YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, Aug. 17, the 230th day of 2016. There are 136 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1807: Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat begins heading up the Hudson River on its successful round trip between New York and Albany.

1863: Federal batteries and ships begin bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor during the Civil War, but the Confederates manage to hold on despite several days of pounding.

1915: A mob in Cobb County, Ga., lynches Jewish businessman Leo Frank, 31, whose death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had been commuted to life imprisonment. (Frank, who’d maintained his innocence, was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986.)

1943: The Allied conquest of Sicily during World War II is completed as U.S. and British forces enter Messina.

1969: Hurricane Camille slams into the Mississippi coast as a Category 5 storm that is blamed for 256 U.S. deaths.

1982: The first commercially produced compact discs, a recording of ABBA’s “The Visitors,” are pressed at a Philips factory near Hanover, West Germany.

2015: The National Labor Relations Board dismisses a historic ruling that Northwestern University football players are school employees entitled to form the nation’s first union of college athletes.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Speaking to a capacity crowd at a New Birth service at Austintown Fitch High School, Dave Dravecky, the only area athlete to pitch in both a World Series and the All-Star Game, says his faith helped him cope with the loss of his arm to cancer.

The Youngstown Health Department says that someone used department stationary to send a hoax letter to a Trumbull County couple telling them that their son had tested positive for the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

The Mahoning County grand jury indicts a Pennsylvania man on charges of theft, accusing him of bilking investors out of money that he said would be used to make a film about organized crime in the Mahoning Valley.

1976: The Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus opens in a lot next to the A.C. Cook Chevrolet dealership in Canfield, sparking a score of neighborhood protests and a flurry of parking tickets from Canfield police.

A rope between two poles at the Dreamy Acres Swim Club in Canfield kills Charles W. Hoffman, 12, when he rode his motorbike into it, fracturing his neck.

The Ohio Grotto Association opens its convention in Youngstown with a concert and performances by Grotto Clowns on Federal Plaza.

1966: A campaign to clear the air in the Mahoning Valley is launched by a Struthers committee for smoke abatement. They want Gov. James Rhodes to ask the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare to conduct an air pollution survey in the Valley.

The Liberty Board of Education increases the pay for substitute teachers from $18 to $20 per day.

Dr. Fred W. Dunlea is appointed parochial school physician to succeed Dr. N.G. Garritano, who resigned to devote more time to his private practice. The part-time post pays an annual salary of $5,103.

1941: Sen. Harold H. Burton, attorney and former mayor of Cleveland, is in Youngstown to address the American Legion Convention at Stambaugh Auditorium.

Following reports that Ruth Elizabeth Baumgardner, a Lakewood coed who disappeared from Ohio Wesleyan University four years ago, was seen in Campbell, Mahoning County Sheriff Ralph Elser joins the hunt for the girl.