Architects, artists, city planners and designers from across South Dakota converged in Yankton April 6-8 for Design:SD, an annual exercise to help the chosen community imagine its possibilities. Photos by Bernie Hunhoff.
Our September/October issue includes a story on Bemis Holland Presbyterian Church. Members and friends of the Deuel County parish have been celebrating fall harvest with an oyster stew supper for more than 130 years. This year’s is this Saturday (October 15). The meal starts at 4 p.m. and continues until the last customer is full. Tickets are sold at the door.
Laura Johnson Andrews photographed last year’s event, and tried the stew, too. Here are some of her shots that didn’t make the magazine.
Our September/October issue includes a story on Vermillion’s downtown restaurants. The college town’s hungry citizens have historically enjoyed little culinary variety. There have always been burger joints, and University of South Dakota students thrive on the chicken wings from Leo’s. But the scene began to change a decade ago, and Vermillion is now home to some of South Dakota’s most popular locally-owned restaurants. Bernie Hunhoff’s photos accompanied the story of Vermillion’s restaurant renaissance. Here are a few that didn’t make the magazine.
As a University of South Dakota alumna, I have many fond memories of Vermillion’s little movie theaters, the Coyote Twin and the Vermillion Theater. My favorite is when my husband — then fiancÈ — and I decided to see a film after a huge blizzard. We first had to clear the driveway to our small trailer, and weren’t sure we’d make the start. Jeremy called the Vermillion Theater.”We’ll wait for you,” the employee assured him. True story.
That’s why I felt so sad when I learned the Vermillion Theater, built in 1918, closed. A leaking roof in the Coyote Twin ruined a projector last summer and Vermillion Theater’s projector was moved down the block to keep the twin screens limping along. Then Jack March, owner of both theaters for over 40 years, put them up for sale with realtor Michelle Maloney. Maloney spoke about the theaters at Yankton’s 1 Million Cups gathering on Aug. 5. Without any real offers, March joked to her that she and her husband should buy them.”We never considered it because we both have our own businesses already and knew it would take a village,” Maloney says.”The Vermillion Downtown Cultural Association (VDCA) formed in the short term to take over the theaters and save a cultural opportunity from going away.”
Maloney is now vice president of the non-profit VDCA. The group took ownership of the theaters in July and the Coyote Twin continues to operate. Through the support of The Vermillion Chamber and Development, USD and other local investors the building got a deep cleaning, new ice machine and a speaker to fix sound that was fuzzy for years. Digital ticketing replaces the former cash or check only policy.”Employees used to make change out of a cigar box,” Maloney told the 1 Million Cups audience with a smile.”They figured sales tax in their head.” Guests will soon purchase tickets on the Vermillion Theaters website and even bigger updates are planned for the future.”We are going to do some very significant physical restoration,” Maloney says. She shared a teaser of the architect’s plans for the Coyote Twin, with a total facelift to the building’s front.
“What we’re trying to do is provide a cinematic opportunity with either classic films, film festivals, documentaries, that type of thing, in the Vermillion Theater and more traditional films in the twin theater,” Maloney explains. The group hosted their inaugural Friday Cult Classic, screening The Princess Bride the weekend of Aug. 7. Another is planned for the weekend of Sept. 11.
Follow the Vermillion Theaters Facebook page and website for events, fundraising and updates on their progress.
Every South Dakota town we visit is looking for ways to attract new families. Well, there was that one mayor in the town of Cottonwood (pop. 12) on Highway 14 that didn’t want necessarily want people poking around, thinking it was a ghost town. But generally every other town is trying something — from painting storefronts to offering free lots or building event centers — to rejuvenate their communities.
Yankton is trying something different. We are holding a 100-day search for a big idea that has the potential to change Yankton for generations. The person with the winning idea will receive $10,000. But the hope is that everyone in Yankton will be a winner if we can have a conversation about Yankton’s future, and also find a project the whole community can rally behind. The search is dubbed Onward Yankton and you can follow along or submit ideas on the website. The Onward Yankton group hopes submissions come from not just Yankton but across the state and country.
Larry Ness, a local banker and a founder of Onward Yankton, says the old river city is just one of many places struggling in today’s fast-changing world. “We think a community-wide exercise to decide Yankton’s next step will have a lot of value in itself. But once we select an idea, a bunch of us are committed to seeing if we can’t make it happen.”
Carmen Schramm, the executive director of the Yankton Chamber, says Yankton has always been a town of big ideas — starting with its designation as the territorial capitol in 1861. “As a city, we’ve started colleges, built one of the first bridges across the Missouri and our residents even built a dam and a lake in the 1950s — not to mention schools, hospitals and serving as an agricultural center.
“We’re proud of all we’ve accomplished,” she said. “But cities our size can’t rest on their laurels. We have to keep adapting and looking for the next challenge that will keep us as an exciting place where young people want to live and work.”
The May/June issue of South Dakota Magazine includes a feature article that talks directly to young South Dakotans, specifically to May graduates. Yes, they already receive advice from parents, teachers and mentors. But we found 18 interesting (and wise) South Dakotans to provide a unique and heartfelt perspective. One of my favorite submissions came from our poet laureate, retired SDSU Professor David Allan Evans. He begins with an anecdote from about 20 years ago when he was very earnestly and carefully teaching a writing class at SDSU. He finished the class feeling pleased with himself. But then a student came up to him and told him he had a leaf on his head. The young professor became embarrassed and agitated, and he felt it had ruined his entire lecture. Now, the story has become a lesson on humility and how not to take himself too seriously — “Something that all of us need to learn as we mature with time,” he writes.
