Today is Tuesday, March 12, the 71st day of 2019. There are 294 days left in the year.

March 12, 2019 at 12:00a.m.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1864: Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assumes command as general-in-chief of the Union armies in the Civil War.

1912: The Girl Scouts of the USA has its beginnings as Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Ga., founded the first American troop of the Girl Guides.

1923: Inventor Lee De Forest publicly demonstrates his sound-on-movie-film system, called “Phonofilm,” in New York.

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers the first of his 30 radio addresses that come to be known as “fireside chats,” telling Americans what was being done to deal with the nation’s economic crisis.

1980: A Chicago jury finds John Wayne Gacy Jr. guilty of the murders of 33 men and boys. (The next day, Gacy was sentenced to death; he was executed in May 1994.)

2009: Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty in New York to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street history.

VINDICATOR FILES

1994: Yolanda King, daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the annual banquet of the Warren Area United Negro College Fund, attributes the increase in juvenile violence to a breakdown of family values.

Youngstown police lift a fugitive warrant for a 47-year old Youngstown man who is wanted for the murder of his wife, to avoid the city being responsible for the man’s bill while he is undergoing treatment for a heart ailment in a Pittsburgh Hospital. Detectives say the man will eventually be charged with murder – after he is released from the hospital.

An employee of the Mahoning County engineer’s office is found guilty of misdemeanor theft in office for using a county-owned backhoe to dig out a driveway at a house he was building in Ellsworth Township. He will be sentenced after a probation report. Engineer William P. Fergus suspended the employee for three days without pay.

1979: With 10 days remaining before the filing deadline, 23 candidates have already filed for Youngstown City Council’s seven ward seats.

Authorities are searching the Allegheny River for the body of an unidentified truck driver whose rig plunged off the Emlenton Bridge on I-80 in Mercer County, Pennsylvania’s highest elevated span.

Edward J. DeBartolo, Boardman real estate developer, is one of 25 prominent Americans invited by comedian Danny Thomas to sit on the National Advisory Council of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

1969: Youngstown firemen use an acetylene torch to free 11-year-old Dorothy Collins from a sewer grate on the Madison Avenue Expressway near Covington School. Her leg was trapped in the grate for about 20 minutes in 20 degree temperatures.

Five juveniles and an 18-year-old youth are arrested on vandalism charges at Harrison School where 54 windows were broken on two nights.

Rolla Airwyke, a bartender at the Bar X Tavern on Coitsville-Hubbard Road, and a patron in the bar open fire on two bandits as they flee after taking $100. It’s unknown whether the robbers were wounded.

1944: Lt. Edward McGowan of Youngstown is one of five pilots credited with saving the life of a fellow flyer whose fighter plane crashed inside Truk lagoon near a Japanese destroyer.

Staff Sgt. Clifford C. Hurst Jr. is posthumously awarded the Air Medal for “exceptionally meritorious achievements” during five combat missions over occupied Europe.

Helen F. Thompson of Poland has two oil paintings hung in the Ohio Valley Oil and Watercolor Show at Ohio University.

Two Cleveland firemen are killed during a two-hour fire that raged through Cleveland’s huge Union Stockyards. Hundreds of cattle, sheep, hogs and lambs stampeded into the neighborhood where police using rifles and submachine guns fired on them.