Years Ago

Today is Sunday, Aug. 17, the 229th day of 2014. There are 136 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1807: Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat begins heading up the Hudson River on its successful round trip between New York and Albany.

1915: A mob in Cobb County, Ga., lynches Jewish businessman Leo Frank, whose death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had been commuted to life imprisonment. (Frank, who maintained his innocence, was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986.)

1943: The Allied conquest of Sicily during World War II is completed as U.S. and British forces enter Messina.

1962: East German border guards shoot and kill 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who had attempted to cross the Berlin Wall into the western sector.

1964: Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa is sentenced in Chicago to five years in federal prison for defrauding his union’s pension fund. (Hoffa was released in 1971 after President Richard Nixon commuted his sentence for this conviction and jury tampering.)

1969: Hurricane Camille slams into the Mississippi coast as a Category 5 storm that was blamed for 256 U.S. deaths, three in Cuba.

1978: The first successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight ends as Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman land their Double Eagle II outside Paris.

1982: The first commercially produced compact discs, a recording of ABBA’s “The Visitors,” are pressed at a Philips factory near Hanover, West Germany.

1985: More than 1,400 meatpackers walk off the job at the Geo. A. Hormel and Co.’s main plant in Austin, Minn., in a bitter strike that lasts just over a year.

1987: Rudolf Hess, the last member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, dies at Spandau Prison at age 93, an apparent suicide.

2004: British police charge eight terrorism suspects. (The leader of the group, al-Qaida operative Dhiren Barot, later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mass murder and was sentenced to life in prison.)

2004: President Barack Obama, addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Phoenix, chastises the defense industry and Congress for wasting tax dollars “with doctrine and weapons better suited to fight the Soviets on the plains of Europe than insurgents in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan.”

2013: The attorney for a young man who’d testified he was fondled by former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky says his client has reached a settlement, the first among dozens of claims made against the school amid the Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal.

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman Don L. Hanni Jr. is planning to run for chairman of the state party in 1990.

James Walker of East Liverpool is elected chairman of the Columbiana County Democratic Party, filling the unexpired term of Don Gosney, who died July 11.

Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell unveils his proposal for an $80 million to $90 million renovation of Cleveland Stadium.

1974: Joey Naples Jr., 42, of Carlotta Drive and six alleged members of his numbers operation are arrested after being indicted by a federal grand jury on gambling charges.

Five Youngstown-Warren area men are indicted by a federal grand jury in Cleveland in the theft of firearms during home and business burglaries.

The smallest All-American Soap Box Derby field in 19 years — 99 cars — is reduced by three as the drivers are disqualified on grounds that they couldn’t have built their cars by themselves.

1964: Skilled burglars cart off more than three tons of rare coins with an estimated value of $250,000 from the Berk Exterminating Co. in Warren.

Summery weather returns to the area but only after setting a record low for the day of 48 degrees at Youngstown Municipal Airport.

Advertisement: State Chevrolet must sell 160 new Chevrolets by Sept. 1. This week’s special: Corvair Monza, $2,281.

1939: More than 2,000 men, women and children attend the Youngstown Symphony’s second “Pops” concert at Idora Park.

Work at Youngstown’s low-income Westlake housing projects shifts back into high gear, with more than 750 workmen on the job after settlement of a carpenters’ strike.

Alice Hayden of 1331 South Ave. has two ice-cream-loving pet groundhogs. “Squeaky” and “Sleepy” were brought home by her brother, Albert, a WPA worker at Youngstown Municipal Airport, after the mother groundhog was killed.