YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, June 7, the 158th day of 2015. There are 207 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1769: Frontiersman Daniel Boone first begins to explore present-day Kentucky.

1892: Homer Plessy, a “Creole of color,” is fined for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)

1929: The sovereign state of Vatican City comes into existence.

1942: The World War II Battle of Midway ends in a decisive victory for Americans over the Japanese.

1955: The quiz show “The $64,000 Question” premieres on CBS-TV.

1972: The musical “Grease” opens on Broadway, having already been performed in lower Manhattan.

1981: Israeli military planes destroy a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.

1998: In a crime that shocks the nation, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man, is hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas.

2005: General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner announces plans to close plants and eliminate 25,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States by 2008.

2014: Actor-comedian Tracy Morgan is critically injured after a Wal-Mart tractor-trailer rams into his limousine bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, setting off a chain-reaction crash that kills comedian James “Jimmy Mack” McNair.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Lima, Warren and Painesville have Ohio’s highest concentrations of factory-emitted chemicals associated with birth defects, according to an analysis released by Citizen Action, a consumer and environmental group.

Trumbull County commissioners ask Sheriff Richard A. Jakmas to investigate the case of 20,000 gallons of gasoline missing from the department’s 34-year-old storage tank since 1989.

Mahoning County will receive $252,000 in federal funding for the $600,000 rebuilding of the Division Street bridge in Brier Hill.

1975: A Penn Central freight train slams into the rear of another train near Leetonia, killing the fireman, Richard Radzevich, 29, of Braddock, Pa., and injuring the engineer, Raphael Pierce, 21, of Crestline.

Chester Steele Jr., 20, home on a short leave from the U.S. Air Force, is fatally shot as he stood talking to another youth in front of his Wilmette Lane home. Youngstown police arrest an 18-year-old and three juveniles who fled the scene in a car.

The NAACP asks the federal district court to enjoin the Youngstown Board of Education from disposing of the Bancroft School property, saying the building will be needed in a future desegregation plan.

1965: Charles M. Beeghly, chairman of the board of Jones & Laughlin Corp. is awarded an honorary degree at the 91 st commencement of Thiel College.

Joseph L. Sacchini, geography and history teacher at East High School, is promoted to major in the U.S. Army Reserve.

George Landis resigns as head coach of Warren Kennedy High School to become assistant football coach under Coach Steve Sonoga at Boardman High School.

1940: The blowing in of two additional blast furnaces bring steel and iron production in the Youngstown district to an estimated output of 67 percent of capacity.

More than 50 members of local veterans organizations meeting at the Road of Remembrance Post 472 pledge to active duty in combating subversive elements and a “fifth column” in Mahoning County.

More than 2,000 people attend commencement at Stambaugh Auditorium, when Dr. Howard W. Jones, president of Youngstown College, presents diplomas to 183 graduates