YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Tuesday, Aug. 25, the 237th day of 2015. There are 128 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1718: Hundreds of French colonists arrive in Louisiana, with some settling in present-day New Orleans.

1825: Uruguay declares independence from Brazil.

1916: The National Park Service is established within the Department of the Interior.

1921: The United States signs a peace treaty with Germany.

1944: During World War II, Paris is liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation.

1958: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a measure providing pensions for former U.S. presidents and their widows.

1965: Former baseball player-turned-doctor Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, who’d briefly played in only one major league game (for the New York Giants), dies in Chisholm, Minn., at age 87.

1975: The Bruce Springsteen album “Born to Run” is released by Columbia Records.

1980: The Broadway musical “42nd Street” opens. Producer David Merrick stuns the cast and audience during the curtain call by announcing that the show’s director, Gower Champion, had died earlier that day.

1981: The U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 comes within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures of and data about the ringed planet.

1985: Samantha Smith, 13, the schoolgirl whose letter to Yuri V. Andropov resulted in her famous peace tour of the Soviet Union, dies with her father, Arthur, and six other people in a commuter plane crash in Auburn, Maine.

2009: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the U.S. Senate, dies at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Mass., after a battle with a brain tumor.

2010: Hurricane Katrina hits Florida with 80 mph winds and heads into the Gulf of Mexico.

North Korea welcomes Jimmy Carter back to Pyongyang as the former U.S. president arrives to bring home Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American jailed in the communist country since January 2010 for entering the country illegally from China.

2014: A funeral takes place in St. Louis for Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson on Aug. 9.

At the Emmy Awards, ABC’s “Modern Family” wins best comedy series for the fifth time, while the final season of AMC’s “Breaking Bad” captures the top drama award.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: During the 1980s, Youngstown’s population dropped 17 percent from 115,510 to 95,593.

A group of East Side residents is lobbying the Youngstown Park and Recreation Commission to clean up and improve facilities in Lincoln Park.

The Gasser Chair Co. is close to signing an agreement to buy part of GF Corp.’s vacant Youngstown plant.

1975: A robber at the Ellwest Theater on Market Street in Youngstown shoots and kills a customer, James W. Dixon, 41, when Dixon failed to empty his pockets within the robber’s count of five.

About 1,500 members of UAW Local 1714 at the Lordstown General Motors plant vote to end a five-week strike.

Valley Consolidated Industries Inc. of Niles is given a multimillion- dollar anti-air pollution contract by Timken Co. of Canton, Joseph J. Comparato, president of Valley, announces.

1965: Two gunmen rob two employees of the McGuffey Plaza A&P store of several thousand dollars as they were making a night deposit at the adjacent Dollar Savings & Trust branch.

A large, well-mannered crowd of teenagers views a “swinging” fashion show of British-designed clothes at McKelvey’s department store downtown. The show featured Pru Hooper, narrator of the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night.”

S. Leroy Foster, principal of Elm Street School since 1947, is reassigned as principal of Washington School, succeeding Margaret Stage, who retired.

1940: Myron N. Graham, one of Youngstown’s oldest airplane pilots, is going to Central America to fly on a jungle air-freight and passenger line.

Twenty-two government employees begin registering and fingerprinting some 12,000 to 17,000 immigrants living in Youngstown and Mahoning County, part of a nationwide effort that will involve about 3.6 million immigrants.

More than 5,000 men, women and children swarm to Sheriff Ralph E. Elser’s farm near North Lima for the third annual Sheriff Elser picnic. More than 1,000 pounds of wieners and 300 cases of pop are consumed.