YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Thursday, Jan. 15, the 15th day of 2015. There are 350 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1862: The U.S. Senate confirms President Abraham Lincoln’s choice of Edwin M. Stanton to be the new Secretary of War, replacing Simon Cameron.

1865: During the closing months of the Civil War, the Second Battle of Fort Fisher near Wilmington, N.C., ends as Union forces capture the “Gibraltar of the South,” depriving the Confederates of their last major seaport.

1559: England’s Queen Elizabeth I is crowned in Westminster Abbey.

1919: In Boston, a tank containing an estimated 2.3 million gallons of molasses bursts, sending the dark syrup coursing through the city’s North End, killing 21 people.

1929: Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is born in Atlanta.

1943: Work is completed on the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of War (now Defense).

1947: The mutilated remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, who came to be known as the “Black Dahlia,” are found in a vacant Los Angeles lot; her slaying remains unsolved.

1967: The Green Bay Packers of the National Football League defeat the Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League 35-10 in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, known retroactively as Super Bowl I.

1973: President Richard Nixon announces the suspension of all U.S. offensive action in North Vietnam, citing progress in peace negotiations.

1989: NATO, the Warsaw Pact and 12 other European countries adopt a human rights and security agreement in Vienna, Austria.

1993: A historic disarmament ceremony ends in Paris with the last of 125 countries signing a treaty banning chemical weapons.

2009: US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditches his Airbus 320 in the Hudson River after a flock of birds disabled both engines; all 155 people aboard survive.

2005: Wilbert Rideau, an award-winning black journalist who’d spent nearly 44 years in Louisiana prisons for the 1961 death of a white bank teller, Julia Ferguson, is found guilty of manslaughter in a fourth trial by a racially-mixed jury and set free, his original sentence for murder reduced to time already served.

Michelle Kwan wins her ninth title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Portland, Ore.; Johnny Weir wins his second straight men’s title.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: James Monroe “Monk” Tillman, a civil- rights advocate in the Mahoning Valley for five decades and president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, says on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that he does not believe Dr. King “would be very happy seeing homeless people living out on the streets with all the riches that this country is supposed to have.”

Area moviegoers may recognize a pair of former Youngstowners in Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Born on the Fourth of July,” starring Tom Cruise. Bill Neal, a 1958 Chaney graduate, appears refereeing a wrestling match, and Ed Jupp Jr., a 1973 Wilson High graduate, is seen as a quadriplegic playing cards.

A year after its renaming, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Boulevard is gaining a foothold in the public consciousness. City Council renamed West Federal Street from Fifth Avenue to the Girard-Youngstown line.

1975: The Youngstown Education Association will remain the bargaining agent for the Youngstown public schools’ 1,166 teachers after winning a hotly contested election with the Youngstown Federation of Teachers.

Domestic car sales in the first 10 days of 1975 are off to their worst start in at least 21 years, but General Motors says it will not slash prices to boost sagging deliveries.

Picketing by Laborers Local 125 over a layoff dispute halts construction at Youngstown State University’s new Maag Library for a second day.

1965: A cold wave sweeps through the Midwest and Northeast, setting low temperature records. International Falls, Minn., records 42 below zero, the coldest in the city’s history.

The largest machine for expanding metal in the United States is put into service at the Niles Expanded Metals Co. during a ceremony attended by local dignitaries and politicians and Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes.

Nearly 800 Mahoning Valley industrial, business and professional men attend a salute to General Motors at the Hotel Pick-Ohio, an expression of gratitude for the GM Lordstown plant that is expected to create 4,800 jobs and at least $5 million annually in new income for the area.

1940: Rodney “Rod” Whitney, a 20-year veteran of professional baseball, is named manager of the Youngstown Browns by William O. DeWitt, vice president of the St. Louis Browns and owners of the Youngstown Mid-Atlantic League franchise.

Mrs. Paul Beight, 34, and her 16-year-old son, Jack, die in a fire that destroys their home about a mile from Poland. Five other people escaped from the fire, which was sparked by an overheated furnace.

Five Youngstowners rescued from an uninhabited atoll in the Atlantic Ocean 135 miles from Miami arrive home. J. Ralph Seidner, Harold Arkwright, Robert Myers, James Tobin and John D. Bloom arrive home by bus after Seidner sold the disabled plane left on the atoll.