YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, March 25, the 84th day of 2015. There are 281 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1776: Gen. George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, is awarded the first Congressional Gold Medal by the Continental Congress.

1915: The U.S. Navy loses its first commissioned submarine as the USS F-4 sinks off Hawaii, claiming the lives of all 21 crew members.

1954: RCA has begun producing color television sets at its plant in Bloomington, Ind.

1965: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leads 25,000 people to the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery after a five-day march from Selma to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks. Later that day, civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit homemaker, is shot and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen as she drove a black volunteer to the airport.

1990: Eighty-seven people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, are killed when fire races through an illegal social club in New York City.

2005: Losing still more legal appeals, Terri Schiavo’s father, Bob Schindler, says his severely brain-damaged daughter is “down to her last hours” as she enters her second week without the feeding tube that had sustained her life for 15 years.

An ailing, silent Pope John Paul II appears to the faithful via video for Good Friday services at the Vatican.

2010: Osama bin Laden threatens i to kill any Americans that al-Qaida captures if the U.S. executes Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: The St. Henry Redskins upset the Liberty Leopards, 71-60, in the Division III state basketball championship game. Bobby Patton, Liberty Coach Bob Patton Sr.’s son, had a team high 17 points in the first half but was held to only 3 points in the second half.

Joseph Palermo, assistant chief enforcement officer for Youngstown’s Building Inspection Department, says the list of abandoned houses that should be demolished has grown from 90 to 200, but the city has no money for demolition.

The Youngstown Area Animal Protectionists, a year-old group, pickets outside the Struthers Field House to protest the use of animals in the annual Aut Mori circus.

1975: Sixty pictures from the private collection of Dr. John J. McDonough of Youngstown will make an 18-month tour of museums in the United States. The exhibit is titled, “Three Hundred Years of American Art.”

Hubbard captures the Steel Valley Conference girls basketball championship, beating Campbell Memorial, 53-34, and ending the season with an 11-0 record.

The Austintown Board of Education adopts a budget of $8.5 million for 1975, a 9-percent increase over the previous year.

1965: Automatic Sprinkler Corp. of Youngstown is awarded the contract for fire protection for the entire office and plant at the General Motors Corp. assembly plant in Lordstown. The $650,000 system will have 15,000 sprinkler heads.

The Mahoning County Law Library Association wins a round in its eight-year battle with Mahoning County commissioners, when the Ohio Supreme Court holds that the commissioners have a responsibility to accommodate the library.

1940: All but 14 bodies of the 72 men who died in the Willow Grove coal mine blast at St. Clairsville on March 16 have been recovered, the Hanna Coal Co. announces.

George Patsko Jr., a stockboy, is seriously injured when he falls into an elevator shaft at the W.T. Grant Co. store at 201 W. Federal St.

A temperature reading of 8 degrees at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. is the coldest for an Easter Sunday since Sheet & Tube began keeping records in 1914.