High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! William Byron Rumford (February 2, 1908 1986) was an American pharmacist and politician. He was the first African American elected to any public office in Northern California. Rumford was born in Courtland, Arizona, a now-defunct mining town, the second of Chauncey G. Rumford and Margaret Lee Johnson's two sons. His father, who had left the family when Rumford was very young, lived in Los Angeles, where his family had moved in about 1910 from Iowa by way of Colorado Springs.