YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, Feb. 1, the 32nd day of 2015. There are 333 days left in the year.

Associated Press

On this date in:

1790: The U.S. Supreme Court convenes for the first time in New York.

1861: Texas votes to leave the Union at a Secession Convention in Austin.

1865: During the Civil War, Union forces led by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman begin the Carolinas Campaign as they invade South Carolina.

1946: Norwegian statesman Trygve Lie is chosen to be the first secretary-general of the United Nations.

1960: Four black college students begin a sit-in protest at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they’d been refused service.

1968: During the Vietnam War, South Vietnam’s police chief (Nguyen Ngoc Loan) executes a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to the head.

Richard M. Nixon announces his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

1979: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini receives a tumultuous welcome in Tehran as he ends nearly 15 years of exile.

2003: The space shuttle Columbia breaks up during re-entry, killing all seven of its crew members.

2010: President Obama unveils a multitrillion-dollar spending plan, pledging an intensified effort to combat high unemployment and asking Congress to quickly approve new job-creation efforts that would boost the deficit to a record-breaking $1.56 trillion.

2014: Academy Award-winning actor Maximillian Schell, 83, dies in Innsbruck, Austria.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: The Main Library and all 22 branches of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County are closed after clerks and custodians go on strike.

Fourteen state representatives call on the Ohio Lottery to offer a game based on the results of NFL football and other professional sports events, but Gov. Richard Celeste remains opposed to the idea.

Youngstown Law Director Edwin Romero instructs city officials to not talk about flooding at the Home Savings & Loan Co., Powers Auditorium, Phar-Mor Centre, City Hall and the former Higbee building because of potential legal action.

1975: The General Motors Assembly Division plant at Lordstown produces the 1,500,000th Chevrolet Vega. The first Vega was produced June 26, 1970.

The Mahoning County Board of Education and the Board of Health will move from the courthouse annex downtown to the old county tuberculosis sanatorium on Kirk Road in Austintown.

“Phantom,” a yearling pony who wandered Struthers and Poland for five months after escaping from his Como Street owner, is finally captured by Michael Kasper of Clingan Road, who used buckets of oats over a period of days to lure the pony into a wired pen. The Humane Society will seek a new home for him.

1965: Monsignor William S. Nash, a clergyman and civic leader in Youngstown for more than 30 years, dies of a heart attack in Hollywood, Fla.

By unanimous vote of the 1,500 delegates to the Ohio Episcopal Diocese Convention in Cleveland, the word “male” is stricken from the diocese law stating the qualifications for election to church vestries, making women eligible.

1940: Youngstown’s new municipal airport in Vienna has its initiation when two Rye, N.Y., fliers miss the New Castle, Pa., airport, where they planned on refueling during a flight from New York to Chicago, and make a forced landing on the never-used runway at the unopened airport.

J.C. Argetsinger, vice president and general counsel of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., says the Interstate Commerce Commission’s report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt recommending against construction of a Lake Erie-Ohio River canal “clinches all arguments for the absolute necessity” of building the canal because the report claims that the canal would force the railroads to cut their rates.

Mayor William Spagnola urges Youngstowners to “unite in the campaign against syphilis by observing ‘Social Hygiene Day.’”