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5/11/2010: Today is a spring day — a day in May for gardening and a time to look at how gardens helped win a war. Each spring during World War II, from 1942 through 1945, residents of Bismarck planted Victory Gardens. Everyone was urged to grow garden crops for home use, and to reduce domestic demands for canned vegetables so that more goods could be shipped overseas to American soldiers. Rationing of canned foods meant that families might not be able to find what they needed in grocery stores.

5/12/2010: Prohibition began in 1920 with the passage of the 18th amendment, but North Dakota was already dry, having coming to the Union as a dry state in 1889. from statehood. By 1933, prohibition was wildly unpopular throughout the US, and the federal legislation was later repealed with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment.

5/20/2010: This week Datebook is looking at Historic Preservation in North Dakota as part of National Historic Preservation Month. As a relatively young state, much of our heritage is still visible in the form of buildings, structures or significant sites that help document the paths we have taken to the present. While most of North Dakota's cities and towns sprang up along the railroad, there was an added dimension required in this semi-arid environment to achieve success in establishing a community — a source of water.

5/24/2010: On this day in 1895, the Grand Forks Herald published a fascinating article about the illegal opium trade from Canada into North Dakota. Trade in opium from poppies grown in Asia was, and still is, an international drug problem. The addictive properties of opium have always lain quietly intermixed with its powers of relieving grievous physical pain.

6/3/2010: Fargo Police Chief Gowland had little expectation of solving a case he was handed on May 30, 1904, involving a missing woman and her ten-year-old daughter. Last seen in Oklahoma, there seemed to be little prospect of finding them in North Dakota.

6/7/2010: For North Dakotans, Fargo and Grand Forks are often portrayed as rival cities competing for supremacy in the eastern part of the state. Fargo is the biggest city, but Grand Forks has the Air Force base. And NDSU and UND athletic teams have had a storied rivalry.

6/8/2010: It is a well-known fact that the great black pitcher Satchel Paige played for the Bismarck semi-professional baseball team in 1933 and in 1935. What might not be known is that Paige's highest strike-out total for a single game in those two seasons was twenty, in a nine-inning game against the Beulah Miners ballclub on August 18, 1933. Bismarck won 8-0, and Paige gave up just three hits - two singles and a double - and did not allow a single base-on-balls.

6/9/2010: The city of Bismarck was shocked on this day in 1904, with the arrest of one of the city's finest attorneys. A. J. Hedrix, long-time resident of Bismarck, was arrested by Sheriff Welch on charges of bigamy.

6/10/2010: It is quite surprising to find that Grand Forks once played a major role in the lumber industry, but from 1886 to 1892, one of T.B. Walker's sawmills was located on the banks of the Red River just south of the Kennedy Bridge.

6/13/2010: The Little Forks Lutheran Church, near Hatton, has been around for more than 130 years.