YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, June 19, the 170th day of 2015. There are 195 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1864: During the Civil War, the Confederate sloop-of-war CSS Alabama is sunk by the USS Kearsarge (also a sloop-of-war) off Cherbourg, France.

1865: Union troops commanded by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrive in Galveston, Texas, with news that the Civil War is over, and that all remaining slaves in Texas are free, an event celebrated to this day as “Juneteenth.”

1910: The first Father’s Day is celebrated in Spokane, Wash. (The idea for the observance is credited to Sonora Louise Smart Dodd.)

1934: The Federal Communications Commission is created; it replaces the Federal Radio Commission.

1944: During World War II, the two-day Battle of the Philippine Sea begins, resulting in a decisive victory for the Americans over the Japanese.

1945: Millions of New Yorkers turn out to cheer Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is honored with a parade.

1953: Julius Rosenberg, 35, and his wife, Ethel, 37, convicted of conspiring to pass U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, are executed at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, N.Y.

1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is approved by the U.S. Senate, 73-27, after surviving a lengthy filibuster.

1972: Hurricane Agnes, blamed for at least 122 deaths, makes landfall over the Florida Panhandle.

1975: Former Chicago organized crime boss Sam Giancana is shot to death in the basement of his home in Oak Park, Ill.; the killing has never been solved.

1999: Author Stephen King is seriously injured when he is struck by a van driven by Bryan Smith in North Lovell, Maine.

2005: Fighting rages across southern Afghanistan as the U.S. military pounded suspected Taliban positions with airstrikes.

2010: President Barack Obama uses his weekly radio and Internet address to pin blame on Republicans for making life harder for the unemployed and for those who could lose their jobs without new federal intervention.

2014: President Barack Obama announces he is dispatching 300 U.S. military advisers to Iraq to help quell a rising insurgency.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Retired Army Sgt. Clyde Lee Conrad, a retired native of Sebring, Ohio, is sentenced to life in prison by a West German court that found him guilty of passing secrets to Hungary and Czechoslovakia from 1975 through 1985 in return for $1.2 million.

An ex-convict suspected in bank robberies across three states walks into the Second National Bank branch on Youngstown Road SE in Warren, puts a toy gun on the manager’s desk and instructs him to call the FBI.

Mahoning County Assistant Prosecutor Kenneth N. Bailey tells a Mahoning County jury that Christopher Magourias prayed to Satan after he and another Boardman man brutally beat and stabbed a Youngstown State University student to death in February 1988.

1975: Youngstown City Council passes a new motor-vehicle noise-abatement law that allows a police officer to determine when exhaust noise is excessive.

The Ohio Senate gives bipartisan support to a “Sunshine Law” designed to open government meetings to public scrutiny, sending the measure to the House on a 29-13 vote.

Youngstown and Warren would not be prime targets in the event of an enemy nuclear attack, according to a U.S. Defense Department survey.

1965: The Youngstown Development Co. of 1445 Belmont Ave. is the high bidder at $200,000 for the 33-acre site of the Mahoning County Home on Herbert Road. Youngstown Development’s address is the same as that of William M. Cafaro & Associates.

Youngstown University opens the first team of the summer session with 4,402 students, 100 more than a year earlier.

New Castle defeats Tippecanoe 24-9 in an inter-club junior tournament at Tippecanoe. Jim Klebe of New Castle and Frank Bellino of Tippecanoe each had 83.

1940: More than 16,000 Youngstown area children flock to Idora Park for the 17th annual Vindicator Kiddies Day.

Youngstown Police chief John Turnbull says the city’s bookie joints, which have a thriving business handling bets on distant horse races, have been closed by vice officers and will remain closed.

Mrs. Willis McGill, a United Presbyterian missionary in Tanta, Egypt, sends word to her parents in Youngstown, The Rev. and Mrs. H.C. McAuley, that “things are serious in Egypt” and she expects to leave for America soon.