Years Ago

Today is Saturday, May 31, the 151st day of 2014. There are 214 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1594: Italian artist Tintoretto dies in Venice in his mid-70s.

1669: English diarist Samuel Pepys writes the final entry of his journal, blaming his failing eyesight for his inability to continue.

1790: President George Washington signs into law the first U.S. copyright act.

1889: Some 2,200 people in Johnstown, Pa., perish when the South Fork Dam holding back Lake Conemaugh collapses, sending 20 million tons of water rushing through the town.

1910: The Union of South Africa is founded.

1913: U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan proclaims the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for popular election of U.S. senators, to be in effect.

1935: Movie studio 20th Century Fox is created through a merger of the Fox Film Corp. and Twentieth Century Pictures.

1949: Former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss goes on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the jury deadlocked, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial).

1961: South Africa becomes an independent republic as it withdraws from the British Commonwealth.

1962: Former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann is hanged in Israel a few minutes before midnight for his role in the Holocaust.

1977: The trans-Alaska oil pipeline, three years in the making, is completed.

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Able-bodied motorists who park in spaces allotted for the handicapped in Warren will be getting tickets issued by volunteer members of the Warren Rotary Club.

Wes Richards, press secretary for U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., says the congressman received “some money” from a West German steel company for a trip he took to West Germany in 1986.

The LTV Steel Co. says demolition of some old steel mills and the impending sale of property has reduced real estate values on its land in Campbell, Struthers and Youngstown by more than $597,000.

1974: Striking Niles teachers ratify a one-year contact and return to their classes for the first time since May 21.

Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raid the Kirk Road home of a sergeant in the Army Reserves, confiscating handguns, a number of simulator grenades, 150 booby- trap simulators, 50 blasting caps and over 100 quarter-pound blocks of TNT.

Dr. Robert A. Liebelt, 47, provost of the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta, Ga., is named dean of the new Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.

1964: Memorial Day parades are held in Youngstown, Boardman, Struthers, Campbell and Coitsville and special services are held throughout the area.

A tanker truck carrying 7,900 gallons of gasoline rolls over, explodes and burns on Route 45 in North Jackson.

1939: A wind-whipped fire sweeps through the village of Cortland in Trumbull County, causing $100,000 in damage to the W. Main Street business district. Firemen from Warren, Niles, Kinsman, Champion and Orangeville fight the blaze.

Three hundred WPA workmen are on the job at the site of the municipal airport in Vienna, clearing trees.

A. Donald Gray, 48, landscape architect and gardening columnist for the Vindicator and the Cleveland Press, dies of a heart attack after putting in a strenuous day planning for the opening of the Cleveland Garden Center.