Donald M Fraser

Donald M. Fraser is the former Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He served from 1980 to 1994. During his tenure as mayor, Mr. Fraser served as President of the National League of Cities in 1993 and was a Presidential appointee to the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and served as chair of several committees of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Previously, Mr. Fraser was Minnesota's 5th District Representative in the U.S. Congress from 1963 to 1978 and was a Minnesota State Senator from 1955 to 1962. While in Congress, he served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee for 16 years. Mr. Fraser also was the National Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action and National Chairman of the Democratic Conference. In 1950 he married Arvonne Delrae Skelton. A women’s-rights activist, she ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Minnesota in 1986 and managed her husband’s campaigns for the House and Senate. She died in August 2018 The couple had six children: Thomas, Mary, John, Lois, Anne and Jean. Anne, at age 8, was fatally injured when she was struck by a car in the Washington area in 1966. Lois committed suicide in 1981. . FRASER, Donald MacKay, a Representative from Minnesota; born in Minneapolis, Hennepin County, Minn., February 20, 1924; educated in the public schools; graduated from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis in 1944 while in Naval R.O.T.C.; served in the Pacific Theater as a radar officer, 1944-1946; graduated in law from the University of Minnesota in 1948; was admitted to the bar in 1948 and began the practice of law in Minneapolis, Minn.; member of the State senate, 1954-1962; elected as a Democratic-Farmer-Labor candidate to the Eighty-eighth and to the seven succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1963-January 3, 1979); was not a candidate in 1978 for reelection but was an unsuccessful candidate for nomination to the United States Senate; elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1979 for the two-year term commencing January 1980; reelected to a four-year term in 1981 and 1985; is a resident of Minneapolis, Minn.