Years Ago

Today is Thursday, May 1, the 121st day of 2014. There are 244 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1707: The Kingdom of Great Britain is created as a treaty merging England and Scotland takes effect.

1786: Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” premieres in Vienna.

1898: Commodore George Dewey gives the command, “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,” as an American naval force destroys a Spanish squadron in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War.

1911: The song “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad),” by Harry Von Tilzer and Will Dillon, is first published.

1941: The Orson Welles motion picture “Citizen Kane” premieres in New York.

1960: The Soviet Union shoots down an American U-2 reconnaissance plane over Sverdlovsk and captures its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

1961: The first U.S. airline hijacking takes place as Antulio Ramirez Ortiz, a Miami electrician, commandeers a National Airlines plane that was en route to Key West, Fla., and forces the pilot to fly to Cuba.

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Kathy French, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Food Bank, says the bank has 600 25-pound bags of dry beans that it can’t distribute because state regulations restrict distribution only to sites that produce food for the needy, not to individuals.

George J. Landis, former all-city quarterback for Ursuline High School and football coach at three area high schools and at YSU, has become an internationally known motivational speaker.

A new plastics company, Lexington Precision Co., will locate on Ridge Road near the Youngstown Municipal Airport and company officials tell Trumbull County commissioners that it will create 150 jobs within five years.

1974: A 17-year-old Cohasset Drive boy, Gerald Walsh, is fatally wounded as he sat at a kitchen table watching a friend load a weapon in an E. Marion Avenue house that had been burglarized a short time before.

Struthers, one of only two small school districts in the state that has no vocational program, is being considered for membership in the Mahoning County Joint Vocational School District.

Standard Oil Co. of Ohio increases the price of gasoline 6 cents per gallon at company-owned stations, bringing the retail price for regular to 57.8 cents and for premium, 61.8 cents.

1964: Mahoning County is doing as much if not more than any other county in Ohio in the field of mental health, Martin A. Janis, director of the Ohio Department of Mental Hygiene and Correction, tells about 75 people at the Hotel Pick Ohio. He describes Woodside Receiving Hospital as one of the finest of its kind in the United States.

A statewide emergency exercise complete after a mock nuclear attack, reveals a serious lack of bomb shelters and warning systems in rural Mahoning County, says Civil Defense Director Bud J. Fares.

1939: Chauncey Miller, charged with slaying Henry Fitch, member of a pioneer Poland family whose body was found in a car outside the Struthers police station, is found insane by a jury of four women and eight men and sentenced by Judge J.H.C. Lyon to the Lima State Hospital for the Criminal Insane.

“Sheilings Sylist,” a Scottish Terrier owned by Mr. and Mrs. T.N. Snethen of Allison Park, Pa., wins “best in show” to climax the Mahoning-Shenango Kennel Club’s fourth annual dog show.