YEARS AGO FOR DECEMBER 21

Today is Thursday, Dec. 21, the 355th day of 2017. There are 10 days left in the year. Winter arrives at 11:28 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1937: Walt Disney’s first animated feature, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” has its world premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles.

1940: Author F. Scott Fitzgerald dies in Hollywood, Calif., at age 44.

1945: U.S. Army Gen. George S. Patton, 60, dies in Heidelberg, Germany, 12 days after being seriously injured in a car accident.

1988: Some 270 people are killed when a terrorist bomb explodes aboard a Pan Am Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, sending wreckage crashing to the ground.

2012: The National Rifle Association says guns and police officers are needed in all American schools to stop the next killer “waiting in the wings,” taking a no-retreat stance in the face of growing calls for gun control after the Newtown, Conn., shootings that claimed the lives of 26 children and school staff.

VINDICATOR FILES

1992: A Department of Defense spokesman says politicians will try to influence the choice of sites for Pentagon finance centers, but the process is designed to eliminate political pressure from the equation.

The 11th District Court of Appeals rules that Warren Municipal Court Judge Sam Petkovich is being too lenient in his handling of drunken drivers.

Child health care advocates in the Youngstown area say the state’s delay of increasing income eligibility for the Ohio Healthy Start programs to save $16.8 million is balancing the budget on the backs of infants and pregnant women.

1977: The body of 15-year-old Lance Jefferson, missing for two weeks after he got in a fight with another student at North High, is found under a railroad freight car in Campbell.

The state of Ohio projects that the four main categories of public assistance in Mahoning County for 1978 will cost almost $58 million, or more than $1.1 million a week. Of that, $16 million will be for Aid to Dependent Children and $23 million for Medicaid.

Hubbard Mayor Arthur Magee says the city’s electricity customers will not receive a bill in December because the city has received a $115,000 refund from its wholesale power supplier, Ohio Edison.

1967: Youngstown State University dedicates its $1.75 million Ward Beecher Science hall. Beecher and his wife receive a plaque from university trustees.

Youngstown City Council sells a 4.3-acre parcel in the River Bend Urban Renewal project to the Moyer Co. for a $750,000 clothes manufacturing plant.

Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Forrest J. Cavalier finds Dr. Herbert C. Blackann Jr., D.O., 49, not guilty of performing an illegal abortion on a 22-year-old Ohio State University co-ed.

1942: Columbiana County has recorded 18 traffic fatalities in 1942 against 32 in 1941.

Youngstown’s main post office and five substations are opened on the Sunday morning before Christmas to help ease the holiday rush.

The parents of Pittsburgh’s “mystery baby,” a 2-year-old, are traced to Youngstown by a faded hotel name on a towel “borrowed” from the hotel and used as a diaper. The parents are held for abandonment.

Youngstown City Council will consider a resolution recommending that the city’s garbage collection contract with M. DeBartolo Co. be canceled for inefficiency.

Mountains of holiday mail and throngs of holiday-bound travelers jam railroad passenger trains, buses and airplanes through Youngstown, forcing transportation companies to rush all available equipment into service.