YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, Dec. 30, the 364th day of 2015. There is one day left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1853: The United States and Mexico sign a treaty under which the U.S. agrees to buy some 45,000 square miles of land from Mexico for $10 million in a deal known as the Gadsden Purchase.

1905: The Franz Lehar operetta “The Merry Widow” premieres in Vienna.

1922: Vladimir I. Lenin proclaims the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which lasts nearly seven decades before dissolving in December 1991.

1936: The United Auto Workers union stages its first “sit-down” strike at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant No. 1 in Flint, Mich. (The strike lasted until Feb. 11, 1937.)

1940: California’s first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway connecting Los Angeles and Pasadena, officially opens.

1954: Olympic gold-medal runner Malvin G. Whitfield becomes the first black recipient of the James E. Sullivan Award for amateur athletes.

1965: Ferdinand Marcos is inaugurated for his first term as president of the Philippines.

1979: Broadway composer Richard Rodgers dies in New York at age 77.

1989: A Northwest Airlines DC-10, which had been the target of a telephoned threat, flies safely from Paris to Detroit with 22 passengers amid extra-tight security.

2006: Iraqis awake to news that Saddam Hussein has been hanged; victims of his three decades of autocratic rule take to the streets to celebrate.

2014: President Vladimir Putin’s chief political foe, Alexei Navalny, is convicted, along with his brother, Oleg, in a fraud case widely seen as a vendetta by the Kremlin, triggering one of Russia’s boldest anti-government demonstrations in years.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Lisbon Police Chief Charles Carlisle says he had no qualms about replacing his officers’ six-shooters with 18 Glock semiautomatic pistols that have plastic bodies. “Everything else is made of plastic,” says Carlisle.

The Warren Police Department, which has had a dozen retirements but no hires, may have to curtail an elementary-schools drug-education program and remove officers from the city’s high schools.

Dwayne E. Hofus of Youngstown is one of 16 people awarded the Carnegie Medal for heroism. Hofus saved Jessica Maxwell, 2, and Heather McGee, 3, from a burning house June 10, 1989.

1975: Two men are being held by Warren police in the death of Dominic Chiarella, 51, a clerk at the Austin Village Plaza on West Market Street, and the wounding of another clerk, Frederick C. Piersol, during a robbery. (Pompie Junior Wade was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the killing. Wade now is serving a life prison term at the Ohio Penitentiary. He was denied parole in October 2015.)

Ignoring cries of “sham” and “cover-up” by Councilman Robert Spencer, Youngstown City Council votes to end its special investigation of Chief Donald Baker’s oversight of the police department.

Jack Sulligan, 69, chairman of the Mahoning County Democratic Party for 25 years and a member of the Mahoning County Board of Elections, is pronounced dead of a heart attack at St. Elizabeth Hospital after being stricken at his Smithfield Street home.

1965: E. Perry Beatty of Poland, director and treasurer of Dollar Savings and Trust Co., dies at his home. He had been with the bank since 1917 and had been active in community affairs.

Republic Steel Corp.’s Truscon plants in Youngstown and Warren receive orders for $5.9 million worth of aircraft landing mats.

Atty. Frank P. Anzellotti Jr. is appointed assistant county prosecutor by Prosecutor Clyde W. Osborne. He fills a vacancy left when Elwyn Jenkins was elevated to common pleas judge.

John B. Morgan Jr., executive vice president of Associated Hospital Service Inc., is elected president of the Youngstown Area Chamber of Commerce.

1940: Youngstown area industrialists, bankers and labor leaders praise President Franklin Roosevelt’s call for the U.S. to give all possible aid to Great Britain in its war with the Axis powers while boosting its own national-defense program.

Mahoning County Engineer Robert Schomer announces that the Mahoning Avenue bridge will be reopened to two-way traffic.

Dr. and Mrs. Howard Talbott and their daughter, Miss Betty Talbott, plan an open house New Year’s Day at their home on Redondo Road.