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The Entertainers of Milbank

By Rich Jensen and Bernie Hunhoff

Linda Junker Buri (left) and Bridget Jensen are enjoying a revitalized Main Street in Milbank.

Milbank long ago distinguished itself with baseball, cheese, granite and a big-winged flour mill. But why stop there?

Now the Grant County town’s old shopping district has blossomed in an age when retailers nationwide are closing their doors. It’s a pleasant surprise to everyone, akin to discovering that your grandfather has some special and useful talent; who knows where it might lead but it sure feels good today.

The retailing renaissance is happening within a three-block downtown district, sandwiched on the east by a shady, old residential district and several historic churches. The 80-foot tall stainless steel milk tanks of Valley Queen Cheese are just west of Main Street. To the south stand the stately Grant County Courthouse and a towering statue of a Civil War soldier.

Other than that old bronze soldier, few people have a better perspective on Milbank’s downtown resurgence than Linda Junker Buri, who started a women’s clothing store called Linda’s in 1975 when malls were the rage. She credits the turn-around to architecture, travelers on Highway 212, visitors to nearby Big Stone Lake and hometown marketing. Once a customer comes in the door, there’s still the matter of giving them what they want.”People want service, service, service. So you must know your customers’ needs,” she says.

Buri also believes fresh attention to the city’s old architecture is making a difference. She credits that in large part to Mark Leddy, a local businessman who has overseen the restoration of several business buildings.”He has a real vision for bringing the buildings back to their original design and appearance.”

Milbank’s downtown area features a Mexican restaurant, a movie theater, a coffee shop and eatery, a cheese shop with antique dairy displays and cow bells, a furniture shop specializing in creative repurposing, a design studio with a vintage radio booth for local podcasts, a clothing store that plans local photo shoots and a book store that throws birthday parties and”book-tastings.” Main Street is as entertaining as it’s ever been.

Years ago, a big sign hung over the street with the words”You’ll Like Milbank.” It was taken down for some reason and is now stored in the basement of the cheese shop. Local business owners think it might be appropriate to rehang it soon because the city of 3,500 seems ready to deliver on the slogan’s promise.

Milbank has a history of standing apart, beginning in 1880 when it was founded as a railroad stop. Within months, the new town went to war with Big Stone City over the coveted title of county seat. After skirmishes that included shotguns, pitchforks and lawyers, Milbank won and built an impressive three-story courthouse in 1915 that has been beautifully maintained for a century.

A flour mill with four big blades, built in 1884 by an Englishman named Henry Holland, has become the town’s symbol. The city also has the distinction of being the birthplace of American Legion baseball, which began at a state Legion convention in Milbank when members voted to sponsor a national tournament. Today more than 80,000 youth play Legion ball, and half of the players in the Major Leagues are alums.

Milbank’s biggest food adventure came in 1929 when two Swiss-born Wisconsin cheese makers came to town and started a plant that now employs more than 220 people and buys milk from dairy farmers throughout the region.

The 1920s also brought the development of quarries, where granite deposits — some thought to be 15 miles deep — lie west of town. Mining the ancient deposits remains a multi-million dollar mainstay of the local economy.

So who knows where today’s Main Street renaissance will lead? Nobody could have imagined that the cheese factory, the quarries or the flour mill would be around in the 21st century. Can a new style of entertainment retail (some call it retail-tainment) also grow into something big?

Milbank storeowners are as intrigued as anyone with their role as entrepreneurial contrarians to national trends.”My husband and I have a lot of conversations about Amazon and online sellers,” notes Amy Thue, co-proprietor with her sister, Sara, of a books and gifts store called Whimsy.”It seems that people once wanted two-day shipping, and then they wanted overnight shipping. Now the pace is so fast that they don’t want to wait at all. They want it now,” she says. That means heading to the nearest store.

“I can’t say I ever imagined being in retail on Main Street,” Thue says.”You are doing odds and ends and somewhere along the way it all comes together. So here we are, with our own little piece of Main Street.”

Here are some of the interesting people and places in today’s Milbank.

THE CHEESEMAKERS

Kerry Fish (left) and Stephanie Pillatzki teach old-time cheese-making.

