YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, Feb. 13, the 44th day of 2015. There are 321 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1861: Abraham Lincoln is officially declared winner of the 1860 presidential election as electors cast their ballots.

1914: The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, also known as ASCAP, is founded in New York.

1920: The League of Nations recognizes the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland.

1935: A jury in Flemington, N.J., finds Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first- degree murder in the kidnap-slaying of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. (Hauptmann was later executed.)

1939: Justice Louis D. Brandeis retires from the U.S. Supreme Court. (He was succeeded by William O. Douglas.)

1945: During World War II, Allied planes begin bombing the German city of Dresden.

1960: France explodes its first atomic bomb in the Sahara Desert.

1965: During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorizes Operation Rolling Thunder, an extended bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese.

1975: A late-night fire intentionally set by a disgruntled custodian breaks out on the 11th floor of the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center; the blaze spreads to six floors, but causes no direct casualties.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: A former Austintown man, Gilbert S. Sabatka Jr., 32, is accosted by a robber who shot him three times with a sawed-off rifle while Sabatka was ordering at the drive-through window of a McDonald’s restaurant in Corona, Calif.

The Howland Board of Trustees is gearing up for another annexation battle, this time with Niles and the Cafaro Co., owner of the Eastwood Mall, over a proposed strip plaza on 15.5 acres of property on the northeast corner of the mall property.

Youngstown State University’s school of business administration hopes to be among the first group of institutions accredited by the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs.

1975: Gov. James A. Rhodes proposes a $2.5 billion bond issue to be financed by a 0.7-percent increase in the state sales tax to help save Ohio’s decaying central cities. Youngstown would get about $50 million for a downtown minidome, convention center and state government building.

Youngstown’s 68 adult patrolmen are granted pay increases by City Council from $7.64 to $8.50 an hour, their first increase in years.

Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, former Harlem Globetrotter and NBA player who appeared in Youngstown numerous times, is a cabdriver in Chicago. He regrets coming along too early to make big money in basketball, but says there’s “Nothing wrong with driving a cab and earning an honest living.”

1965: At the Lake Erie AAU Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Cleveland, four local boxers win crown: Marke Estes, 118 pounds; Lom Leone, 135; Zack Page, 160, and Joe McKinney, 118.

Police in New Castle, Pa., file child neglect charges against an East Long Avenue couple, the second couple in a month in Lawrence County charged in the death of a child.

Three Youngstown men graduate from the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy. The are William A. Walter, 28; Jack E. Megela, 23, and James I. Forrester, 27.

1940: Dominic Moore, president of the Youngs-town Fraternal of Police, is named chief of the vice squad by police Chief John W. Turnbull.

Mahoning County advances in industrial importance, according to the Department of Commerce, going to 27th place among 3,070 U.S. counties in value of manufactured products. It ranked 31st in 1929.

Authoritative sources at the Vatican deny that the Holy See had instructed Archbishop Edward Mooney of Detroit to deliver an ultimatum to the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin to cease broadcasting on political and racial subjects, but that the Vatican was not displeased with his action.