YEARS AGO
Today is Thursday, Aug. 20, the 232nd day of 2015. There are 133 days left in the year.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
On this date in:
1833: Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the U.S., is born in North Bend, Ohio.
1866: President Andrew Johnson formally declares the Civil War over, months after fighting had stopped.
1882: Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” has its premiere in Moscow.
1914: German forces occupy Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.
1953: The Soviet Union publicly acknowledges it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
1940: During World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pays tribute to the Royal Air Force before the House of Commons, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Exiled Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico, by Ramon Mercader, a Spanish Communist agent working at the behest of Josef Stalin. (Trotsky died the next day.)
1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act, a nearly $1 billion anti-poverty measure.
1989: Entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife, Kitty, are shot to death in their Beverly Hills mansion by their sons, Lyle and Erik.
1994: Benjamin Chavis Jr. is fired as head of the NAACP after a turbulent 16-month tenure.
2005: Northwest Airlines mechanics go on strike rather than accept pay cuts and layoffs; Northwest ends up hiring replacement workers.
2010: President Barack Obama invites Israel and the Palestinians to meet face to face in Washington for talks aimed at achieving an agreement to establish an independent Palestinian state and secure peace for Israel.
2014: The U.S. launches a new barrage of airstrikes against Islamic State extremists and weighs sending more troops to Iraq as President Barack Obama vows to be relentless in pursuit of a terrorist group that beheaded American journalist James Foley.
VINDICATOR FILES
1990: The Army Corps of Engineers is studying the feasibility of creating a 10-mile-long lake north of Kinsman by damming the Pymatuning Creek and flooding parts of Kinsman and Gustavus townships to provide more water for Trumbull County.
Nicholas M. Wolsonovich, superintendent of the Diocese of Youngstown schools, says that when he became involved in Catholic education in 1966, there was no tuition for elementary students in the diocese and high-school tuition was $100 or $200. High-school tuition has increased to $2,000.
Commercial Intertech Corp. will open a distribution center in Dallas to serve the rebounding oil and refining industries.
1975: Gene Cunin, operator of Kettlesprings Kilns of Alliance, has designed and is producing a commemorative plate to mark the city of Warren’s bicentennial.
John R. Makosky of Champion Township, a member of the East Suburban Youngstown Optimist Club, is elected governor of the Ohio District of Optimist International, which has 115 clubs and a membership of 3,500.
The Ohio Department of Agriculture warns the state’s farmers to be on the alert for witchweed, a parasitic plant that can destroy corn, sorghum and other grasses.
1965: Mr. and Mrs. Edward Neff of Canfield plan an open house to welcome Cooper Dawson of Swaziland, an American Field Service exchange student.
Michael Swearingen, High Street, gets his knee caught in a tree and had to remain there for nearly an hour until firemen were summoned.
Representatives of the Ohio Department of Highways are bombarded with protests during a public hearing on the new alignment proposed for the Boardman Expressway (Interstate 680) and the relocation of three state routes on the South Side.
Regular cigarette smokers accounted for more than half of the 71 people found with lung disease among 577 tested by the Mahoning TB and Health Association’s mobile X-ray over a month’s time.
1940: Michael and Carmine Ficocelli, directors of the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra, are returning to Youngstown after attending the conductors’ school of Serge Koussevitzky, famed director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Lennox, Mass.
Thirty men leave Youngs-town for training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and Norfolk after enlisting in the Navy with recruiting officers W.J. Kelley and Fred Burke.
Coach Dike Beede puts his Youngstown College gridders through their first workouts at Rayen Stadium as they prepare for the opening game of the football season against Geneva College on Sept. 12.