YEARS AGO FOR SEPT. 22

Today is Friday, Sept. 22, the 265th day of 2017. There are 100 days left in the year. Autumn arrives at 4:02 p.m. Eastern time.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1776: During the American Revolutionary War, Capt. Nathan Hale, 21, was hanged as a spy by the British in New York.

1792: The French First Republic is proclaimed.

1862: President Abraham Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in rebel states should be free as of January 1, 1863.

1949: The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.

1950: Omar N. Bradley is promoted to the rank of five-star general, joining an elite group that includes Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall and Henry H. “Hap” Arnold.

1957: The TV series “Maverick,” starring James Garner and Jack Kelly, premieres on ABC.

1964: The musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” starring Zero Mostel, opens on Broadway, beginning a run of 3,242 performances.

1975: Sara Jane Moore attempts to shoot President Gerald R. Ford outside a San Francisco hotel but misses.

1993: Forty-seven people are killed when an Amtrak passenger train falls off a bridge and crashes into Big Bayou Canot near Mobile, Ala.

VINDICATOR FILES

1992: Poland Township trustees say the agreement they reached with Soil Remediation Inc. for the operation of an incinerator that will treat contaminated soil is the best they could do, but some residents say they will continue to appeal to the EPA.

Linda Chavez, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, tells a primarily student audience at Grove City College that teaching immigrant students or the children of immigrants to speak English should be the most important goal in education.

1977: Nearly a dozen highway patrolmen and workers are hospitalized with adverse reactions to polyvinyl chloride at the scene of a tanker truck-car collision that claimed the life of four people at Western Reserve Road and state Route 46 in Canfield Township. Dead are Thomas L. Staggs, 30; Mary A. Edwards, 84; Velma Bennett, 61, and Ethel Young, 77.

During a trip to the Mahoning Valley that included stops in Struthers, Campbell and Youngstown, Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes promises an all-out state effort to assist laid-off workers and to find new industries to replace jobs lost to Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. cutbacks.

About 700 steelworkers, most from the Mahoning and Shenango valleys, arrive in Washington, D.C., to lobby for labor reforms and legislation that would discourage plant closings in the future.

1967: State Chevrolet Inc. purchases six parcels on Wick, Woodbine and Logan avenues for relocation of the dealership when its present location at 669 Wick Ave. is razed for the Madison Avenue Expressway.

Shenango Inc. will blow in one of its two Sharpsville blast furnaces and start up its Sharpsville foundry, recalling about 440 employees.

The main 7,500-foot runway at Youngstown Municipal Airport is closed by a heavy rain that broke up the asphalt surface, but no flights are canceled.

1942: Pvt. William Wood of Canfield Road is one of the Marines who drove the Japanese out of Guadalcanal, he writes to his parents.

The Youngstown Board of Education votes to turn over to the scrap drive iron fences and fire escapes at Shehy and Haseltine schools.

Plants of Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp. are blacked out for five minutes during an air-raid alarm.