I’d like to think the citizens of Yankton are following his advice with our Big Idea contest. We’re not saying we know all the answers — that’s why we are asking for your ideas. And we’re not taking ourselves too seriously. We look forward to a lot of silly and fun discussion over which idea to pick. But we are serious about the future of our town and our youth. I encourage you visit the Onward Yankton website to learn more, and also to read our letters to youth in the May/June issue. Who knows, the letters might spark an idea worth $10,000. Even better, the project might provide Yankton and other rural communities some ideas on how to grow and prosper.
Tommie Fantine Lauer shared these photos from Lennox, south of Sioux Falls. Lauer was born in Sioux Falls and currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. She makes Lennox her home when visiting South Dakota. You may view and download more of her photos here.
Monday evening, lots of folks were glued to their news dispensers of choice taking in the grim news from Boston. Tuesday evening, I was glued to my computer screen, scanning the Web for first word on the Spearfish municipal election. Two hours after the polls closed, the local paper posted the vote counts: Boke beat Krambeck for mayor, Young beat Moe for city council, Sleep and Bessler beat Rauterkus for school board.
And then everyone went to bed. So much for wall-to-wall coverage to rivet my attention.
It’s hard to look away when the national media choose a story to spotlight with continual Breaking Updates. But as important as a crime in Boston is, and as noteworthy and fitting as it is that folks on the Plains can take deep interest in events on the Coast, we sometimes miss the newsworthy events in our own backyards that we can do something about.
Local elections should be a bigger deal. A large majority of my neighbors disagree with me: my rough count says 75% of eligible Spearfish voters did not vote in Tuesday’s city election. Poll those people today, and I’ll bet you’ll find that more of them can tell you the number of people killed (3) or injured (176 listed as I write) at the Boston Marathon than will be able to tell you the vote margin in their own mayoral election (899 for Boke, 790 for Krambeck).
But local elections deserve more discussion. Mayors and city councilors and school board members make decisions for us. Local officials spend our money. They hire folks to do important work for us. They make decisions that affect our daily lives, decisions that, if we’re paying attention, we could influence with one phone call or one conversation in the check-out aisle at Lueder’s. We ought to talk more with those people and about those people.
Local elections also provide a yearly opportunity for everyone to take a refresher course in civics. Someone ran anonymous ads in the Spearfish mayoral campaign; that gave me the opportunity to review campaign finance law and discover that, son of a gun, that’s illegal in Congressional, Legislative, and county commission races but not in municipal races.
Along with reminding ourselves what the law is, elections invite discussion of what the law should be. I strolled through the light Election Day snow to chat with folks waving signs on the street for the Boke campaign (Krambeck had no such clever last-minute campaign push) and had thoughtful conversations about community, conversation, qualifications for office, and term limits. One sign-waving neighbor (campaigning for the challenger, remember, against the incumbent), seemed inclined to believe term limits are good. I said we already have term limits: they’re called elections.
And Tuesday, in Spearfish, the election worked as a term limit, trading a 13-year incumbent for a political newcomer promising change and openness. I’ll be watching eagerly for the debut of Mayor-Elect Boke’s public blog. I wish more people would be watching with me.
Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard every other Monday on this site.
Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.
Is there a national “Support Your Local Museum” Week?
I don’t know, so I’ll just say this today. Shame on you if you’re not already doing it.
In our travels around South Dakota, we’ve come to believe that there is no group that works any harder for their communities than the ragtag little group of folks who try to protect, conserve and hoard our history and culture. And they do it with little or no pay, recognition or glory.
Somehow they just operate from an innate feeling (gut feeling, they would explain) that saving Jack Sully’s revolver, Governor Mellette’s winding stairway or Wild Bill Hickok’s third gravestone is important to our future.
Not our past. Our future.
I thought of this on Saturday afternoon when my son, Chris, and I were driving to Valley Springs to buy an old snooker table. We were pulling a borrowed trailer that didn’t have current license plates, so we thought it would be safer to drive the backroads so as not to infringe upon the workload of the already overburdened State Highway Patrol.
That placed us on 272nd Street through the no-longer-so-little city of Tea. The community now has 3,800 people. We were happy to see that the Tea Steak House is still going strong, and we also passed a sign pointing to the town’s museum.
The median age in Tea might be the youngest in the Midwest, so it’s particularly encouraging to see that the museum bug has bitten there. The Tea Historical Society will grow in importance with every passing year.
Here in Yankton, the local museum is working to restore the Mead Building on the historic state hospital campus where Jack McCall was hung in 1877. Historians are collecting tractors in Kimball and shoes in Webster, among many other things. On Wednesday of this week they’ll meet in the Moody County Extension Building in Flandreau to talk about preserving country schools.
God, Family, Life, Death and Taxes come first. But beyond those priorities, preserving our stories should rank fairly high. And we’re glad to see that it does in Tea and countless other South Dakota towns.
One of our favorite photographers, Chad Coppess, received a real honor last week at the State Tourism Conference. Chad was given the 2013 A.H. Pankow Award, which honors those who have made a contribution to South Dakota’s tourist indusry.
Coppess is the senior photographer for South Dakota Tourism. He’s traveled all over our state with his camera, taking shots that capture our state’s beauty and fun. He co-founded the Black Hills Photo Shootout with Scott Howard, created South Dakota-themed backdrops for an online racing game, and writes three blogs celebrating South Dakota in music, film and photography. You’ve seen his photos in the pages of South Dakota Magazine and on this website many times.
Let’s celebrate this honor with a few of our favorite Coppess photos. Congratulations, Chad, and keep up the great work!
