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6/23/2005: Artist Clyfford Still died in Baltimore, MD, twenty-five years ago today. He was born November 30, 1904 in Grandin, which lies in the Red River Valley between Fargo and Grand Forks. While his name is certainly not a household one, he is possibly the most highly regarded artist the state has ever produced. Unfortunately, most of us know little about him, because he so intensely guarded his work. Over his lifetime, Still created nearly a thousand oil paintings and some 13,000 works on paper, but only 225 pieces ever escaped from his private collection.

6/26/2005: George E. Winship established the Grand Forks Herald on this day in 1879.

7/7/2005: It was about this time in 1905 that H. F. Osborn revealed the discovery of the “Dynamosaurus” or “dynamic lizard.” Now known as the Tyrannosaurus, or T. rex, this nasty carnivore literally surfaced for the first time just across the border in Montana.

7/13/2005: The 1930s were very hard on North Dakota farmers. About the only thing that survived the dust and grasshoppers were Russian thistles. Cattle starved or fell dead with bellies full of dirt, and farm foreclosures became more and more frequent. An elevator man in Sanish thought the price of wheat hit rock bottom at 56 cents a bushel and wrote on his market chalkboard, “Don’t faint when you read these prices.” Little did anyone realize that within the next several years, wheat would go as low as 17 cents in Montrail County.

3/20/2005: As closely as archeologists can figure, North Dakota’s first export commodity was flint, a semi-translucent igneous rock that was mined in Dunn and Mercer Counties about 9,500 B.C.

3/23/2005: On this date in 2002, 1,791 people laid themselves down in the snow in Bismarck and made snow angels – a new record that’s now in the Guinness World Records. Since then, the people of Syracuse, NY, have twice challenged the record but failed. In what’s become a good-natured rivalry, they’ve given Bismarck notice they’re already making plans for next winter.

3/24/2005: Maryvale is a Roman Catholic religious women’s community constructed in 1965 on the north edge of Valley City. The community is for the Sisters of Mary of the Presentation, for whom Maryvale serves as the Provincial Center for the “United States Province.”

3/26/2005: Daniel Yanofsky was the first Grandmaster of the British Commonwealth.

3/27/2005: On this date in 1908, a young group called the Literary Society held a basket social to raise money to buy a bell for their schoolhouse belfry near Lankin, North Dakota.

3/30/2005: An unmanned, Japanese, bomb balloon landed in the Minto-Warsaw area of Walsh County on this date in 1945, but the incident was kept secret until World War II ended five months later. On August 16th, the Fargo Forum reported, “Several other balloons were sighted in the air, and reported to the army authorities, at Fargo, Park River and Mandan, it can now be revealed. Army intelligence officers showed Fargo Forum editorial department workers pictures of the Walsh County balloon, which was dismantled and taken to Fort Snelling. Neither the pictures nor the information could be used at the time under the censorship code.”