21 WFMJ archives  / December  23, 1984 | Mary Haddow  Elementary in Youngstown was one of a few elementary schools in the area to have a concert band 40 years ago.

December 21


1999: U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. rules that Ohio's four-year-old tax-supported voucher program, which pays for children to attend religious schools, is unconstitutional.

General Motors Corp. and Honda Motor Co. reach an agreement to buy and sell engines to each other.

Boardman Police Chief Glenn Bowers says the department's new computer systems are Y2K compliant, so ringing in the New Year will be no problem. 


1984: New Castle police and a state police task force from Zelionople arrest eight people in a citywide sweep. Most of the buys were for small amounts of marijuana, but there was one cocaine purchase.

After thieves cut down two of his 10-foot tall blue spruces, Larry Schweikert has begun standing guard against Christmas tree thieves armed with a shotgun outside his home on old Route 588 near Salem.

General Motors' booming operations poured more than $1 billion in wages and salaries or local purchases in the Mahoning Valley.  Over $800 million was paid to employees of the Lordstown complex and Packard Electric. 


1974: A search party of nearly 100 plant security workers and supervisors scours a portion of western Canfield Township looking for clues in the murder of the Benjamin Marsh family.

Two men, one ski-masked and both armed, take $2,000 from a teller at the Liberty branch of Peoples Bank on Belmont Avenue.

Youngstown bomb squad officers detonate a live 45-inch rocket found in a railroad car filled with scrap metal at the U.S. Steel Corp.'s Ohio Works. 


1949: Outgoing Christmas mail reaches an all-time high, with clerks at the Youngstown Post Office handling 950,000 pieces of mail, 50,000 more than the record set a day earlier.

Clarence W. Coppersmith, a member of the Youngstown Police Department for 31 years and traffic commissioner since 1936, resigns in a continuing dispute with police Chief Edward Allen over the issuance of taxi licenses.