On this date in ...

1919: Albany police put out the word that two highwaymen were operating in the city. A fireman returning home at midnight from work was accosted by the men on Hudson Avenue near Swan Street. They allegedly put him in a martial arts hold that “almost broke his neck” while also robbing him of all his cash and a gold watch. The firefighter did not report the crime for fear it would make him “look foolish,” but news of the incident reached police headquarters anyway.

1969: The College of Saint Rose was going coeducational: men would be admitted to the undergraduate day division in September, announced Sister Margaret Keeshan, college president. The college had a coeducational graduate division since the 1940s and at that moment had about 125 men on the graduate level. The college had been founded in 1920 as a four-year college for women. The move to coeducation was a decision of the board of trustees of the college.

1994: For nearly two months, the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation was, quite quietly, unable to legally issue permits for everything from campsites and archaeological excavations to the filming of commercials on park grounds — all because of a Long Island evangelist and a federal judge who may have gotten his sections confused with his subsections. It was a story of a bureaucracy tangling with itself and losing, albeit briefly and without anyone’s knowledge, some of its essential power: the ability to tell people what they could and couldn’t do. The odd little mess left state agency lawyers scrambling for a way out.

Want to read more about the Capital Region’s past? Have any memories or thoughts about how our history relates to today’s events? See http://blog. timesunion.com/history/.