YEARS AGO

Today is Monday, May 18, the 138th day of 2015. There are 227 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1642: The Canadian city of Montreal is founded by French colonists.

1765: About one-fourth of Montreal is destroyed by a fire.

1896: The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorses “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

1910: Halley’s Comet passes by earth, brushing it with its tail.

1926: Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanishes while visiting a beach in Venice, Calif. (McPherson reappeared more than a month later, saying she’d escaped after being kidnapped and held for ransom.)

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.

1934: Congress approves, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs, the so-called “Lindbergh Act,” providing for the death penalty in cases of interstate kidnapping.

1944: During World War II, Allied forces finally occupy Monte Cassino in Italy after a four-month struggle with Axis troops.

1953: Jacqueline Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier as she pilots a Canadair F-86 Sabre jet over Rogers Dry Lake, Calif.

1969: American astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Thomas P. Stafford and John W. Young blast off aboard Apollo 10 on a mission to orbit the moon.

1973: Harvard law professor Archibald Cox is appointed Watergate special prosecutor by U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson.

1980: The Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state explodes, leaving 57 people dead or missing.

1995: Ballet dancer Alexander Godunov is found dead at his West Hollywood, Calif., home at age 45.

Actress Elizabeth Montgomery, 62, star of the long-running TV comedy hit “Bewitched,” dies in Los Angeles.

2005: President George W. Bush offers his unqualified support for Egypt’s political reform process as he receives Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief at the White House.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: North Star Steel Co. is spending $5.3 million to expand its Youngstown seamless pipe mill, an investment that will create 35 jobs.

Strong winds break the passenger ferry boat at Mill Creek Park loose from its mooring, sending it over a park waterfall. Wind damage was reported throughout Mahoning and Trumbull counties.

California prison officials deny parole to John Tidwell, 41, who is serving a life sentence for the 1973 murder of a California man, while also facing life sentences in Ohio for the 1973 murders in Bazetta Township of Warren industrialist C. Walter Holmquist and his wife, Dorothy.

1975: The threatened total deregulation of the scheduled airline industry does not bode well for Youngstown Municipal Airport, which already has skimpy airline service and is facing operating deficits.

Dr. John R. White, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Youngstown State University, will lead YSU students and 20 Struthers High School seniors in an excavation of the Hopewell Furnace, the first blast furnace in the Western Reserve, in the Yellow Creek Gorge between Struthers and Poland.

David L. Gruber, 15, and Michael A. Malenic, 16, receive their Eagle Scout awards at a court of honor by Boy Scout Troop 2 at Poland Methodist Church.

1965: The Old Stone House on Meander Reservoir property, built in 1830, will be dedicated as Austintown Township’s first historic site. Famous guests included Presidents McKinley and Garfield, and it was a station on the Underground Railroad.

Boardman Township Fire Chief Wayne Ewing Jr. and Assistant Police Chief Robert Rhinehart submit surprise resignations at a meeting of the township trustees.

Betty Allen, a Rayen School graduate, is selected to sing the world premiere of Franz Waxman’s “Song of Terezin” at the acclaimed Cincinnati May Festival.

1940: A large number of inquiries made in Youngstown about enlisting in the U.S. Army causes Army officials to make plans to reopen a recruiting office at the main Post Office.

The Rev. Edward Joseph Hogan, who was ordained a priest of the Sulpician Order in St. John’s Cathedral, Cleveland, sings his first solemn high Mass at his home parish of St. Patrick Church in Youngstown.

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