Jayme L. Job

1/31/2012: United States Senator from North Dakota Fountain L. Thompson resigned from his position on this date in 1910. Thompson had been appointed to fill the seat vacated by the death of Martin Johnson, but served less than three months before his resignation.

1/30/2012: The Fargo Forum reported a novel solution for rural school transportation on this date in 1955. After the closure of their rural school southwest of Fargo, four sisters were ferried to school and home again in a yellow checkered taxi-cab.

1/29/2012: William Purcell was appointed to the U.S. Senate on this date in 1910. Purcell’s appointment was made to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Fountain Thompson, who had been appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Martin N. Johnson; this made Purcell the third man to fill North Dakota’s junior Senate seat during a single term.

1/27/2012: The first meeting of the Fargo-Moorhead American Association of University Women was held on this date in 1922. North Dakota’s third AAUW branch, it was founded by Mrs. R. L. Weber, a new teacher at NDSU.

1/26/2012: North Dakota’s second post office was established on this date in 1855 at St. Joseph by Indian trader Charles Grant. The first post office, at Pembina, was founded five years earlier. St. Joseph was an off-shoot of the Pembina settlement. Since the end of the eighteenth century, Pembina had served as “…the home base for the Metis bison hunters and freemen who challenged the trading monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

1/22/2012: J. A. Kitchen, North Dakota’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Labor, proposed a resolution to the State Legislature on this date in 1923.

1/21/2012: Lee Fahler of the Minot Police Department was shot and killed on this date in 1921.

1/20/2012: North Dakotans elected Porter McCumber to the U.S. Senate on this date in 1899. An attorney from Wahpeton, McCumber had served in both the Dakota Territory House and Senate. After his election to the U-S Senate in 1899, he would go on to become one of the state’s best-known and longest-serving U-S Senators.

1/17/2012: The Volstead Act took effect at midnight on this date in 1920, forbidding the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol into or within the United States. While the separate Eighteenth Amendment established prohibition in the U-S, the Volstead Act enabled its enforcement.

1/16/2012: The United States Air Force set new climb-time records with the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Superior Fighter aircraft on this date in 1975. The records were set at the Grand Forks Air Force Base as part of Operation Streak Eagle.