YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

years ago

Today is Friday, Dec. 4, the 338th day of 2015. There are 27 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1965: The United States launches Gemini 7 with Air Force Lt. Col. Frank Borman and Navy Cmdr. James A. Lovell aboard on a two-week mission. (While Gemini 7 was in orbit, its sister ship, Gemini 6A, was launched Dec. 15 on a one-day mission; the two spacecraft were able to rendezvous within a foot of each other.)

1214: Alexander II becomes King of Scots at age 16 upon the death of his father, William the Lion.

1619: A group of settlers from Bristol, England, arrives at Berkeley Hundred in present-day Charles City County, Va., where they have a service thanking God for their safe arrival.

1783: Gen. George Washington bids farewell to his Continental Army officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York.

1816: James Monroe of Virginia is elected the fifth president of the United States.

1918: President Woodrow Wilson leaves Washington on a trip to France to attend the Versailles Peace Conference.

1945: The Senate approves U.S. participation in the United Nations by a vote of 65-7.

1954: The first Burger King stand is opened in Miami by James McLamore and David Edgerton.

1977: Jean-Bedel Bokassa, ruler of the Central African Empire, crowns himself emperor in a lavish ceremony. (Bokassa was deposed in 1979; he died in 1996 at age 75.)

1978: San Francisco gets its first female mayor as City Supervisor Dianne Feinstein is named to replace the assassinated George Moscone.

1984: A five-day hijack drama begins as four armed men seize a Kuwaiti airliner en route to Pakistan and force it to land in Tehran, where the hijackers kill American passenger Charles Hegna. (A second American, William Stanford, also was killed during the siege.)

1991: Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, the longest-held of the Western hostages in Lebanon, is released after nearly seven years in captivity.

1996: The Mars Pathfinder lifts off from Cape Canaveral and begins speeding toward the red planet on a 310 million-mile odyssey. (It arrived on Mars in July 1997.)

2005: Members of the former Sept. 11 commission, appearing on the Sunday talk shows, say the U.S. is at great risk for more terrorist attacks because Congress and the White House have failed to enact several strong security measures.

Show business legends Robert Redford, Tina Turner, Tony Bennett, Julie Harris and ballerina Suzanne Farrell headline the annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C.

Croatia wins its first Davis Cup title.

2010: President Barack Obama praises a newly sealed trade deal with South Korea as a landmark agreement that promises to boost the domestic auto industry and support tens of thousands of American jobs.

2014: The Obama administration acknowledges that many people covered under the Affordable Care Act would face higher premiums the next year.

Police wage hours-long gunbattles with Islamic militants who attacked Chechnya’s capital of Grozny, leaving at least 20 people dead.

Jeremy Thorpe, an influential British politician who’d helped revive the Liberal Party before his career was cut short by scandal, dies in London at age 85.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: The Trumbull Chapter of the American Red Cross puts a Christmas tree in Eastwood Mall holding the names of soldiers serving with Operation Desert Shield.

A Trumbull County grand jury indicts Mahoning County rackets figure Orland Carabbia on charges of bribery and gambling.

Ron Parise, a Warren native and YSU graduate, is the payload specialist on the Columbia space shuttle that is using a $150 million observatory to study the stars.

1975: Ohio State’s Archie Griffin is named winner of the Heisman Trophy for an unprecedented second year in a row. Griffin says he’d like to play professional football, but is looking only as far ahead as the Rose Bowl game between the Buckeyes and UCLA.

F. James McDonald, General Motors Corp. executive vice president, tells 500 area business leaders at the Youngstown Area Chamber of Commerce 70th anniversary banquet that he’s optimistic about the national economy and the auto industry.

Members of the Youngstown Negro Business and Professional Women enter into the holiday spirit by donating $100 to Salvation Army’s Christmas Cheer Program.

1965: The payroll for hourly employees of the Packard Electric Division of General Motors exceeded $1 million a week in November for the first time in the company’s history. Packard is Warren’s biggest employer, with 7,500 workers.

Struthers Mayor-elect Stanley Davis, Mayor Joseph Opsitnik and councilmen and officials are given a glum report by Auditor Michael Orenic Jr. on the state of the city’s finances.

1940: Ursuline High basketball coach Pat McCarty says he’ll have a small but speedy team, with returning varsity players Jack Dorsey (at 6 feet, the tallest player), Frank Knisely and Bob Fullerman.

Attorney J. Cameron Argetsinger, vice president and general counsel of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., is re-elected president of the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association.

“We must keep the infection of cruel prejudice from our land,” Mrs. Charles W. Guilkey of Chicago, former national president of the YWCA, tells about 200 people at a banquet marking the renovation of the Youngstown YWCA, which includes a swimming pool.