YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, Aug. 12, the 224th day of 2015. There are 141 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1867: President Andrew Johnson sparks a move to impeach him as he defies Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

1898: Fighting in the Spanish-American War ends.

1915: The novel “Of Human Bondage,” by William Somerset Maugham, is first published in the United States, a day before it was released in England.

1939: The MGM movie musical “The Wizard of Oz,” starring Judy Garland, has its world premiere at the Strand Theater in Oconomowoc, Wis., three days before opening in Hollywood.

1944: During World War II, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, is killed with his co- pilot when their explosives-laden Navy plane blows up over England.

1953: The Soviet Union conducts a secret test of its first hydrogen bomb.

1962: One day after launching Andrian Nikolayev into orbit, the Soviet Union also sends up cosmonaut Pavel Popovich; both men land safely Aug. 15.

1978: Pope Paul VI, who had died Aug. 6 at age 80, is buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.

1981: IBM introduces its first personal computer, the model 5150, at a news conference in New York.

1985: The world’s worst single-aircraft disaster occurs as a crippled Japan Airlines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashes into a mountain, killing 520 people. (Four people survived.)

2005: A NASA spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, begins a seven-month voyage to the Red Planet.

2010: General Motors Co. chief Ed Whitacre announces he will step down as CEO on Sept. 1, 2010, saying his mission has been accomplished as the company reports its second-straight quarterly profit. (Whitacre was succeeded as CEO by GM board member Daniel Akerson.)

2014: Steve Ballmer officially becomes the new owner of the Los Angeles Clippers; the sale closes after a California court confirms the authority of Shelly Sterling, on behalf of the Sterling Family Trust, to sell the franchise. (Her husband, Donald Sterling, had unsuccessfully fought the sale of the team he owned since 1981 in court.)

Lauren Bacall, 89, the slinky, sultry-voiced actress who created on-screen magic with Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep” and off-screen magic in one of Hollywood’s most storied marriages, dies in New York.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Bruce Ragon, an educator in the Youngstown Health Department, opens a campaign to ban all smoking in Youngstown municipal buildings. Mahoning County commissioners have banned smoking in the courthouse.

For the first time, the Lawrence County Fair will be expanded to a six-day event.

Analysts say surging oil prices might not be bad for the Mahoning and Shenango valleys because many local steel companies supply bars and tubular goods to the oil industry and would benefit from a long-term oil-price increase.

1975: Two suspected arsonists are in St. Elizabeth Hospital with massive burns after an explosion and fire destroyed a vacant house at 142 Kenmore Ave.

The Mahoning County Welfare Advisory Board urges Mahoning County commissioners to seek a piggyback sales tax to help erase a $1.3 million deficit at the Mahoning County Nursing Home.

A Youngstown State University security guard suffers an apparent heart attack and dies after chasing a suspected vandal across campus and arresting him. William C. “Bud” Comm, 41, is pronounced dead at St. Elizabeth Hospital.

1965: LWK Developers of New Castle, Pa., tells city council that if several lots on Edison Avenue are rezoned from residential to local commercial, a large office building will be constructed that would add $1.5 million of taxable real estate to the city and schools assessments.

Trumbull County commissioners agree to pay a $5,000 deficit accumulated by Hillside Hospital. The county-owned hospital cares for patients with TB, chronic illnesses or injuries requiring rehabilitation.

Directors of the Lake Erie-Ohio River Highway Association accuse the state of skimping by planning the highway with at-grade crossings rather than overpasses.

1940: Nine Ursuline sisters from Youngstown attend the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Ursuline community in Cleveland. Archbishop Joseph Schrembs presides at a Mass of thanksgiving.

Back home for a three-night stand against the Portsmouth Red Birds, the Youngstown Browns treat 1,500 fans at Idora Park to heads-up baseball during a 3-2 victory.

In her column, the Youngstown Vindicator’s Esther Hamilton nominates for her Hall of Shame “the lowlifes who take kittens and puppies out and leave them along the road to ... starve or be crushed by cars. If you have an abundance of either, chloroform them. Do it so the animals will not suffer.”