Other days

100 YEARS AGO March 23, 1924

■ Inmates of the State Farm for Women, which institution was destroyed by fire Friday night, are being housed temporarily at the State Hospital for Nervous Diseases, until the Board of Control of the farm selects a site for a new home. … The dormitory, the officers’ mess hall and a small lighting plant were destroyed by the fire, which originated in two cell rooms where Pauline Williams and Louise Taylor were confined. Miss Mary DeWeese, superintendent of the farm, said that she found evidence enough to satisfy anyone that the girls in the cells deliberately fired the building, but this was denied by the girls themselves yesterday.

50 YEARS AGO March 23, 1974

■ The state Republican Party, which kicked Joseph H. Weston out of the governor’s race Thursday for not being registered as a Republican, was caught Friday in the predicament of having a state Party chairman who also isn’t listed as a Republican. Party officials, called by newsmen who discovered that no party affiliation was given on the chairman’s voter registration form, said the effect was only embarrassing, not actually of any consequence. … Bob Scott of Little Rock, GOP counsel, said the opinion he rendered would be applied evenly to all Republican candidates for governor, but not to candidates in any other races, nor to Republicans in Party offices.

25 YEARS AGO March 23, 1999

■ When Ida Thompson, mother of a murder victim, and the state paid Clarence Washington more than $3,000 to bury her son, they didn’t expect the body to sit in a funeral home basement for more than six months. Washington, owner of the former Kings and Queens Funeral Home at 2405 Gaines St., was charged with abuse of a corpse and theft by deception in 1996. But Washington won’t be going to jail. He died Feb. 15, two weeks short of his 75th birthday, forcing the Pulaski County prosecuting attorney’s office to drop the charges Monday. Previous trial settings were continued because of Washington’s ill health.

10 YEARS AGO March 23, 2014

FAYETTEVILLE — Presidential aspirations and exasperations are evident in the papers of former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers, which were opened to the public Wednesday at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Bumpers had twice considered running for president — in 1984 and 1988 — and is known for defending Bill Clinton in an impassioned speech on the Senate floor during Clinton’s presidential impeachment trial on Jan. 21, 1999. The papers offer a glimpse at Bumpers’ life as he defended his friend and fellow Arkansan. “The president’s conduct was indeed shameless, but not impeachable,” Bumpers, a Democrat, wrote 19 days later in a letter to Marcia Balonick, executive director of the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs. “The real danger is the precedent. Nobody believes B.C. would have been impeached for the same conduct had he been a Republican.”