Years Ago

Today is Thursday, Feb. 13, the 44th day of 2014. There are 321 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1542: The fifth wife of England’s King Henry VIII, Catherine Howard, is executed for adultery.

1861: Abraham Lincoln is officially declared winner of the 1860 presidential election as electors cast their ballots.

1914: The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, also known as ASCAP, is founded in New York to protect the copyrights of creators and ensure compensation for public performances of their works.

1920: The League of Nations recognizes the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland.

1935: A jury in Flemington, N.J., finds Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-slaying of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. (Hauptmann is later executed.)

1939: Justice Louis D. Brandeis retires from the U.S. Supreme Court. (He is succeeded by William O. Douglas.)

1943: During World War II, the U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve is officially established.

1960: France explodes its first atomic bomb in the Sahara Desert.

1974: Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union.

1980: The 13th Winter Olympics open in Lake Placid, N.Y.

1984: Konstantin Chern-enko is chosen to be general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee, succeeding the late Yuri Andropov.

1988: The 15th Winter Olympics open in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

1991: During Operation Desert Storm, allied warplanes destroy an underground shelter in Baghdad that had been identified as a military command center; Iraqi officials say 500 civilians were killed.

2004: President George W. Bush, trying to calm a political storm, orders the release of his Vietnam-era military records to counter Democrats’ suggestions that he’d shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard.

2009: A $787 billion stimulus bill aimed at easing the worst economic crisis in decades clears both houses of Congress.

2013: Beginning a long farewell to his flock, a weary Pope Benedict XVI celebrates his final public Mass as pontiff, presiding over Ash Wednesday services inside St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Trumbull County Commissioner Anthony A. Latell Jr. pushes to renovate the Stone Building at High Street and Park Avenue for office and retail space rather than raze it.

Three people who lived in a one-story home on Woodlawn Street in Mineral Ridge along with 22 dogs are homeless after fire destroys the building.

The Tam O’Shanter Golf Course in Hermitage will host the 1989 Pennsylvania Public Links Championships in July.

1974: Milk, which is selling at 71 cents a half- gallon in the Youngstown area, is expected to increase by 8 cents because of an increase in raw milk by wholesale distributors. A year ago, milk was 50 cents per half-gallon.

Youngstown area Steel Haulers of America vote to return to work by a four-to-one margin, joining the majority of independent truckers who are ending a two-week shutdown aimed at high fuel prices and government policies that affect truckers.

Most Campbell Memorial High School students are forced to walk to school because thieves siphoned more than 100 gallons of gasoline from nine school buses.

1964: An Alliance motorist passing another car in Smith Township just inside the Mahoning County line plows into three boys, killing one, David Boyd, 11, and injuring William Kelley, 16.

Dr. Howard W. Jones, president of Youngstown University, announces that the university will hold two commencements in 1964 and will graduate more than 1,000 seniors for the first time in its history.

Billy Wetzl, 8, who underwent heart surgery when he was 1 year old, dies of an apparent heart attack at St. Joseph School, shortly after returning to home room following Mass.

1939: A $30,000 fire of undetermined origin destroys half of the Teachout-Cooley Memorial Library and the college observatory at Hiram College. Students and faculty formed a book-passing brigade to save thousands of volumes.

Civic leaders voice their support for Mayor Lionel Evans’ position that Youngstown will not compromise with holdout property owners in streets to be widened in the city’s PWA $5 million program.

Ohio State University trustees authorize a committee of three members to inquire into charges of “un-American” activities within the university.