YEARS AGO FOR SEPT. 20

Today is Thursday, Sept. 20, the 263rd day of 2018. There are 102 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1519: Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew set out from Spain on five ships to find a western passage to the Spice Islands.

1911: The British liner RMS Olympic collides with the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke off the Isle of Wight; although seriously damaged, the Olympic is able to return to Southampton under its own power.

1958: Martin Luther King Jr. is seriously wounded during a book signing at a New York City department store when he is stabbed in the chest by Izola Curry. (Curry was later found mentally incompetent; she died at a Queens, N.Y., nursing home in 2015 at age 98.)

1962: James Meredith, a black student, is blocked from enrolling at the University of Mississippi by Democratic Gov. Ross R. Barnett. (Meredith was later admitted.)

1976: Playboy magazine releases an interview in which Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter admits he’d “looked on a lot of women with lust.”

1984: The family sitcoms “The Cosby Show” and “Who’s the Boss?” premiere on NBC and ABC, respectively.

2017: Hurricane Maria, the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico in more than 80 years, strikes the island, wiping out as much as 75 percent of the power distribution lines and causing an island-wide blackout.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: Both sides in Youngstown’s 13-day teachers’ strike report progress in weekend contract talks, but major issues such as salary and health insurance remain unresolved.

U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant leaves for Israel to help escort former Cleveland automaker John Demjanjuk back to the U.S. after his acquittal of being “Ivan the Terrible,” a Nazi guard who operated gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp during World War II.

Mahoning County is losing farmland to housing development, with farm acreage falling nearly 7 percent, from 89,000 in 1987 to 83,000 in 1992.

1978: The owners of a Meridian Road home file suit for $13,000 against two area police agencies that riddled the house with 37 bullet holes June 7 during efforts to take a mental patient to Woodside Receiving Hospital.

A Campbell man who professed to being an arsonist for hire allegedly accepted $500 as a down payment from an undercover arson investigator and demanded 10 percent of the insurance claim for burning down a South Meridian Road restaurant.

Hubbard Township trustees hire four patrolmen for the township’s new police department: Fred Prassack, an Austintown police officer; Phillip Tamaro, a Brookfield police officer; Kevin Wells, a Trumbull deputy sheriff and Clarence Brewer, who has no police experience.

1968: A daring thief drives off with a truckload of color TVs valued at $20,000 from in front of Appliance Wholesalers, 1197 Wick Avenue. The empty truck is found on Hayman Street two hours later.

A new burlesque theater replacing the demolished Park Theater on Champion Street will be built and opened by New Year’s Day on the site of the Earle Hotel on West Federal Street.

Sears Roebuck & Co. will close its operation in the Uptown district when it opens a giant store at Southern Park Mall. The firm does not want two large operations so close to each other.

1943: The Army Ordnance Depot baseball team from Atlanta, Ga., wrested the 1943 National Amateur Baseball Federation crown from the defending titleholders, the Detroit Auto Club team, by winning the final of a three-game playoff 4-1 before nearly 9,000 spectators at Shady Run Field.

Two unidentified thugs attack Peter Myers Sr., owner of Gray Wolf Tavern, and beat him and his wife, Rosie, with blackjacks. They flee without touching the tavern’s safe.