This Day in History
In Alaska
• In 1900, the post office at Uyak was established on Kodiak Island with Herbert Hume as postmaster.
• In 1913, Juneau's new city hall, at the corner of 4th & Main, was ready for occupancy.
• In 1967, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall announced plans to open the continental shelf in the Gulf of Alaska to oil and gas exploration. (He suggested that oil and gas revenues could provide a solution to the Alaska Native Land Claim problem.)
• In 1977, Doyon Ltd. and Louisiana Land & Exploration Company abandoned plans for a fourth exploratory well in the Kandik Basin (northeast of Fairbanks) after the first three yielded nothing.
• In 1979, four thousand pounds of mail for Anchorage and Rural Alaska was lost as a mail container van washed overboard in the Gulf of Alaska.
In the nation
• In 1789, North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
• In 1877, inventor Thomas A. Edison announced the invention of his phonograph.
• In 1934, the Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes," starring Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney, opened in New York.
• In 1964, New York's Verrazano Narrows Bridge, connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island, opened.
• In 1969, the Senate voted down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement F. Haynsworth, the first such rejection since 1930.
• In 1973, President Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.
• In 1980, 87 people died in a fire at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. An estimated 83 million TV viewers tuned in to the CBS prime-time soap opera "Dallas" to find out "who shot J.R." (It turned out to be Kristin Shephard, played by Mary Crosby.)
• In 1994, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican, remarked in a newspaper interview that President Clinton "better have a bodyguard" if he were to visit North Carolina; Helms later called his comment "a mistake."