Local history

50 years ago: May 5, 1975

Cloyd Benden, 80, Gallitzin, gave the Altoona Mirror’s James M. Shafer an interview about the now extinct village of Glen White, which was a coal mining town just above the Horseshoe Curve. He said there was a company store called the Taylor Trading Co., a Catholic church, 29 houses, a boarding house, rooming house, 85 coke ovens and a school with as many as 34 children at a time.

25 years ago: May 5, 2000

The Altoona Area School District was using a program called Project Character Building to teach elementary students respect, responsibility and to tell the truth.

10 years ago: May 5, 2015

The Hollidaysburg Area Women’s Club, Jamie Baser Women’s Club Improvement Project chairwoman, spent two years and $30,000 to refurbish the Kids Kingdom Play Park, part of Legion Memorial Park.

— Compiled by Tim Doyle

World history

Today is Monday, May 5, the 125th day of 2025. There are 240 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. became America’s first space traveler as he made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard Mercury capsule Freedom 7.

On this date:

– In 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, died in exile on the island of St. Helena.

– In 1862, Mexican troops repelled French attacks on the city of Puebla de los Ángeles in the Battle of Puebla, also known as the Battle of Cinco de Mayo.

– In 1925, schoolteacher John T. Scopes was charged in Tennessee with violating a state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution. (Scopes was found guilty, but his conviction was later set aside.)

– In 1945, in the only fatal attack on the U.S. mainland during World War II, a Japanese balloon bomb exploded on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon, killing a pregnant woman and five children.

– In 1973, Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the first of his Triple Crown victories, in a time of 1:59.4 — a record that still stands.

– In 1981, Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands died at age 27 at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland on his 66th day without food.

– In 1994, Singapore caned American teenager Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton.

– In 2016, Lonnie Franklin Jr. was convicted of 10 counts of murder in the “Grim Sleeper” serial killings in Los Angeles that targeted poor, young Black women over two decades.

— The Associated Press