Until the California recall qualified for the ballot, it's a good bet that the most commonly known fact about North Dakota was that a group of serious business interests considered improving the state's image, if not its climate and social life, by dropping "North" from its name, leaving it to share a moniker with a model of pickup truck.
But now everyone knows that in 1921, North Dakotans scored a national first, recalling their three-term governor, Lynn J. Frazier, their attorney general, and the agriculture and labor commissioner.
North Dakota, too, was in economic straits, after drops in beef, wheat and land values. Frazier was a Republican, but in N.D. the conflict pitted Republican vs. Republican. One branch advocated creation of state-owned industries to get around private business influence, much as the California recall and initiative process were begun to get around Southern Pacific and other industries' stranglehold on state lawmakers. And like Gov. Gray Davis, Frazier ended up with a budget bigger than the tax base to support it.
There was a lot of other stuff, involving other officials and hints of graft. And one anti-Frazier lawmaker quoted from a public library book about "free love rot" and whether marriage was necessary -- as if Frazier had ordered the book himself.
But as the Grand Forks Herald pointed out, Frazier himself was a teetotaler, a nonsmoker and a churchgoer who disliked dancing but so loved the University of North Dakota that he named his twin daughters Unie and Versie.
And remorseful Dakotans liked him enough after the recall to send him to the U.S. Senate for 18 years.
Davis Won't Replace Davis in Election
Flotsam and jetsam from the recall:
* Now there are no Davises running in the recall election. Palo Alto's Scott Davis dropped out of the race after reports that he was the chief suspect in an unsolved 1996 Atlanta murder case, news that would make campaigning "a difficult process at best," according to his Web site.
* Officials at the UC Merced campus want former candidate Bill Simon Jr. to pay them a visit, after the Republican, in a CNN interview, cited as an example of wasteful spending the fact that the not-yet-opened university has a payroll.
* Porn movie performer and gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey will go on a dinner date -- just dinner, if you please -- with anyone donating at least $5,000 to her campaign. Because she's an independent, she says, "I have to be creative and develop more unconventional methods of raising money."