Grant and Brookings counties have more dairy cows than anywhere else in South Dakota because Wisconsin cheesemaker Alfred Gonzenbach drove through town in October of 1928 on his way to Montana, where he and his partner Alfred Nef hoped to find a site for a new plant.

Learning of his intentions, Milbank leaders gave Gonzenbach a tour of the town and the nearby dairy farms. They offered a deal on an empty brick water plant, and Gonzenbach never bothered to go west to Montana. By the following March they were doing business as Valley Queen Cheese Factory in Milbank. Today, Gonzenbach and Nef descendants, along with 270 employees, produce 140 million pounds of cheese a year. Nearly all their milk comes from dairy farms within 60 miles of town.

Most of the cheese is sold in 700-pound blocks to other food companies. Valley Queen has long sold family-size blocks to local people at the main office but the receptionist sometimes became too busy selling cheese to answer the phones, so the company has now opened a retail store called The Cheese Shop, adding to the momentum of Milbank’s Main Street resurgence.

“The Nefs and Gonzenbachs want to maintain the Swiss heritage and the local traditions,” says Kerry Fish, who manages the store. Swiss cowbells, antique cheese-making memorabilia and photos from the factory’s pioneer days are displayed in the store, but it isn’t all about Valley Queen. They also sell candies, pretzels and other products made by other South Dakota companies — even cheeses made by a competitor in the little town of Dimock.

A BEDROCK INDUSTRY

Workers have been mining granite from Grant County for over 100 years. The reddish brown stone crystallized more than 2 billion years ago.

I’m at Dakota Granite, standing at the bottom of a 180-foot deep quarry. They take the stone out in 3-by-6-foot slabs called loaves, lifting them with quarter-inch steel cables banded by rings encrusted with diamonds.

Once on the surface, the loaves are sliced by giant circular saws, some with blades more than 11 feet in diameter. Forty-foot long polishing machines run around the clock.

Computerization has arrived at the quarry but some tasks are better done by hand. Artisans work with hammers and chisels to shape the stone. Pat Raffety, the plant manager and part-time mayor of nearby Milbank, says his craftsmen spend two years or more mastering the skills.

Most of Dakota Granite’s products are used for countertops and memorial stones, but granite from the area has also been used on the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York and Toyota’s Tokyo offices. It also forms the first floor of the state capitol in Pierre.

— Rich Jensen

NOW AND THEN

Did you ever see a”sandwich board” store sign made from a baby crib? That’s just one of many novelties at Milbank’s Now and Then Store.”I hate to see furniture taken to the landfill,” laments the creative proprietor Carol Geisinger.”I cringe when I hear the word ëdump.’ If something has already lasted 50 or 60 years or more, it’s probably sturdy enough to be around another 50 or 60 years if you can just find a new purpose for it.”

Themed parties are business as usual for Sara Snaza (left) and Amy Thue.

WHIMSY ON MAIN

Want a better Milbank? Then build it yourself. That was the message of Jason Roberts, a national advocate of urban development, when he visited Grant County a few years ago. Amy Thue and Sara Snaza, sisters and both former school librarians, took it literally and started Whimsy, a fun-filled shop that sells books, toys, crafts, gifts and home dÈcor. They organize kids’ themed birthday parties for busy moms, and book readings for children. They started Whimsy in another location before buying an old jewelry shop (safe and all) for $35,000; their husbands helped them remodel it into a stylish store that exemplifies Milbank’s embracement of retail-tainment.

URBAN THREADS

Lindsey Keller taught first graders and ran her clothing store, Urban Threads, part-time before taking the business plunge and opening full-time in an historic building on Main Street. She features women’s clothing and some lines for men and youth. As one of many female entrepreneurs in town, she’s quick to note that the spouses are often full partners. Her farmer-husband can run the cash register and the tagging gun.”Tyler even went to market with me in Chicago and he picked out some of the men’s shirts,” she says.”I could not do this without him.”

Craig and Sarah Weinberg bring creativity, energy and three children (Edward, Calvin and Penelope) to Main Street.

VPD STUDIO

Sarah Weinberg and her husband, Craig, came to Grant County from Oregon to care for her aging grandparents.”We never thought it would be a permanent situation,” says Craig.”But the community was fantastic. We got a house in town and then we got a building on Main Street.” He runs a photography and design studio, and she holds art classes. Both have immersed themselves in local culture. Sarah started a”Milbank Rocks” program, helping kids paint rocks and hide them as surprises around town. Craig worked with local high school students to produce a video titled”Why Milbank: Telling the Stories of Our Communities.” He also built a sound studio for podcasting and is now encouraging college students to talk of their relationships with their hometown. He and a friend also produce The David Allen Show, a series of political podcasts.

