YEARS AGO FOR MARCH 30

Today is Saturday, March 30, the 89th day of 2019. There are 276 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1822: Florida becomes a United States territory.

1867: U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward reaches agreement with Russia to purchase the territory of Alaska for $7.2 million, a deal ridiculed by critics as “Seward’s Folly.”

1923: The Cunard liner RMS Laconia becomes the first passenger ship to circle the globe as it arrives in New York.

1970: Future Triple Crown winner Secretariat is born at The Meadow near Doswell, Va.

1981: President Ronald Reagan is shot and seriously injured outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John W. Hinckley, Jr.; also wounded are White House press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and a District of Columbia police officer, Thomas Delahanty.

1991: Patricia Bowman of Jupiter, Fla., tells authorities she’d been raped hours earlier by William Kennedy Smith, the nephew of Sen. Edward Kennedy, at the family’s Palm Beach estate.

2002: Britain’s Queen Mother Elizabeth dies at Royal Lodge, Windsor, outside London; she was 101 years old.

2014: President Barack Obama asserts unprecedented government control over the auto industry, rejecting turnaround plans from General Motors and Chrysler and raising the prospect of controlled bankruptcy for either ailing auto giant.

VINDICATOR FILES

1994: The all-new 1995 Lordstown-produced Chevrolet Cavalier will make its debut at the New York Auto Show.

Warren Councilman Alford Novak is applying for a community development grant that would help attract a private business owner to open a minimum-security workhouse in the city for nonviolent offenders.

Local veterinarians are offering microchips that can be implanted in pets to help identify them if they are lost. Of 2,600 dogs picked up by dog warden Carol Markovitch in 1993, only 300 could be returned to their owners. The others were destroyed.

1979: The federal government announces it will not put its money into a proposed worker-owned reopening of the Campbell Works of the former Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.

The Rev. William T. Hogan, known as the “steel priest,” has a redevelopment suggestion for the Mahoning Valley: Build a giant centralized coke plant as a response to huge tonnages of foreign coke being imported to the United States.

Richard F. Celeste, former lieutenant governor of Ohio, is named director of the Peace Corps by President Jimmy Carter. (Celeste would become governor in 1983.)

1969: Mr. and Mrs. Frank Fucci of Glendale Avenue NW, Warren, visit their son, Pfc. Thomas E. Fucci, 18, who is recovering in Fort Devens, Mass., hospital from leg wounds suffered when he stepped on a land mine 33 days after arriving in Vietnam.

A valuable Maltese dog was beaten and apparently thrown down the basement staircase by burglars who ransacked the home of Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Kadlubowski, Idora Avenue. The dog was finally found trembling in the basement.

I.W. Abel, international president of the United Steelworkers of America, will be honorary chairman for a testimonial dinner in May honoring District 26 Director James Griffin who is slated to become one of Abel’s top aides.

1944: Ohio Highway Director Hal G. Sours says an Ohio Turnpike should link to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and follow a northern route where it would serve the largest number of residents.

Sgt. Ralph Skerkavich and Pvt. Richard Skerkavich, sons of Mr. and Mrs. John Skerkavich, Lamar Avenue, meet for the first time in two years in Australia. Both are in the infantry.

The wide assortment of frozen fruits and vegetables will go on a ration-free basis beginning the first of the week. The bargain point values in effect for all kinds of meat will be continued.