YEARS AGO
Today is Sunday, May 17, the 137th day of 2015. There are 228 days left in the year.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
On this date in:
1792: The New York Stock Exchange has its origins as a group of brokers meets under a tree on Wall Street.
1875: The first Kentucky Derby is run; the winner is Aristides, ridden by Oliver Lewis.
1912: The Socialist Party of America nominates Eugene V. Debs for president at its convention in Indianapolis.
1940: The Nazis occupy Brussels, Belgium, during World War II.
1954: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, unanimously strikes down racially segregated public schools.
1961: Cuban leader Fidel Castro offers to release prisoners captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion in exchange for 500 bulldozers.
1973: A special committee convened by the U.S. Senate begins its televised hearings into the Watergate scandal.
1980: Rioting that claimed 18 lives erupts in Miami’s Liberty City after an all-white jury in Tampa acquits four former Miami police officers of fatally beating a black insurance executive.
1987: Thirty-seven American sailors are killed when an Iraqi warplane attacks the U.S. Navy frigate Stark in the Persian Gulf. (Iraq apologized for the attack, calling it a mistake.)
1995: Jacques Chirac issworn in as president of France, ending the 14-year tenure of Socialist Francois Mitterrand.
2004: Massachusetts becomes the first state in the U.S. to allow legal same-sex marriages.
VINDICATOR FILES
1990: Youngstown Mayor Patrick J. Ungaro and City Council are locked in a battle over how to spend a $90,000 budget surplus. Ungaro wants to hire five police officers; council wants to hire firefighters and reopen the Oakland Avenue fire station.
Youngstown officials want to break the contract with Aero Services International Inc. as the fixed-base operator at Youngstown Municipal Airport, saying that Pan American World Airways has offered the city a better deal.
Backers of a bike trail from Leetonia to Lisbon are regrouping after the Columbiana County commissioners refuse to back the rail financially.
1975: A stained-glass “Window of the Christian Faith” is dedicated at the First United Methodist Church in Niles in memory of Miss Dorothy Black.
The Rev. Thomas Pokabla of Liberty Township is elected president of the Eastern Academy of the Ohio Podiatry Association, succeeding Dr. David Dull.
The Rev. Richard I. Lambert is ordained into the priesthood at Sts. Peter and Paul Byzantine Catholic Church in Warren by Bishop Stephen J. Kocisko, metropolitan archbishop of the Byzantine Catholic Archdiocese of Munhall, Pa.
1965: An estimated 30,000 people watch a variety of military exercises at the Youngstown Air Reserve Base to mark Armed Forces Day.
Shirley Walley wins season’s opening event of the Women’s Youngstown District Golf Association at Yankee Run with a low 39-41-80 for the day.
The Salem Board of Health opposes creation of a Columbiana County general health district, which would eliminate the city’s health department and require the city to pay a share of the county unit’s operation.
1940: Contending that the European war shows clearly the importance of waterways, Col. Raymond A. Wheeler, U.S. Army waterway expert, tells 400 people at a Chamber of Commerce forum that a Lake Erie-Ohio River canal would play an important part if the U.S. were engaged in another war.
Two bandits with guns drawn enter the Bloom drugstore at Market Street and Marion Avenue and take $150 in cash from two clerks and $6 from two customers.
The Canfield Fair Board completes improvements to the fairgrounds to allow midget auto races that will begin May 24 and polo matches in June.