MUSCLE CARS

Not all of Milbank’s interesting businesses are downtown. Jim Gesswein’s car dealership is on Highway 15, on the south edge of the city. He’s been selling cars since the early 1960s, and in the last 25 years he’s become a collector and seller of America’s favorite”muscle cars,” family-size sports cars with big V-8 engines. Gesswein likes vehicles from the ’60s and ’70s, and he likes the people who like such cars even more.”I sold a ’64 Imperial to a couple from Sweden who came out, picked it up and drove it to the Black Hills before they went back. I still hear from them every couple weeks.”

— Rich Jensen

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Judging a Junk Man

By Bernie Hunhoff

Photos courtesy of the Grant County Review

Emil Tucholke, Milbank’s junk man, sold postcards featuring this professional portrait taken by local photographer Milton Fischer to supplement his second-hand business.

Ted Rathjen was Yankton’s junk man. His white, two-story house near Broadway Avenue in the center of town was surrounded by rusting bicycle frames, old appliances, yesterday’s automobiles, worn furniture, abandoned toys and just about everything else that was once sold as”new” in the downtown stores. Rathjen was a tiny, smiling man who hobbled about on crutches because his legs were crippled from a childhood injury.

In his older years, he just poked his head out from a second story window and advised customers on where they might find what they needed. Schwinn rims were piled beneath the big elm tree. Garden tools were hanging on the picket fence by the road. Toys were in the front of the house by the mailbox.

He suggested a price, and it was usually so low that any negotiation seemed silly. He charged nickels and dimes to kids who needed bike parts, and dollars to adults for the same merchandise. If he was upstairs, he asked visitors to leave the payment in a coffee can on the porch. Ted crossed the highway once or twice a day to have coffee at Sunshine Grocery Store. He fed the store’s penny bucking-horse for kids and always had a smile and a story for the regulars on the stools. Most of the town fathers had bought bike parts or toys from him when they were young, so nobody made a serious attempt to clean up his property until the late 1980s, after his death.

Every town had a junk man. And there were altercations, as with all professions that involve money and territory. One of the most serious situations involved Shorty Miller, a bearded old man who lived in Canton’s town dump by the Big Sioux River until he was 94 years old.

When he died at the South Dakota Human Services Center in Yankton, a local editor memorialized him as”a hermit, river rat, friend of the beaver and blue jay, dump caretaker emeritus, figure familiar, colorful storyteller, character extraordinaire.”

He was also lucky to have reached such a ripe age. In the 1980s some young men tried to infringe on his territory. An argument ensued, and Shorty was shot in the arm and shoulder. He later admitted to also firing a gun.”I got four rifle shots off, just to scare’em,” he later said. While there were some discrepancies between the two parties’ stories, the sheriff said the dispute”evidently arose over a longtime feud over scavenging rights” at the city dump.

Despite his brush with the law, Miller was known as a friendly hermit who delighted in entertaining visitors with stories about the Big Sioux River. He was a contemporary of another Lincoln County hermit known as Rattlesnake Bill. In his obituary, the editor quoted an acquaintance who said Miller”was a gentle and likeable old guy and when he of- fered you a cut of left-over beaver meat it was hard to say no.”

Ted Rathjen sold old bike parts, appliances and other oddball items at his home along Broadway Avenue in Yankton.

But none of the aforementioned junk men could hold a discarded candelabra to Grant County’s Emil Tucholke, who took on city hall, won a moral victory, and nearly parlayed that into a political career.

After considering a career in the ministry, Emil bought two small pieces of land west of town along Whetstone Creek. Then he began to collect odds and ends from the citizenry.

Rev. Jack Garvey grew up in Milbank, the son of the postmaster in the 1940s. He remembers Emil as one of his hometown’s most colorful characters.”He was more than just a junk collector,” says Garvey, a Catholic priest.”He had a 1902 Cadillac that he loved to drive in parades. He had a horse-drawn carriage that he would use to travel up and down the alleys, picking up junk before there was any garbage collection. He grew strawberries on a floating raft in the creek. He would bring them into the post office and give them to dad.”

