YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, Dec. 14, the 348th day of 2014. There are 17 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1799: The first president of the United States, George Washington, dies at his Mount Vernon, Va., home at age 67.

1819: Alabama joins the Union as the 22nd state.

1911: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team become the first men to reach the South Pole.

1939: The Soviet Union is expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland.

1946: The United Nations General Assembly votes to establish the U.N.’s headquarters in New York.

1962: The U.S. space probe Mariner 2 passes Venus at a distance of just over 21,000 miles, transmitting information about the planet.

1964: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, rules that Congress was within its authority to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against racial discrimination by private businesses (in this case, a motel that refused to cater to blacks).

1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan end their third and final moonwalk and blast off for their rendezvous with the command module.

1974: Journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, 85, dies in New York.

1981: Israel annexes the Golan Heights, which it had seized from Syria in 1967.

2012: A gunman with a semi-automatic rifle kills 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., then commits suicide as police arrive; 20-year-old Adam Lanza had fatally shot his mother at their home before carrying out the attack on the school.

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Nine recycling centers in Mahoning County and three in Trumbull County operated by the largely volunteer Recycling-Environmental Centers Inc. will shut down at year’s end.

Bowing to pressures from area black leaders and city employees, the city decides to postpone hiring the mayor’s white assistant for a proposed new management position in the predominately black Sanitation Department.

Construction of a federal building in downtown Youngstown, delayed in 1986 by budget shortfalls, is delayed again, for at least 10 months, by design work, and earliest completion date is estimated for late 1992.

1974: A bandit robs the Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Radio Shack stores on McCartney Road, fleeing with an estimated $800.

Bishop Francis Kearns dedicates the First United Methodist Church and its parsonage in Niles.

Anthony Resek, 48, operator of Resek’s 76 service station at 1924 Belmont Ave. is in guarded condition in St. Elizabeth Hospital after being shot by a would-be robber after Rezek refused to hand over any cash.

1964: The Catholic Service League’s Christmas Party entertains 300 children at St. Columba’s cafeteria. Dr. Carl Raupple was general chairman, and Fred Knott distributed gifts as Santa Claus.

Sean Connery stars in “Goldfinger,” the Christmas attraction coming to the State Theater downtown.

Ohio individuals listed as donating $5,000 or more to national political parties include J. Cafaro of Youngstown and William Cafaro of Hubbard, each of whom gave $5,000 to the Democratic Party.

1939: Joseph E. Smith, head of the social science department at Youngstown College and a personal friend of Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential candidate, will join Dewey’s labor research staff.

Available city-owned land on W. LaClede Avenue is sufficient for a municipal stadium with a professional baseball diamond, says Youngs-town City Engineer Albert R. Haenny.

St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in Salem immediately preceding the Civil War and linked to the “underground railroad,” is being abandoned and consolidated into Mt. Zion African M.E. Church of Youngstown.