YEARS AGO

Today is Thursday, Aug. 27, the 239th day of 2015. There are 126 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1883: The island volcano Krakatoa erupts with a series of cataclysmic explosions; the resulting tidal waves in Indonesia’s Sunda Strait claim some 36,000 lives in Java and Sumatra.

1908: Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, is born near Stonewall, Texas.

1957: The USS Swordfish, the second Skate Class nuclear submarine, is launched from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine.

1962: The United States launches the Mariner 2 space probe, which flies past Venus in December 1962.

1965: Influential Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier, 77, dies in Cap Martin, France.

1979: British war hero Lord Louis Mountbatten and three other people, including his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, are killed off the coast of Ireland in a boat explosion claimed by the Irish Republican Army.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: A dramatic increase in fees that criminal lawyers are charging to defend indigent defendants in Mahoning County has spurred talk of establishing a public defender’s office.

Weathersfield Township trustee Joseph Takacs, 42, writes to President George Bush asking that the age requirement for the armed forces be waived so that he and other Vietnam era veterans can serve in the Persian Gulf conflict.

Youngstown activist Ron Daniels says he is mulling a 1992 run for the presidency on what he says would be a “progressive African-American agenda.”

1975: Youngstown’s first family, Mayor Jack C. Hunter and his wife Pauline, become the parents of a 7-pound, 1- ounce girl in St. Elizabeth Hospital.

Three pieces of government property totaling 387 acres at the Youngstown Municipal Airport are turned over to the city after being declared surplus property by the General Services Administration.

The League of Women Voters of Youngstown reports membership of 143, an increase of 10 percent over two years at a time when the national trend is a decrease in league membership.

1965: The Pennsylvania Railroad will build a $7.5 million coal dock at Ashtabula Harbor, bolstering the railroad’s coal shipments through the Youngstown area.

O. W. Wade Lenhart, former superintendent of Lowellville Schools, dies of a heart attack at his residence on Youngstown-Poland Road.

The Boardman Community Day Parade features 110 units and 1,150 marchers. Atty. Harold B. Doyle was grand marshal. Judges for the 24 floats were Howard Cailor, Alfred Davis and Levi Good.

1940: Mayor William B. Spagnola announces that the contract with the M. DeBartolo Co. for excavation at the new municipal airport in Vienna will be terminated Aug. 31, and the city will advertise for new bids on the work.

Inclement weather causes the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra to move its last pops concert of the summer inside to Stambaugh Auditorium. Admittance will be 25 cents, except for the first 12 rows, which will be 50 cents.

John F. Clarke, 22, of East Cleveland, son of the Rev. Gerald C. Clarke who served St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Youngstown, recently shot down a German Messerschmitt fighter plane somewhere over England. Clarke is a member of a Canadian anti-aircraft unit.