YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, July 24, the 205th day of 2015. There are 160 days left in the year.

Associated Press

On this date in:

1783: Latin American revolutionary Simon Bolivar is born in Caracas, Venezuela.

1862: Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a U.S. citizen, dies at age 79 in Kinderhook, N.Y., the town where he was born in 1782.

1866: Tennessee becomes the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

1915: The SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolls onto its side while docked at the Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people die in the disaster.

1923: The Treaty of Lausanne, which settles the boundaries of modern Turkey, is concluded in Switzerland.

1937: The state of Alabama drops charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the “Scottsboro Case.”

1959: During a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engages in his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

1969: The Apollo 11 astronauts – two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon – splash down safely in the Pacific.

1974: The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rules that President Richard Nixon has to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

1975: An Apollo spacecraft splashes down in the Pacific, completing a mission that included the first docking with a Soyuz capsule from the Soviet Union.

1980: Comedian-actor Peter Sellers dies in London at 54.

1998: A gunman bursts into the U.S. Capitol, killing two police officers before being shot and captured. (The shooter, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., is being held in a federal mental facility.)

2002: Nine coal miners become trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania; the story ends happily 77 hours later with the rescue of all nine.

2005: Lance Armstrong wins his seventh-consecutive Tour de France (he later was stripped of all his titles after admitting doping).

2010: A stampede inside a tunnel crowded with techno-music fans leaves 21 people dead and more than 500 injured at the famed Love Parade festival in western Germany.

2014: Air Algerie Flight 5017, an MD-83 carrying 116 people, crashes in northern Mali, killing all on board; it is the third major international aviation disaster in a week.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: An Ohio law takes effect that requires state agencies to give preference to veterans in making referrals for job placement and training programs that are funded by the federal government.

Beth Daniel wins the first Phar-Mor LPGA tournament at Squaw Creek Country Club in a sudden-death playoff against Patty Sheehan and takes home the first-place prize of $60,000.

Representatives of Youngstown’s Arab community ask for monthly meetings with Mayor Patrick Ungaro’s administration to express their concerns about violence at their neighborhood stores and find out how they can help police.

1975: Warren firefighters rescue a 25-year-old Austintown man, Michael Hubinsky, who was trapped by fire at Ray Gollan’s Honda motorcycle shop on Parkman Road. Damage is estimated at $100,000.

Two Youngstown men are charged in federal court with possession of stolen property after they are found with a stolen trailer loaded with cigarettes valued at $100,000.

Some 750 employees of the NRM Rubber Machinery Division walk off the job at plants in Columbiana and Leetonia in a dispute over outsourcing work at a time when 80 workers are on layoff.

1965: Thomas A. Rudebock of Leetonia is chosen “Outstanding Young Farmer” in District E by the Dairymen’s Cooperative Sales Association.

Mahoning County’s traffic toll for 1965 rises to 44, compared with 19 at the same time in 1964. The city has had 24 traffic deaths, compared with five a year earlier.

Youngstown’s delegation to the Children’s International Summer Village leaves for Ford Castle in England and a month of traveling abroad. The students are Jane Stark, Sally Anderson, Michael Woloschak and Tod Nichols.

1940: Directors of the United Engineering and Foundry Co. inspect the $1 million expansion and improvement program at the Youngstown plant.

An additional 550 Works Progress Administration workers will be assigned to work at the Youngstown Municipal Airport in Vienna Township to speed construction.

Twenty Youngstown families have volunteered to take in European refugee children for the duration of the war.