YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Tuesday, April 12, the 103rd day of 2016. There are 263 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1861: The American Civil War begins as Confederate forces open fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga., at age 63; he is succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman.

1955: The Salk vaccine against polio is declared safe and effective.

1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to fly in space, orbiting the Earth once before making a safe landing.

1963: Civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. is arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Ala., charged with contempt of court and parading without a permit. (During his time behind bars, King writes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”)

1981: The space shuttle Columbia blasts off from Cape Canaveral on its first test flight.

1985: Sen. Jake Garn, R-Utah, becomes the first sitting member of Congress to fly in space as the shuttle Discovery lifts off.

2006: Jurors in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial listen to a recording of shouts and cries in the cockpit as desperate passengers twice charged hijackers during the final half-hour of doomed United Flight 93 on 9/11.

2011: Japan ranks its nuclear crisis at the highest possible severity on an international scale – the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster – even as it insists radiation leaks are declining at its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

2015: Hillary Rodham Clinton announces in a video her second campaign for the White House.

Pope Francis marks the 100th anniversary of the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, calling it “the first genocide of the 20th century,” a politically explosive declaration that provokes a furious reaction from Turkey.

Jordan Spieth romps to his first major championship with a record-tying performance at the Masters, shooting an 18-under 270 to become the first wire-to-wire winner of the green jacket since 1976. (Spieth came in second place in the 2016 Masters.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: A hospital food- service worker visiting the chapel at St. Elizabeth Hospital Medical Center finds a newborn baby boy abandoned with a note pinned to his blanket reading: “Please tell him I’m sorry, and I’ll never stop thinking about him and I’ll love him forever.”

A 23-year-old Youngstown man is sentenced to four years in prison for drinking, driving and causing the death of Carol McKinley, 26, of Niles. Miss McKinley’s mother, Joan Bosel, had spent 10 days in a hospital bed in 1963 to save the baby she was carrying after her car was struck by a drunken driver. The baby was Carol McKinley.

Edward Jenkins, principal of McKinley Elementary School, spends the day on the roof of the school reading, making good on a challenge he gave his students that they read 2,000 books for Right to Read Week.

1976: Charlotte Jones, 13, of Michigan Avenue, is in guarded condition in South Side Hospital with a bullet wound suffered when a 15-year-old girl shot her with a pistol after an argument near Pioneer Pavilion in Mill Creek Park.

A robber takes cash from several drawers at the Union National Bank’s Canfield Office and fires at a man who chased him as he fled.

Elvin Charity Jr., former North High School and Yale University football star, tells 400 people at the sixth annual North High School Athletic Boosters banquet that “sports helps to develop both mind and body, teaching respect for others and helping us to relate to our social environment.”

1966: Thomas R. Kelley, a 20-year veteran on the Struthers Police Department, is named a detective sergeant by Mayor Stanley Davis.

Candidates for Girard’s May primaries will be guests of the Women’s Republican Club at a card party at the American Legion Hall.

About 200 area students tour St. Elizabeth Hospital when the Women’s Auxiliary of the Mahoning County Medical Society sponsors its annual Health Careers Day.

1941: About 200 members of Local 29, Ohio Leather Workers Union, unanimously reject a general wage increase of 2 cents an hour.

Forty members of the afternoon drama group of the American Association of University Women enjoy a review of the play “Ladies in Retirement” and a discussion at the home of Mrs. Alfred O. Stuart on Park Avenue.

Three Poland Seminary High School seniors score first, second and third in Mahoning County scholarship tests: Paul Cover, Helen Mae Murray and Doris Dean. Twenty-two other students from throughout the county are honored for high scores.