Years Ago

Today is Monday, March 18, the 77th day of 2013. There are 288 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1913: King George I of Greece is assassinated in Thessaloniki.

1937: Some 300 people, mostly children, are killed in a gas explosion at a school in New London, Texas.

1938: Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalizes his country’s petroleum reserves and takes control of foreign-owned oil facilities.

1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which is put in charge of interning Japanese-Americans, with Milton S. Eisenhower (the younger brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower) as its director.

1965: The first spacewalk takes place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov goes outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

1980: Frank Gotti, the 12-year-old youngest son of mobster John Gotti, is struck and killed by a car driven by John Favara, a neighbor in Queens, N.Y. (The following July, Favara vanishes, the apparent victim of a gang hit.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: Campbell Municipal Judge Joseph M. Kolmacic orders a 23-year-old AIDS victim who pleaded guilty to two counts of theft to leave the state as a condition of probation because neither Campbell police nor the Mahoning County sheriff’s department has a policy for dealing with prisoners with AIDS.

U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. says construction of the long-awaited federal building in downtown Youngstown is scheduled to begin in the spring of 1989.

1973: Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Earnest Lee Holmes remains in Mahoning County Jail on $45,000 bond on one count of shooting a police officer with intent to kill and two counts of shooting at police with intent to kill.

Mill Creek Park police are seeking two Youngstown area men in their early 20s who police believe reneged on a pre-arranged drug buy and instead robbed a 20-year-old New Castle, Pa., man of $250 and abducted his 19-year-old female companion and took her to a South Side apartment where one of the men assaulted her.

1963: The Rev. Homer J.R. Elford, minister of Trinity Methodist Church, tells the congregation that there are eight definitive things each individual in the community can do to create a better moral climate because “the best way to overcome evil is with good.”

Four Jackson Milton High seniors try to complete President Kennedy’s 50-mile hike, by walking from Craig Beach to Youngstown University and back, but buffeted by winds that approached 50 mph, Juanita Siegel, Brenda Linebaugh, Becke Chepke and Joan Phillips give up in West Austintown after completing about 40 miles.

1938: The 19-year-old proposal for a waterway connecting Lake Erie with the Ohio River, an undertaking estimated to cost $200 million, is reported moving closer to congressional action.

Nearly 700 people brave a winter storm in Youngstown to attend a reception for former Lt. Gov. Charles Sawyer, candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor. The reception was hosted by Municipal Judge William B. Spagnola at the NuElm ballroom.