YEARS AGO FOR MARCH 18

Today is Sunday, March 18, the 77th day of 2018. There are 288 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1766: Britain repeals the Stamp Act of 1765.

1818: The U.S. Congress approves the first pensions for government service.

1837: The 22nd and 24th president of the United States, Grover Cleveland, is born in Caldwell, N.J.

1922: British magistrates in India sentence Mahatma Gandhi to six years of imprisonment for civil disobedience.

1925: The Tri-State Tornado strikes southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana, resulting in some 700 deaths.

1937: In America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people, most of them children, are killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.

1938: Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas nationalizes his country’s petroleum reserves and takes control of foreign-owned oil facilities.

1940: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass, where the Italian dictator agrees to join Germany’s war against France and Britain.

1942: Two black baseball players, Jackie Robinson and Nate Moreland, request a tryout with the Chicago White Sox; they are allowed to work out.

1959: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Hawaii statehood bill. (Hawaii became a state on Aug. 21, 1959.)

1963: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, rules unanimously that state courts are required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.

1965: The first spacewalk takes place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov goes outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.

1974: Most of the Arab oil-producing nations end their five-month-old embargo against the United States that had been sparked by American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War.

1980: Frank Gotti, the 12-year-old youngest son of mobster John Gotti, is struck and killed by a car driven by John Favara, a neighbor in Queens, N.Y.

1990: Thieves make off with 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (the crime remains unsolved).

2008: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama confronts America’s racial divide head-on with a speech in Philadelphia in which he urges the nation to break “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.”

2013: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her support for gay marriage in an online video released by the gay rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign.

2017: Chuck Berry, rock ‘n’ roll’s founding guitar hero and storyteller who defined the music’s joy and rebellion in such classics as “Johnny B. Goode,” ‘’Sweet Little Sixteen” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” dies at his home west of St. Louis at age 90.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: Mathews Local School District passes a resolution saying the board “will not oppose or prevent” students having a baccalaureate ceremony, will observe a moment of silence at board meetings and will legally pursue ways of having prayer at graduation exercises. “I won’t let somebody tell our kids they can’t pray,” says board member Cathy Michetti.

Laurie Stoll of Howland, a 4.0-graduate of Youngstown State University, scored the highest grades in the nation on accounting’s two top examinations, the Uniform Certified Public Accountant exam and the Certified Management Accountants exam.

The Girard Board of Education bans smoking or the use of other tobacco products in all school buildings.

1978: U.S. Steel Corp., the steel industry’s financial pacesetter, expects to report its first quarterly loss in 75 years.

Boardman police arrest a 40-year-old Farrell, Pa., man, charged with stealing more than $25,000 worth of jewelry during a holdup at Cerelli Jewelers, 5903 Market St.

Named to the All-City Series Girls Basketball Team are Denise Schwab, Chaney; Ida Sullivan, South; Robin Keels, North; Yvonne Dukes, Rayen, and Priscilla Bowers, East.

1968: Three prisoners of Trumbull County’s “escape-proof jail” remain at large after clubbing Jailer Earl McGregor with a broomstick and fleeing through a kitchen door.

Fire in a warehouse that once housed the Stafford Theater at 131 W. State St., Niles, causes $20,000 in damage. Arson is suspected.

Paul Haus of Canfield is seriously injured when thrown from his car in a crash with a tractor-trailer truck at Route 7 and Calla Road.

1943: The Ohio Selective Service reports twice as many men left farms to enter war industries as were inducted into military service.

State investigators, deputy sheriffs and vice squad men hit eight bookmaking joints downtown. About 400 people were picked up for questioning.

Mrs. A.E. Sanderson reads a paper on Mill Creek Park’s rocks at the Mill Creek Garden Club’s March meeting.