YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, March 18, the 77th day of 2015. There are 288 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1766: Britain repeals the Stamp Act of 1765.

1925: The Tri-State Tornado strikes southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana, resulting in some 700 deaths.

1937: Some 300 people, mostly children, are killed in a gas explosion at a school in New London, Texas.

1940: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agrees to join Germany’s war against France and Britain.

1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Hawaii statehood bill. (Hawaii became a state on Aug. 21, 1959.)

1962: France and Algerian rebels sign the Evian Accords, a cease-fire agreement that takes effect the next day to end the Algerian War.

1965: The first space walk takes place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov goes outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

1974: Most of the Arab oil-producing nations end their 5-month-old embargo against the United States that had been sparked by American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

1980: Frank Gotti, the 12-year-old youngest son of mobster John Gotti, is struck and killed by a car driven by John Favara, a neighbor in Queens, N.Y. (The following July, Favara vanished, apparent victim of a gang hit.)

1990: Thieves make off with 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (the crime remains unsolved).

1995: Spain’s Princess Elena marries a banker, Jaime de Marichalar y Saenz de Tejada, in Seville; it is Spain’s first royal wedding in 89 years. (The couple separated in 2007, and later divorced.)

2005: Doctors in Florida, acting on orders of a state judge, remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. (Despite efforts of congressional Republicans to intervene and repeated court appeals by Schiavo’s parents, the brain-damaged woman died on March 31, 2005, at age 41.)

Former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland is sentenced to a year in prison and four months under house arrest for selling his office in a corruption scandal (he served 10 months).

2010: President Barack Obama signs into law a $38 billion jobs bill containing a modest mix of tax breaks and spending designed to encourage the private sector to start hiring again.

Actor Fess Parker, 85, dies in Santa Ynez, Calif.

Jerome York, an Apple Inc. board member and a financial wizard credited with turning around Chrysler and IBM, dies in Pontiac, Mich., at age 71.

2014: With a sweep of his pen, President Vladimir Putin adds Crimea to the map of Russia, provoking denunciations from the Western leaders who call Putin a threat to the world.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: In the wake of a $15,000 flim-flam of a 77-year-old Boardman woman, area police say financial institutions could do more to guard depositors from being conned out of their savings.

Youngstown’s Democratic Mayor Patrick J. Ungaro says he has no qualms about working with Republican candidate for governor, George Voinovich, as long as Youngstown benefits.

Liquid crystals and advanced manufacturing technologies are the topics of two “high-tech breakfasts” being offered by Youngstown State University’s Public Service Institute and the Office of Continuing Education and Education Outreach.

1975: An empty tractor-trailer rig crashes into the Standard Slag Co. Research Lab building at 510 W. Main St., Canfield, causing $100,000 in damage to the building and its contents.

Fred Davis of Boardman is the only Youngstown area player named to the Associated Press All-Ohio basketball team.

The Rayen School dramatics department presents “Anything Goes,” a musical comedy. Heading the cast are James Paramore and Tricia McClennan as Moonface Martin and his girlfriend, Bonnie.

1965: The Mahoning-Shenango Kennel Club’s 27th annual dog show has a record number of entries, 617.

Amos Alonzo Stagg, athlete and “grand old man of football,” dies in California at age 102. Stagg retired from coaching at 98 when his eyesight failed.

1940: Former Judge James E. Bennett will head the 22nd annual Community Chest campaign.

An egg is found in Pete Penguin’s house in Crandall Park leading to the suspicion that Youngstown College’s mascot is not a he, but a she.

The work force at the Packard Electric Division of General Motors in Warren has grown from 750 in 1936 to 1,400, and the payroll for 1939 totaled $2.6 million.