YEARS AGO FOR MARCH 31

Today is Sunday, March 31, the 90th day of 2019. There are 275 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1492: King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain issue an edict expelling Jews from Spanish soil, except those willing to convert to Christianity.

1596: French philosopher and mathematician Ren Descartes is born.

1880: Wabash, Ind., becomes the first American town to claim to be completely illuminated by electric lighting.

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Emergency Conservation Work Act, which creates the Civilian Conservation Corps.

1943: “Oklahoma!,” the first musical play by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opens on Broadway.

1968: At the conclusion of a nationally broadcast address on Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson stuns listeners by declaring, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

1975: “Gunsmoke” closes out 20 seasons on CBS with its final first-run episode, “The Sharecroppers.”

1976: The New Jersey Supreme Court rules that Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman in a persistent vegetative state, could be disconnected from her respirator. (Quinlan, who remained unconscious, died in 1985.)

1986: One hundred sixty-seven people die when a Mexicana Airlines Boeing 727 crashes in a remote mountainous region of Mexico.

1991: The Warsaw Pact is formally dissolved.

1993: Actor Brandon Lee, 28, is accidentally shot to death during the filming of a movie in Wilmington, N.C.. He was hit by a bullet fragment that had become lodged inside a prop gun.

1995: Mexican-American singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez, 23, is shot to death in Corpus Christi, Texas, by the founder of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar, who would later be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

2004: Four American civilian contractors are killed in Fallujah, Iraq; frenzied crowds drag the burned, mutilated bodies and string two of them from a bridge.

2008: U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson announces his resignation amid the wreckage of the national housing crisis.

2009: President Barack Obama arrives in London with his wife, Michelle, at the start of a trip to Europe, his first journey across the Atlantic since taking office two months earlier.

Benjamin Netanyahu takes office as Israel’s new prime minister after the Knesset approves his government.

2014: In a flood of last-minute sign-ups, hundreds of thousands of Americans rush to apply for health insurance as deadline day for President Barack Obama’s overhaul brings long waits and a new spate of website ills.

An umpire’s call is overturned for the first time under Major League Baseball’s expanded replay system, with Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun ruled out instead of safe in a game against the Atlanta Braves. (The Brewers won, 2-0.)

Charles H. Keating Jr., 90, the notorious financier who’d served prison time and was disgraced for his role in the costliest savings and loan failure in the U.S., dies in Phoenix.

2018: Amid tight security, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and her family return to her hometown in Pakistan for the first time since she was shot in the head in 2012 for her work as an advocate for young women’s education.

Hundreds of well-wishers line the streets of Cambridge, England, as a hearse carries the remains of physicist and author Stephen Hawking to a private funeral.

VINDICATOR FILES

1994: Youngstown City Council gives first reading to an ordinance establishing a police-dog unit to help sniff out drugs and track down criminals. There is a proposal for a second K-9 unit to assist the fire department in arson investigations.

More than 100 computers will be installed in Youngstown’s four high schools and the vocational school with a $630,000 state grant aimed at boosting technology in poor districts.

The Columbiana Public Library needs $100,000 for a computer system that would eliminate the card catalog and computerize all library services. The library board has allocated $40,000, and volunteers are working to raise $60,000.

1979: A steady rain doesn’t deter more than 3,000 men and women standing at the General Motors Assembly Division’s doors in the early morning to pick up applications for jobs at the plant.

Unlike the Ecumenical Coalition’s angry response to the federal government’s denial of loan guarantees for reopening the Campbell Works, area representatives in Washington greet the decision with a collective shrug of resignation.

Msgr. William Maxwell, former pastor of St. Brendan Church, and the Rev. James Stevenson, former assistant at St. Patrick Church, Youngstown, celebrate the 50th anniversary of their ordinations.

1969: All four members of a Hubbard family are dead after the 1969 Mustang they were passengers in sheared a pole and struck a tree on a curving rural road north of New Bedford, Pa. Dead are Ronald K. Gongaware, 28; his wife, Norma Lee, 27, and two of their children, Ted, 4, and Tamara, 2. The 18-year-old driver of the car is unconscious in Jameson Memorial Hospital.

Larry A. Cico, 23, of Vienna is killed when he was crushed between two buggies carrying slabs of hot steel at the Republic Steel plant in Warren.

Youngstown State University’s graduate school accepts 160 of the 190 applicants for the spring quarter. Of those accepted, 106 are for the School of Education.

1944: Garbage cards, which will be required for house collection after April 3, are on sale at City Hall for three months, six months or a year at $1.50, $3 or $6.

Youngstown’s municipal contagious disease hospital on East Indianola Avenue is officially closed after 20 years of service.

Bishop Ralph Spaulding Cushman of St. Paul, Minn., will be the speaker for noon services held Monday through Thursday at the Palace Theater, sponsored by Federated Churches and the Youngstown Ministerial Association.