YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, Oct. 4, the 277th day of 2015. There are 88 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1777: Gen. George Washington’s troops launch an assault on the British at Germantown, Pa., resulting in heavy American casualties.

1822: The 19th president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, is born in Delaware, Ohio.

1931: The comic strip “Dick Tracy,” created by Chester Gould, debuts.

1940: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini confer at Brenner Pass in the Alps.

The Warner Bros. movie “Knute Rockne All American,” starring Pat O’Brien as the legendary Notre Dame football coach and featuring Ronald Reagan as George Gipp, premieres in South Bend, Ind.

1957: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit.

The television series “Leave It to Beaver” premieres on CBS.

1959: The Soviet Union launches Luna 3, a space probe that transmits images of the far side of the moon.

1960: An Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-188A Electra crashes on takeoff from Boston’s Logan International Airport, killing all but 10 of the 72 people on board.

1965: Pope Paul VI, making the first-ever papal visit to the Western Hemisphere, addresses the U.N. General Assembly, where he urges delegates to adopt as their solemn oath: “No more war, war never again.”

1970: Rock singer Janis Joplin, 27, is found dead in her Hollywood hotel room.

1976: Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz resigns in the wake of a controversy over a joke he’d made about blacks.

1985: Islamic Jihad issues a statement saying it has killed American hostage William Buckley. (Fellow hostage David Jacobsen later said he believed Buckley had died of torture injuries four months earlier.)

1990: For the first time in nearly six decades, German lawmakers meet in the Reichstag for the first meeting of reunified Germany’s parliament.

1995: Pope John Paul II arrives in the United States for a five-day visit.

2005: President George W. Bush defends his Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, from suggestions by some skeptical Republicans that she is not conservative enough, and insisted Miers shares his strict-constructionist views. (Miers ended up withdrawing.)

2010: The Supreme Court begins a new era with three women serving together for the first time as Elena Kagan takes her place at the end of the bench.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Sharon police arrest a 24-year-old Heinz Avenue man in connection with a pipe-bomb blast that damaged a truck, garage and house in the 200 block of Oakland Avenue.

Trumbull County school counselors say there is no organized program for suicide prevention education in the schools.

City Council members agree that Youngstown needs more police officers to battle lawlessness but are reluctant to support Mayor Patrick Ungaro’s plan to spend $750,000 to hire 25 additional police officers.

1975: Robert D. Rowland, president of Dollar Savings & Trust Co., presides at a ribbon-cutting attended by 1,000 people for the bank’s $6 million reconstructed downtown headquarters.

Gov. James A. Rhodes’ Cost Control Council recommends 590 proposals that are estimated to save the state $216 million a year.

Three Lordstown-built 1976 Vega hatchbacks complete a grueling 60-day endurance run of more than 60,000 miles over some the country’s hottest and most desolate desert wasteland.

1965: A 19-room addition is being constructed to meet increased student population at Howland Junior High School.

The newly organized Youngstown Area Chapter of the Kent State University Alumni Association adopts a constitution and names William C. Barrett as the group’s first president.

Mrs. Chester W. Bailey, member of the Governor’s Committee for Employment of the Handicapped and Youngstown’s Manpower Advisory Committee, is new chairman of the Youngstown Committee for Employment of the Handicapped.

“As police, your prime job is to protect society, so you must not be sorry for those you, in clear conscience, put on the road to prison,” the Rev. Carl J. Breitfeller, Dominican friar who served in federal prisons as a chaplain for 11 years, tells Youngstown police.

1940: President Franklin D. Roosevelt will stop in Youngstown Oct. 11 during a tour of defense facilities in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Following a ranking of U.S. cities after the census, Youngstown is the 49th largest city in the nation with a population of 167,426, a decrease of 1.5 percent since the 1930 census. (With 65,062 people in 2014, Youngstown now ranks 545th largest).

Richard W. Greenlee, army recruiting sergeant in Youngstown, says he has had to turn away a number of “old men,” those over 35, who have attempted to enlist, many wanting to rejoin the outfits they served in during the World War.