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19351776 Club

Roosevelt dedicates the great dam on the Colorado, two years ahead of schedule

He calls it Boulder Dam; the man whose name it once bore is not on the podium.

Construction on the dam in the Black Canyon had run for four years. On September 30, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood before the finished dam straddling Arizona and Nevada and formally dedicated it, calling it Boulder Dam rather than the name President Hoover's administration had first given it. The concrete had gone in for the last time four months earlier, and Lake Mead had already begun rising behind the wall. Six Companies, Inc. had built it two years ahead of schedule, in the depths of the Great Depression…

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More from September 30
1949

The last plane lands, and Operation Vittles is over

Fifteen months, 278,228 flights, and 2.3 million tons of coal and food later, the Berlin Airlift stands down.
1968

A jet 2½ times the size of anything flying rolls out of Boeing's new Everett plant

Representatives of 26 airlines that had already ordered the plane came to see what they'd bought.
1955

James Dean's Porsche collides with a Ford near Cholame, California; the actor is dead within the hour

Donald Turnupseed turned left in front of the Spyder without seeing it; Dean never made the Salinas race.
19541776 Club
Commander Eugene Wilkinson takes command of a hull with a reactor where diesel tanks used to be.
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Read the full September 30 edition →Everything that happened on September 30 →
More from The World Wars
1942

Congress makes the Pledge of Allegiance official, fifty years after a magazine wrote it

The wording, unchanged from Bellamy's 1892 Columbus Day campaign, is now federal law, with the United States seven months into war.
1944

Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act; veterans to get mortgages, tuition, and a year's pay

Congress voted unanimously, sixteen days after D-Day, with the WWI bonus debacle and the 1932 Bonus Army march still fresh in every lawmaker's memory.
1945

Flag rises on Okinawa; Ushijima and his chief of staff are dead by their own hand

Eighty-two days of cave fighting, monsoon rain, and kamikaze attacks end with organized Japanese resistance broken and ninety miles of runway in Allied hands.
1922

The American Professional Football Association votes to call itself the National Football League

Two years after clubs from four states formalized the game in a Canton auto showroom, the league sheds its borrowed name for one that fits its ambitions.
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