Garvey also remembers that Emil gave his dad a piece of pottery.”It was an old Greek urn of some sort, just a piece of junk I’m sure. But that thing sat on Dad’s desk and I always imagined it was worth millions.”

As Emil’s outdoor inventory grew in size, it spilled over from his land onto a weedy lot owned by the county. Some of the very people who had made contributions to the collection now began to complain, so the county commissioners filed a lawsuit to force him out. Surely they figured that they could evict him without much trouble, but they were wrong. Emil wasn’t about to abandon his domain. After some legal wrangling, a court date was set and the bearded junk man showed up in the courtroom wearing a hangman’s rope around his neck.

Emil acted as his own attorney, and his wit and ready answers seemed to delight Judge Van Buren Perry. The junk man was especially adept at cross-examination. He asked a public official whether he had ever visited the property. The official denied being there until Emil reminded him that he’d visited just the previous Sunday.

“Did you ever buy anything from me?” Emil asked.

“No,” said the official.

“I guess that’s right,” Emil countered.”You just took that stove part without paying me.”

Emil carefully examined all of the state’s exhibits, made numerous motions and objections and invited the judge to recess the proceedings long enough to tour the junkyard. When they returned to court, the judge was carrying a beautiful antique china bowl — a gift for his wife from Emil.

Milbank’s famous junk man lived in a covered wagon that he hitched to his horses and rode in local parades.

Phyllis Justice, the longtime editor and publisher of the Grant County Review, covered the trial.”Over the years, he had built up a huge collection of what some would call junk, but to him it was treasure,” she wrote years later for an anniversary issue of the paper.”Actually, he had preserved some valuable materials, including his prize 1902 Cadillac and covered wagon. In a way he performed a free trash service for residents and restaurants. He fed his team of horses the food thrown out by the restaurants.”

The prosecutor accused Emil of maintaining an”unsightly nuisance area.” Emil countered that the covered wagon, which his horses pulled in local parades, served as his dwelling and an old outhouse was his kitchen and cook shack. He said he was growing strawberries on a raft and feeding beaver.

Justice said that Judge Perry eventually rendered a Solomon-like verdict. In his long opinion, he noted that even though the county commissioners regarded the place as an unsightly garbage dump, there were other ways to describe Emil’s property.”Many years have taught him that some can live on what others waste, and that articles discarded by some have utility and value for others … He has assembled these articles upon his lots … as neatly as his strength and character of material permitted. His stock of merchandise probably amounts to more than a hundred tons, gross, and would probably assay as much as Homestake ore, which runs about $8.00 a ton, I believe.

“Upon these lots we observe an enormous quantity of firewood, the concentration of which no doubt eases the minds of citizens who are apprehensive under the activities of John L. Lewis and the high price of oil. This wood would heat the whole of Milbank for a considerable period,” the judge continued.”There are fruit and pickle jars in sufficient quantities, if used, to tide Milbank over a crop failure or two. Furniture from all periods, some of it repairable, some containing walnut and other woods coveted by tinkers and some only firewood, is piled here and there.

Tucholke scavenged surplus foods like stale bread and rolls and shared them with his horses and chickens.

“Machinery of all kinds abound. A laundry is dickering for a large churn, which he salvaged from a creamery. Horse-drawn vehicles such as sleighs, carts, surreys and wagons are there, to say nothing of a priceless 1902 Cadillac which runs and which Christopher [locals often referred to Emil as Christopher Columbus] sometimes drives in parades to the astonishment and delight of all.”

Judge Perry was especially respectful of Emil’s independence.”The defendant, disdaining pensions, supports himself and pays taxes on his lots by selling stuff from this stock,” wrote the judge.”Numerous citizens testified that they were able to buy from him much-wanted items otherwise unobtainable. His business is lawful and useful, if a bit unsightly in some respects. It is unique and has some elements of fascination. There is a beaver dam in the creek, with live beavers. To them and to his horses and chickens the defendant feeds stale bread, which he also eats and which the bakeries are glad to get rid of. On a sizeable raft in the beaver pond the defendant raises by hydroponic methods a considerable quantity of strawberries in season.”

