderosa Park Resort bankruptcy case says his first priority in running the resort will be to satisfy the 3,700 people who have an interest in the park.

A malfunction in a gas-fired heater sparks a $200,000 fire at the Louisiana-Pacific Corp., a Boardman aluminum extrusion company.

1973: American Legion Post 236 of Newton Falls marks its 50th anniver-sary with a dinner dance at the post home.

Ginny Albaugh, a senior at Cardinal Mooney High school, is crowned Mahoning County Junior Miss 1974 at Austintown Middle School.

Five Youngstown men are arrested by Mahoning County Sheriff’s deputies and turned over to the U.S. Secret Service after deputies break up a counterfeit ring that was passing fake $20 bills.

1963: A Poland Township truck driver, Jack C. Blackiston, 38, is killed when a load of steel pipe shifts while he was trying to stop suddenly and smashed through the cab in Easton, Pa.

Gloria Battisti, wife of Federal District Judge Frank J. Battisti of Youngstown, resigns from the Ohio Pardon and Parole Commission. Gov. James A. Rhodes had criticized her for taking a five-week honeymoon to Florida.

WKBN-TV and WFMJ-TV will begin broadcasting 15-minute daily educational television programs and the Youngstown Board of Education approves the purchase of 70 TV sets for classroom use.

1938: About 3,000 reserved seats for Esther Hamilton’s Alias Santa Claus show are snapped up in an hour and 45 minutes by a ticket hungry crowd that began forming more than two hours before the sale with E.P. Steinfort the first man in line.

Oscar Hahn, 12, will be given free access to the Ohio state prison in the two days before his mother, Anna Marie Hahn, is scheduled to be electrocuted for the poisoning death of an elderly Cincinnati man for his money. She is suspected of murdering six others.

Twenty-five members of a Youngstown College criminology class inspect the Mahoning County jail, peering through the bars at felons, drunks, bums and alleged murderers.