Years Ago

Today is Wednesday, Feb. 20, the 51st day of 2013. There are 314 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1792: President George Washington signs an act creating the U.S. Post Office.

1862: William Wallace Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of President Abraham Lincoln and first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, dies at the White House, apparently of typhoid fever.

1907: President Theodore Roosevelt signs an immigration act which excludes “idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons” from being admitted to the United States.

1962: Astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth as he flies aboard Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 spacecraft.

2003: A fire sparked by pyrotechnics breaks out during a concert by the group Great White at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, R.I., killing 100 people and injuring about 200 others.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: Police apprehend a 35-year-old Youngstown man as he was riding in a car at Gypsy Lane and Goleta Avenue about an hour after the man abducted two young women, forced them to drive to the Belmont Avenue branch of Bank One, where he let one of the woman out to get money. She alerted a teller, who called police.

Packard Electric Division of General Motors will continue operating the second shift at its Plant 42 in Hubbard as a result of increased production at the GM plants it supplies.

1973: A newborn girl found in the toilet bowl of a United Airlines Boeing 737 at the Youngstown Municipal Airport is reported in satisfactory condition at Warren General Hospital The full term baby, its umbilical cord still attached, was discovered by cleaning crews and rushed to the hospital.

Grant Kibbel, superintendent of Boardman schools, says the district has lost $160,000 in state aid since passage of the Ohio income tax and a new state funding formula was instituted.

1963: John Stavich, president of Calex Corp., says the Campbell aluminum extrusion company has completed a $300,000 expansion that triples the plant’s capacity.

Three Youngstown men are accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of fraudulent sale of oil and gas well leases in a Shreveport, Ark., firm.

William Herr, speaking for the city planning commission, tells 35 members of the Cornersburg Improvement Club how annexation to the city would be of benefit to the area.

1938: Testifying before the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cleveland Industrialist Cyrus S. Eaton says President Herbert Hoover was “very anxious” about the merger of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and Bethlehem Steel, which was blocked by litigation in 1930. Eaton says his own opinion was that it was bad deal for Sheet & Tube.

Dr. Glenn Frank, publicist, former university president and author, will open the 1938 forum program of the Youngstown Chamber of Commerce.