21 WFMJ archives  / December 16 1999 | Mahoning Valley Amateur Radio Association members found a way for patients at Tod Babies and Children's Hospital on Youngstown's North Side to connect with Santa by HAM radio 25 years ago. Here, Shaneka Parks, 7, ponders what she wants to ask Santa to bring her on Christmas Day. 

December 16


1999: John Leeson, 81, who played on Dike Beede's first Youngstown College football team in 1938, will be wearing his yellow and red letter sweater when he attends the Youngstown State University-Georgia Southern NCAA Division 1AA championship game in Chattanooga. 

Lt Brian Girts, commander of the Canfield Post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, spends 12 hours on a billboard catwalk above Route 224 in Boardman to help Radio Y103 raise $7,000 for car seats for people who can't afford them. 

Mahoning County Sheriff Randall Wellington suspends a 26-year-old deputy for 60 days for having illegal gambling at his pre-wedding stag party.  The party will cost the deputy $5,575.


1984: A group of ten Champion Township ministers spearheading a Committee for Decency say they have successfully removed pornographic magazines from the shelves of seven targeted stores in the Trumbull County community. 

Ohio House Speaker Vernal Riffe is overheard threatening to remove state Rep. Joseph Vukovich from chairmanship of the Civil and Commercial Law Committee because Vukovich, a Poland attorney, voted against an omnibus pay raise bill for state and local elected officials. The bill, which passed the House easily, gives state legislators a $10,000  increase in their annual salary of $22,500.

A group of recovering cocaine addicts begins meeting in Salem as Cocaine Anonymous, the first organized group in Ohio to take on America's fastest growing drug problem. 


1974: Youngstown Patrolman Billy Arnaut is treated at South Side Hospital after being struck on the head with his own night stick by a man he was arresting on a drunk charge. 

Ara Parseghian says he will quit coaching Notre Dame football after 11 years. His last game will be against Alabama in the Orange Bowl. 


1949: Charles Pastiu, a Trumbull County sheriff's deputy, admits firing the shot that killed William R. Rogers, 24, of Austintown during a fight at the Shady Lane trailer park near Warren. 

Youngstown Traffic Commissioner Clarence Coppersmith agrees to give up vacation time as a reprimand for issuing taxi licenses to as many as 30 men with criminal records.