YEARS AGO FOR AUG. 20

YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, Aug. 20, the 232nd day of 2017. There are 133 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1619: The first known African-Americans in English North America (approximately 20) land at Point Comfort, Va. They are then sold or traded into servitude.

1833: Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the United States, is born in North Bend, Ohio.

1866: More than a year after the end of fighting in the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson issues Proclamation 157, which declares that “peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.”

1910:A series of forest fires sweep through parts of Idaho, Montana and Washington, killing at least 85 people and burning some 3 million acres.

1914: German forces occupy Brussels, Belgium, during World War I.

1920:A preliminary meeting takes place in Akron to form the American Pro Football League

1940: During World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pays tribute to the Royal Air Force before the House of Commons, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Exiled Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Coyoacan, Mexico, by Ramon Mercader. (Trotsky died the next day.)

1953: The Soviet Union publicly acknowledges it has tested a hydrogen bomb.

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act, a nearly $1 billion anti-poverty measure.

1968: The Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations begin invading Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring” liberalization drive.

1977: The United States launches Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch, gold-plated copper phonograph record containing images, greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature.

1992: The Republican National Convention in Houston nominates President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle for second terms in office.

2007: Tens of thousands of tourists flee the beaches of the Mayan Riviera as Hurricane Dean roarsoward Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

A smoking China Airlines Boeing 737-800 explodes in a fireball at an airport gate in Okinawa seconds after all 157 passengers and eight crew members had safely evacuated.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama expresses irritation with the “Obama Girl” web video starring actress Amber Lee Ettinger, telling The Associated Press it had upset his young daughters.

Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley dies in Greenwich, Conn., at age 87.

2012: In a historic change at one of the world’s most exclusive golf clubs, Augusta National invites former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore to become the first female members; both accepted.

Two college friends, Elizabeth Nass and Rose Mayr, are killed when a CSX train derailed on a rail bridge in Ellicott City, Md,, burying the young women in coal.

Comedian Phyllis Diller, 95, dies at her Los Angeles home.

2016: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tells a rally in Fredericksburg, Va., that his party has to do a better job of appealing to African-American voters and that he wants the GOP to become their political home as it was in the era of Abraham Lincoln.

At the Rio Games, the U.S. women’s basketball team wins a sixth consecutive Olympic gold medal in dominant fashion, routing Spain 101-72. Allyson Felix and LaShawn Merritt anchor the 4x400 relay teams to victory. Caster Semenya of South Africa wins her first Olympic gold in a personal-best of 1:55.28 in the 800 meters.

VINDICATOR FILES

1992: It takes Poland Township police and other township officials an hour to round up a bull that got loose from the pasture of J.W. Schaade on Youngstown-Pittsburgh Road.

Two days after being sued by Phar-Mor Inc., the auditing firm of Coopers & Lybrand files suit against Michael Monus and other former Phar-Mor officials, saying they concealed losses from auditors and diverted funds.

1977: Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. offers to sell a long-held interest in Wabush iron mining properties in Labrador as part of Lykes Corp.’s program of reducing holdings to strengthen its financial position. The shares are worth about $75 million.

An analysis of the Northeastern Ohio Employment and Training Consortium concludes that the agency’s administration of the federal CETA program has been ineffectual at best and a violation of federal guidelines at worst.

Youngstown State University football coach Bill Narduzzi says he was pleased with the Penguins performance as two-a-day drills began at Liberty Field.

1967: Fred Childress, Vindicator theater critic, hosts a reunion of Youngstown-area servicemen at the Hotel Caravelle in Vietnam. Among them are Youngstown University graduate John MacIntosh, Lt. Fred D’Amico of Youngstown, Lt. Terrance Monnie of Conneaut Lake, Pa., and Lt. Eli Mladenoff of New Middletown.

Marine Sgt. Joseph M. Hallas, 19, of Thalia Avenue, Youngstown, dies near Thua Thien, Vietnam, of multiple fragment wounds from an explosive device.

Calvin DiCarlo, assistant superintendent of schools in New Castle, Pa., praises the new French program that emphasizes sound and sight over book learning. Some students are speaking French in two weeks.

1942: The Mahoning County selective service boards say the 1-B classification for men with minor physical defects, under which about 20 percent of the county’s residents were deferred from the draft, has been eliminated.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.’s new blast furnace, 200 feet tall and weighing nearly 700 tons, is moved 112 feet and placed on its foundation at the Campbell plant. Sheet & Tube pioneered in building the furnace on a moveable base.

More than 4,300 Youngs-town children carry 10,200 pounds of tin cans downtown to the State and Park theaters to enjoy a show for the admission price of 12 cans to aid the war effort.