YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, March 23, the 83rd day of 2016. There are 283 days left in the year. The Jewish holiday Purim begins at sunset.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1775: Patrick Henry delivers an address to the Virginia Provincial Convention in which he is said to have declared, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

1792: Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 in G Major (the “Surprise” symphony) has its first public performance in London.

1806: Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, having reached the Pacific coast, begin their journey back east.

1919:Benito Mussolini establishes his Fascist political movement in Milan, Italy.

1933: The German Reichs- tag adopts the Enabling Act, which effectively grants Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers.

1942: The first Japanese-Americans evacuated by the U.S. Army during World War II arrive at the internment camp in Manzanar, Calif.

1956: Pakistan becomes an Islamic republic.

1965: America’s first two-person space mission takes place as Gemini 3 blasts off with astronauts Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young aboard for a nearly five-hour flight.

1983: President Ronald Reagan first proposes developing technology to intercept incoming enemy missiles – an idea that comes to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Dr. Barney Clark, recipient of a Jarvik permanent artificial heart, dies at the University of Utah Medical Center after 112 days with the device.

2006: Police take DNA samples from 46 members of the Duke University lacrosse team after a woman hired to dance for a party charges she’d been raped. (Three players were indicted on charges of attacking the woman, but the rape counts later were dropped, and the players were exonerated.)

2011: Academy Award-winning actress Elizabeth Taylor dies in Los Angeles at age 79.

2015: Sen. Ted Cruz launches his bid for the Republican presidential nomination at Liberty University, a Christian school in Lynchburg, Va., founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Youngstown State University trustees scale back tuition increases approved in December to meet maximum increases at state universities that would be allowed under Gov. George Voinovich’s proposed budget.

Tamsanqa Linda, a former mayor of Port Elizabeth Township in South Africa, speaking in Liberty Township as a guest of the John Birch Society, says Nelson Mandela is not the hero depicted by the American media and is pushing South Africa toward communism.

Ruth Bowers, who submitted a letter of resignation to the Youngstown Board of Education citing health issues, says other members of the board have prevailed upon her to rescind the letter.

1976: The U.S. Supreme Court lets stand a 7th District Court of Appeals ruling that Youngstown municipal employees can live outside the city, unless there is a special need. The exception allows the city to require police and fire personnel to live in the city.

The Ohio State Auditor’s office says 462 of 13,710 tickets issued in Youngstown in 1974 are unaccounted for in an audit of the Youngstown Municipal Clerk of Courts office.

The spouses of Arthur W. Feisley, 31; and Valura Biles, 26, of Sebring are arrested in their slayings in Austintown. Charged with kidnapping and murder were John H. Biles and Regina Feisley.

1966: Twenty-four residents of northeastern Coitsville Township petition the Youngstown Board of Education for transfer to the Hubbard Exempted Village School District.

A 0.7-mill, three-year levy to be placed on the ballot in Trumbull County would raise almost $1 million as the local share of $2.5 million needed to build a branch campus of Kent State University in the county.

Evangelist Oral Roberts bring his crusade to Canton Memorial Auditorium.

1941: Youngstown city voters will be asked to approve a charter amendment to provide for nomination for city offices by party primaries. The amendment “recognizes the need for two properly functioning parties in the city, as in the nation.”

John J. Baumgartner, 28, of Girard, blind since birth, conducts his own seven-member band and composes his own tunes.

Employment in the Shenango Valley, which hit a low in 1940 when Carnegie-Illinois closed its Farrell tin mill, is beginning to see a gradual gain.