In an opinion he clearly enjoyed authoring, the judge also complimented Emil on his”insulated prairie schooner,” his flock of poultry and even his”magnificent beard.” He concluded that the defendant”lives the life of Riley, enjoys himself, supports himself, salvages a good deal of useable material and conserves it so that many people are able to purchase needed items at a saving or which are not elsewhere obtainable.”

But, concluded the judge,”law is law. The lot belongs to the county and the county commissioners have the say-so about it.” In a cunning twist, he granted the county permission to remove Emil’s possessions but he cautioned that any such disposition must be accomplished”tenderly, carefully and with the complete approval of Mr. Tucholke and to see that not the least bit of damage results to [the collection].”

The result was a victory for Emil.”In other words, he allowed Emil to stay on the land since there was no way the county could meet the requirements,” Justice said.”He gave the county its pound of flesh but only if there was no letting of Emil’s blood.”

Emil tried to parlay the ruling into elective office. He ran for state representative in 1952 as an independent. His motto was simple and poetic:”The world is full of corruption and evil — but keep cool and vote for Emil.”

In a full-page advertisement in Justice’s paper, he published Judge Perry’s ruling and then noted,”I handled the case mentioned below without a lawyer. Seems this should be a fair recommendation for any candidate … “

The eccentric junk man tallied 1,496 votes — a respectable showing but not enough to win a seat among the bland, suit-and-tie crowd in Pierre. Instead, he returned to his business of finding and selling used goods. Now somewhat of a local hero, he became even more popular in local parades. He put a new canvas on his covered wagon for the territorial centennial in 1961. Milbank photographer Milton Fischer took a picture of Emil in an old fur coat and the Grant County Review printed it on glossy postcards that he sold to supplement his second-hand business. He enjoyed hawking them for”a dime apiece or two for a quarter.” When he was no longer permitted to drive, he traded his car for a tractor and used it to collect junk.

In the end, he died alone in April of 1962. His body was found near the railroad tracks that ran by his junkyard. If he hadn’t befriended the local newspaper publisher he might be forgotten. But Justice included a lengthy article on the junk man in the 125th anniversary paper for Milbank.

Like his cohorts in other towns, Emil practiced conservation before most of us understood the concept of recycling. Such men had an aversion to waste and an appreciation for frugality, two traits quite rare today. The junk man saw a need and filled it, and that’s as American as his 1902 Cadillac.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Main Street Milbank

Our September/October issue includes a story on Milbank’s downtown. The Grant County community is long known for cheese-making and a big-winged flour mill, but its shopping district is also blooming in a time when many retailers nationwide are struggling. Bernie Hunhoff visited Milbank to meet its entrepreneurs and gather photos. Here are a few shots that we couldn’t fit into the magazine.

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When the Stars Align

By John Andrews

Some people are born in Grant County and stay there all their lives. For others, settling in this county in northeastern South Dakota is a matter of fate.

Such was the case with the Benedictine monks who established Blue Cloud Abbey near Marvin. St. Meinrad Abbey in Indiana wanted to establish a new monastery in the Dakotas, so they sent a team to scout for land. The men found a spot they liked along the Missouri River near Yankton, but WNAX’s tall radio towers east of town obstructed the view of the river valley. They decided to try North Dakota, but along the way they were taken with the rolling hills of the Coteau des Prairies and Whetstone River valley. The delegation stopped to inquire about available land, and the banker told them that a property had been listed for sale just 30 minutes earlier. They bought 300 acres at $22 an acre. The deal seemed too good to be true, but when they learned the banker’s name — Effner Benedict — they knew Grant County was the place for them.

Blue Cloud Abbey was a place of worship and reflection for more than 60 years.

Monks worked and prayed at Blue Cloud Abbey until its closure in the summer of 2012. The facility has since been reopened as Abbey of the Hills, an inn and retreat center that also includes an organic farm.

Who knows what other forces were at play when Clarence Justice responded to a”Help Wanted” ad in the Minneapolis Tribune. Justice, a regular reader of the paper, was working as a printer in Miller when he saw the ad seeking a printer to work at the Grant County Review in Milbank. He called and the publisher, Bill Dolan, hired him over the phone without even asking his name (a small oversight in the world of journalism).

The Grant County Review remained in the same family for a century. Phyllis and Clarence Justice published the newspaper for several of those decades.

