YEARS AGO FOR DEC. 13

Today is Thursday, Dec. 13, the 347th day of 2018. There are 18 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1862: Union forces led by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside launch futile attacks against entrenched Confederate soldiers during the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg; the soundly defeated Northern troops would withdraw two days later.

1918: President Woodrow Wilson arrives in France, becoming the first U.S. chief executive to visit Europe while in office.

1928: George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” premieres at Carnegie Hall in New York.

1977: An Air Indiana Flight 216, a DC-3 carrying the University of Evansville basketball team on a flight to Nashville, crashes shortly after takeoff, killing all 29 people on board.

2000: Republican George W. Bush claims the presidency a day after the U.S. Supreme Court shuts down further recounts of disputed ballots in Florida; Democrat Al Gore concedes, delivering a call for national unity.

2003: Saddam Hussein is captured by U.S. forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Adwar, Iraq, near his hometown of Tikrit.

2008: The White House weighs its options for preventing a collapse of the troubled U.S. auto industry.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: Five of seven Youngstown Board of Education members say they have either thrown away or can’t find their evaluation notes for Superintendent Alfred Tutela. Board President Anthony Julian says he has his forms but will not release them. Only board member Don Hanni III has released his.

Workers at the General Motors Lordstown plant are told that in 1994 they will produce an additional 20,000 Chevrolet Cavaliers, which will be right-hand drive to be sold in Japan by Toyota.

A Fishers Big Wheel executive says the New Castle, Pa., discount chain is doing well since filing bankruptcy in July.

1978: The state has extended for at least two weeks a 30-day clean-up notice issued by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to 25 oil and gas well operators in Trumbull County.

Seventy-five-year-old Garfield School, the oldest school building in Youngstown, falls to the wrecking ball to make room for parking for football and basketball fans at nearby South High School.

William B. McKelvey, 59, the last president of the former G.M. McKelvey Co. and a vice president of The Higbee Co., dies at his Fifth Avenue home after an illness of a year.

1968: Two Austintown men, one AWOL from the Oakdale (Pa.) Army Base, are in Mahoning County jail for an armed robbery that netted $13, including 13 quarters, on Friday the 13th.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and Lykes Bros. Corp. of New Orleans break off “merger talks.”

Bessie Lawson, 65, of Boardman-Poland Road is killed instantly when she pulled into the path of a tractor-trailer rig at state Routes 14 and 62.

1943: Two Army fliers, one from Cleveland and one from Wilkes Barre, Pa., safely bail out of their plane over Hubbard in heavy snow while trying to find the Youngstown airport. The plane crashes on a farm near West Middlesex, Pa.

Atty. Russell Mock files a petition in common pleas court that may reopen the battle between Republican Arthur Williams and Democrat Ralph O’Neill over who won the Youngstown mayoral election.

Carbon Block took undisputed first place in the Mahoning Valley Bowling League by winning two of three games from Steven son’s at the last session.