Today in history: Wednesday, April 16, the 106th day of 2014

Today is Wednesday, April 16, the 106th day of 2014. There are 259 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1789: President-elect George Washington leaves Mount Vernon, Va., for his inauguration in New York.

1862: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia.

The Confederacy conscripts all white men between the ages of 18 to 35.

1879: Bernadette Soubirous, who’d described seeing visions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, dies in Nevers, France.

1889: Comedian and movie director Charles Chaplin is born in London.

1912: American aviator Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to France in 59 minutes.

1935: The radio comedy program “Fibber McGee and Molly” premieres on NBC’s Blue Network.

1947: The French ship Grandcamp blows up at the harbor in Texas City, Texas; another ship, the High Flyer, explodes the following day (the blasts and fires kill nearly 600 people).

Financier Bernard M. Baruch says in a speech at the South Carolina statehouse, “Let us not be deceived — we are today in the midst of a cold war.”

1963: Martin Luther King Jr. writes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he says, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1964: The Rolling Stones’ first album, eponymously titled “The Rolling Stones,” is released in the United Kingdom by Decca Records (a slightly different version debuts in the United States a month and a-half later).

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Micah Robitille, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Poland Middle School, wins the 56th annual Vindicator Spelling Bee in the 15th round, outspelling 148 other students at South High School.

The old Carousel building at Cascade Park in New Castle is being restored, not as the site of a merry-go-round, but as the site of concerts, dances and special events.

Mahoning County Prosecutor James A. Philomena says his staff has won convictions in seven out of eight of the cases taken to trial in his first 100 days as prosecutor.

1974: Youngstown Councilman Jerome McNally suggests repealing the city’s $5 motor-vehicle license tax.

Pat Ross, 73, of Niles, brother of the Niles chief of police, John Ross, is robbed, stabbed, driven to a lonely area in Jackson Township and dumped from his car, which was then stolen by the robbers. Ross is in guarded condition in South Side Hospital.

Joseph Gray, director of the Health and Welfare Council of Youngstown’s Community Chest, is named director of the McGuffey Center.

1964: Youngstown racketeer Joseph “Joey” Naples turn himself in at the Mahoning County Jail after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to hear his appeal of a conviction in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on felony counts of receiving stolen property and promoting a numbers game.

Youngstown University receives a grant of $10,520 from the National Science Foundation for a nine-month mathematics institute for high school mathematics teachers.

Struthers police are holding one ex-convict who was captured at the scene of an attempted burglary at the Elmton Caf and are seeking five others who were believed to be involved.

1939: A group of railroad propagandists and lobbyists opens a campaign in Washington, D.C., to defeat the proposed Lake Erie-Ohio River canal, saying Youngstown, not the federal government, should build it if it is important to the area.

Cyril C. Thompson, executive assistant to the president of United Airlines, says the company is ready to start service to Youngstown on its New York to Chicago flights “the day (Youngstown’s) airport is approved for big airplanes.”