YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, August 16, the 228th day of 2015. There are 137 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1777: American forces win the Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington.

1948: Baseball legend Babe Ruth dies in New York at age 53.1962: The Beatles fire their original drummer, Pete Best, replacing him with Ringo Starr.

1977: Elvis Presley dies at his Graceland estate in Memphis, Tenn., at age 42

1978: James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tells a Capitol Hill hearing he did not commit the crime, saying he’d been set up by a mysterious man called “Raoul.”

1999: The U.S. version of the quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” hosted by Regis Philbin, begins a limited two-week run on ABC.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins strongly urges the Ohio parole board to reject a request for clemency filed by Marie Poling of Howland, who was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of aggravated murder in the shooting death of her husband, Richard.

The Mahoning County Board of Health asks an appeals court to reconsider its ruling to allow Browning-Ferris Industries Inc. to continue to operate a landfill at Carbon Limestone in Poland.

Colombia’s new first lady, Ana Milena Munoz de Gaviria, 34, fondly remembers her days as an American Field Service exchange student in Poland from September 1972 to June 1973. Her husband, Cesar Gaviria Trujillo, was inaugurated as president of Colombia, a country that is engaged in a drug war that has claimed more than 500 lives, including three presidential candidates.

1975: A four-alarm fire destroys the 59-year-old Roberts Building at State Street and Poland Avenue in Struthers, leaving six tenants homeless. Four Struthers firemen are treated at city hospitals for smoke inhalation.

Atty. Carl J. Nunziato is elected president of the Youngstown Wolves Club. Other officers are Anthony Pannunzio, Dominic Cortell, Dr. Frank Damiano, Angelo Salpietra, Atty. Ray Tisone, Paul Marelli, Albert Marsch and Carmen Amadio.

Three small children under 5 years of age are placed in the protective care of the Mahoning County Children Services Board after the parents, both 20, are sentenced to one-year jail terms on drug-related charges by Municipal Judge Leo P. Morley.

1965: Youngstown University is the sole bidder when the Board of Education auctions a building. It will be converted into 22 classrooms for the YU School of Education.

About 5,000 Lebanese Catholics from 20 states attend dedication ceremonies of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Lebanon on Lipkey Road in North Jackson. After the ritual, 1,500 attend a banquet at the Idora Park ballroom.

Herman Spahr, a law enforcement expert employed by the Youngstown Chamber of Commerce, is saved by police from a gang that turned on Spahr after Spahr stopped his car and shot and wounded a man who was beating a woman outside the Royal Caf on East Federal Street.

1940: The U.S. government will employ 10,000 people in a huge $10 million munitions plant that will be scattered over nearly 60 square miles near Newton Falls.

“The destruction or capture of the British fleet would put this country in serious danger,” Professor Theodore Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells the Youngstown Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. He is national coordinator of 500 chapters of the Committee to Defend America.

“L-I-B-E-R-T-Y spells Liberty,” a song written by Mrs. Edward M. Griffiths of 2205 Volney Road, Youngstown, will be sung and played when Wendell L. Willkie makes his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination in Elwood, Ind., says the chairman of the program.