Justice went to work at the Review in 1952 and three years later, he and the publisher’s daughter, Phyllis, were married. They ran the paper together for more than 50 years, becoming South Dakota’s First Couple of newspapering.

Grant County was officially created in 1873 and organized five years later. It’s named after President Ulysses S. Grant. Among the county’s early settlers was Henry Holland, an immigrant from England. Holland built a 44-foot-tall windmill to grind wheat for local farmers. The mill was abandoned and moved to the city park in 1912. It was moved again in 1978 and underwent a total restoration in the early 2000s. Holland’s Mill remains a landmark along Highway 12 on the west side of Milbank.

Holland’s Mill is a Grant County landmark along Highway 12.

With 3,300 people, Milbank is the Grant County seat. It’s also known nationally for Legion baseball and high quality granite. American Legion baseball has its roots in Milbank. The program started there in July of 1925 when a group of World War I veterans thought American boys were losing interest in the national pastime. Tens of thousands of teenagers play Legion ball across the country today.

Milbank’s granite caught the eye of designers as they created the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s. More than 200 truckloads were hauled halfway across the country during construction. The granite around Milbank is thought to be 4 billion years old. It’s popular because of its high quartz content, which accounts for its hardness and light red color.

The Muskegon is dry docked in a local museum.

Several other small towns are scattered throughout Grant County. Big Stone City lies on the southern shore of Big Stone Lake, which serves as the very northeastern border of the county. The lake is a popular recreation spot, but it was also the site of South Dakota’s worst nautical tragedy.

An excursion boat called the Muskegon departed for a pleasure cruise in July of 1917 and never returned. A tornadic storm caused it to capsize, killing seven of the nine people aboard. The boat was pulled shore and eventually resurrected as The Golden Bantam, which plied the waters of Big Stone Lake for another 30 years. In 1960, the boat was placed in dry dock north of Big Stone City and was used as a lake cabin. In 1985, it was donated to the Big Stone County Historical Society and Museum just across the state line in Ortonville, Minn., where it remains today.

Just west of Milbank, Twin Brooks is known for its big annual threshing show the second weekend in August. But there’s also a unique restaurant in town called the Bird Feeder. Carol Kilde runs the cafÈ in the back of the town’s post office. It’s open May through December and there’s no menu. You choose your meal when you call for reservations.

Several years ago, while driving through Stockholm, we met Steve Misener on Main Street. Misener began tuning pianos more than 30 years ago and became an avid collector. His shop holds about 75 pianos and boxes stuffed with parts. Misener often exhibits his collection around northeastern South Dakota.

Steve Misener’s shop in Stockholm holds many piano treasures.

Misener told us he worried about the future of music because younger generations seem to be occupied with other things. But music seems to be in the blood of Delaney Johnston, who released her first country music CD before reaching middle school.

The youngster from Summit got her break when renowned South Dakota singer Sherwin Linton was performing at a benefit concert in LaBolt. Johnston requested that Linton sing Johnny Cash’s”Jackson” for her grandmother. Linton asked if Johnston would like to sing along, and she agreed. Linton recognized that she had talent and helped produce her CD. Now Johnston balances summertime performance at county fairs along with being a kid.

Who knows if young Delaney will stay, but Grant County is richer because of her and others — natives and transplants — who chose to make a home in the county on the Coteau.

Editor’s Note: This is the 13th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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Milbank’s Newspaper Family

By Bernie Hunhoff

Editor’s Note: Clarence and Phyllis Justice were going strong as publishers of the Grant County Review in Milbank when we visited the newspaper in 2008. At the time, the paper had been in their family’s hands for almost 100 years. Not long after this story appeared, both Phyllis and Clarence developed health problems. They sold the Review to Debbie Hemmer and Holli Seehafer in October of 2013. Phyllis died in November 2013 and Clarence followed in October 2014. They will long be remembered as one of South Dakota’s pioneer publishing families.

Lucky is the town with a newspaper owned and edited by a spunky journalist who knows the community’s history and secrets, and even its very soul. By that standard, Milbank won the lottery when Bill Dolan bought the weekly Grant County Review in February of 1911.

