YEARS AGO

Today is Thursday, Dec. 4, the 338th day of 2014. There are 27 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1619: A group of settlers from Bristol, England, arrives at Berkeley Hundred in present-day Charles City County, Va, where they have a service thanking God for their safe arrival.

1783: Gen. George Washington bids farewell to his Continental Army officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York.

1918: President Woodrow Wilson leaves Washington on a trip to France to attend the Versailles Peace Conference.

1965: The United States launches Gemini 7 with Air Force Lt. Col. Frank Borman and Navy Cmdr. James A. Lovell aboard.

1978: San Francisco gets its first female mayor as City Supervisor Dianne Feinstein is named to replace the assassinated George Moscone.

1980: The bodies of four American churchwomen slain in El Salvador two days earlier are unearthed. (Five Salvadoran national guardsmen were later convicted of murdering nuns Ita Ford, Maura Clarke and Dorothy Kazel, and lay worker Jean Donovan.)

1984: A five-day hijack drama begins as four armed men seize a Kuwaiti airliner en route to Pakistan and force it to land in Tehran, where the hijackers kill American passenger Charles Hegna. (A second American, William Stanford, also is killed during the siege before Iranian security seized control of the plane.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge Wyatt McKay sentences a 60-year-old Niles ex-foster parent to eight to 25 years in prison for raping and molesting young girls left in his care.

Two buildings at North Main Street and West Park Avenue in Niles are razed to make way for landscaping the area around the McKinley National Memorial library and museum.

Packard Electric, a division of General Motors with headquarters in Warren, announces that it will build a new plant in Brazil that will employ 600.

1974: With the Lykes-Youngstown Corp.’s fourth-quarter earnings continuing at high levels, the corporation will pay a regular dividend of 25 cents on common stock.

Ohio Democrats elect state Rep. Vernal G. Riffe Jr. House speaker. Rep. Thomas J. Carney, D-Youngstown, is elected majority whip.

Ohio hunters bag 1,989 deer on the first day of the season, the Ohio Division of Wildlife reports.

1964: A proposed Ohio Senate bill, supported mostly by Republicans, would remove the townships of Poland, Canfield and Boardman, and the villages of Canfield, Poland, Sebring and Washingtonville, from the 19th District and put them into the predominantly agricultural 16th district.

The Boys’ Choir of St. Patrick Church in Youngstown sings Christmas carols on Central Square at the annual lighting of the community Christmas tree.

1939: The Youngstown College Penguins end their season with a 3-0 win over Davis & Elkins on a late-game field goal by Archie Shoup.

Bertram Parker, president of the Youngstown Chamber of Commerce, declares a municipal stadium for which the management of the Youngstown Browns baseball team is willing to assume all local cost is “an absolute necessity for the city’s community welfare.”

Pete Penguin, mascot of Youngstown College, is in his permanent quarters in Crandall Park, where he has taken to “submarining” the swans at the lake, swimming underneath them and then surfacing to send them head over heels.