YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, Sept. 4, the 247th day of 2015. There are 118 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1781: Los Angeles is founded by Spanish settlers under the leadership of Governor Felipe de Neve.

1888: George Eastman receives a patent for his roll-film box camera and registers his trademark: “Kodak.”

1951: President Harry S. Truman addresses the nation from the Japanese peace-treaty conference in San Francisco in the first live, coast-to-coast television broadcast.

1957: Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus uses Arkansas National Guardsmen to prevent nine black students from entering all-white Central High School in Little Rock.

Ford Motor Co. begins selling its ill-fated Edsel.

1972: U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz wins a seventh gold medal at the Munich Olympics, in the 400-meter medley relay.

1974: The United States establishes diplomatic relations with East Germany.

2010: Six days after Hurricane Katrina left a devastated New Orleans in chaos, police storm the Danziger Bridge, shooting and killing two unarmed people and wounding four others. (Five New Orleans police officers were found guilty of civil- rights violations in connection with the shootings; however, a federal judge threw out those convictions in September 2013 and ordered a new trial, concluding the case had been tainted by “grotesque prosecutorial misconduct.”)

2014: Joan Rivers, the raucous, acid-tongued comedian who crashed the male-dominated realm of late-night talk shows, dies at a New York hospital at age 81, a week after going into cardiac arrest in a doctor’s office during a routine medical procedure.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: The 144th Canfield Fair is the first in at least 25 years without a single day of rain, but it still falls short of breaking the 1979 record attendance of 539,437 by nearly 65,000.

Mahmoud Massri, 32, of 135 Madison Ave. on Youngstown’s North Side is arrested by FBI agents who say he operated a makeshift telephone switchboard from his apartment that allowed Palestinians in Israel to make calls to Palestinians in Arab countries, skirting Israeli law and purportedly defrauding American telephone companies of fees.

St. Rose Church in Girard will have its fourth annual Octoberfest, which will include a polka Mass with music by Del Rezek.

1975: Youngstown City Council says it will investigate charges by the Fraternal Order of Police that Chief Donald Baker has caused “a severe lack of morale” in the department.

Youngstown Mayor Jack C. Hunter has asked the city law department to determine the legality of a “zoo” maintained by Dr. Richard Murray at his Glenwood Avenue home and office. If the city has no ordinance regulating the keeping of wild animals, Hunter wants the law department to draft one.

Despite the efforts of 100 firemen from five departments, fire destroys a large warehouse at Barth Farms on Western Reserve Road. The fire was kept from spreading to nearby buildings housing 13,000 hens and 15,000 young turkeys. No livestock was lost.

1965: Speaking to Northeast Ohio reporters in Cleveland, Paul F. Lorenz, general manager of Ford’s Lincoln-Mercury division, predicts that 1966 will be another record year for U.S. auto production.

A new first-day attendance record of 42,380 is set at the 119th Canfield Fair.

Carole Haus of Calla Road, south of Canfield, who works at Farmers National Bank, is crowned “Apple Queen” at the Canfield Fair.

Dr. Frank Laubach, 81, president of the Laubach Literacy Fund, speaks at Trinity Methodist Church in Youngstown. Over 35 years, his phonetic approach to teaching literacy has been applied to 312 languages and dialects.

1940: The federal low-cost housing program is portrayed by Langdon Post, a consultant for the U.S. Housing Authority, as a method of eliminating “breeding grounds for Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin” while Atty. T. Lamar Jackson assails it as “socially, economically and politically unsound” during a debate on the proposed McGuffey low-cost housing program on WFMJ radio.

Gus Hall (Arvo Halburg until he legally changed his name in 1938) says he plans to run for county commissioner, and he objects to Judge Erskine Maiden’s temporary injunction preventing election officials from verifying names on the petitions of Communist candidates.

Because of complaints from parents and patriotic societies that the outstretched-arm salute during the pledge of allegiance to the Stars and Stripes duplicates the salute of dictator nations, the Pittsburgh city schools have abandoned the gesture during the pledge.