He married Christine Olson a year later, and they had a daughter, Phyllis. Clarence Justice joined the family in 1955 when he married Phyllis. Christine’s sister, Victoria Olson, was also involved in the paper from 1915 to 1990, selling ads, gathering news, setting type and keeping books.

That’s basically the history of The Review to this date. The family has been in charge for the last 97 years. Portraits of both Bill and Phyllis hang in the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame on the South Dakota State University campus in Brookings.

Bill Dolan was a young St. Thomas College graduate — a staunch Democrat and Catholic — when he arrived in Milbank from St. Paul, Minn. He couldn’t have known the tough competition he would face in a predominately Republican and Protestant community with competing newspapers.

At times, three newspapers fought over readership, advertising and printing. Milbank didn’t become a one-paper town until 1991, when the Herald Advance ceased publication. The Review and the Herald Advance had been lively competitors for over 100 years.”When it was gone, it was like playing tennis without a partner,” Phyllis says.”It took us a long time to adjust.”

“My dad had many other interests, and he might have sold the paper somewhere along the way, but my mother was really devoted to it, and neither she nor I would hear of selling,” says Phyllis.”When mother was on her deathbed at age 101 she asked me, ‘We still have the paper, don’t we?'”

Phyllis says both of her parents chose to spend money for needed printing equipment rather than for their own use.”No matter how little advertising dad had, he never cut back on news coverage,” she says.”Even in the Depression years he always put out a newsy paper, and he never failed to include a generous number of editorials. He was determined to make Milbank a better community.”

Though he often worked 80-hour weeks, he still found time to promote community and political projects and to enjoy hunting and fishing in the Glacial Lakes. For 12 years as a Democrat on the five-member state Board of Regents, he was instrumental in shaping the future of South Dakota’s public universities. On one occasion, press day at The Review was delayed while he helped to settle a student strike at Northern Normal and Industrial School (now Northern State University) in Aberdeen. Phyllis returned to Milbank in July of 1946 to join her father in the family enterprise and succeeded him as editor and publisher when he died in 1957. A journalism graduate of the University of Minnesota, she had worked at the Minneapolis Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Journal and the Mankato Free Press. She had also served as an assistant club director for the USO in the Seattle area during World War II, and later as public relations director for the National Catholic Community Service in Washington, D.C. No matter where she was working, she always furnished her dad with a weekly column that she’d started while in college.

When many readers couldn’t afford subscriptions in the 1930s and early 1940s, Phyllis’ dad continued to mail newspapers to them. After the hard times ended, he decided it was time to make everyone a paying customer again, so he sent Phyllis and her Aunt Victoria as collectors — door to door and farm to farm. Victoria and Phyllis would start out early in the morning after the week’s paper had been printed and mailed. They packed a thermos of coffee and lunch, and headed down country roads in an old Dodge, with the subscription list in the back seat.

Some subscribers hadn’t paid for a dozen years. On a good day, however, Victoria and Phyllis would go home with more than $100. They risked dog bites, and several times they were ordered to”get off the premises and never to send that dirty Democrat rag to them again.”

For a special issue commemorating the paper’s 125th anniversary in 2005, Phyllis wrote about her family’s involvement, but she also heralded the non-family staff, several of whom had been with the paper for over 50 years. And she explained how she met her husband and assistant publisher.

“Finding a capable printer who was willing to live in a small town was very difficult,” she wrote.”In 1952, dad placed a help wanted ad in the Minneapolis Tribune. Little did he suspect that he would get a call from a printer in Miller who was a regular reader of the Minneapolis paper. Dad was so impressed with the caller that he asked him to report for work on Monday.”

She recalled that her dad put down the phone and told her he’d hired a printer who had experience on dailies and weeklies in several states.

“What is his name?” Phyllis asked.

“Oh, I forgot to ask him,” her father replied.”But he is coming.”

Phyllis doubted the printer would show, but the following Monday a tall, slender young man was at work in the office when she arrived. She became Mrs. Clarence Dolan Justice just three years later, and the two have worked together ever since. By any standard, they are the First Couple of South Dakota newspapering.

In the 2005 anniversary issue, Phyllis, Clarence and the entire Review staff invited readers to a cake and ice cream open house with a full page advertisement that read,”It hasn’t always been a piece of cake, but it has been a labor of love.”

Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Protestants, Catholics, agnostics and others showed up to celebrate.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.