Tag: pierre

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Twenty Years Ago

By Bernie Hunhoff

Yea, what good beginnings
To this sad end!
Have we had our innings?
God forfend!

So ends a poem titled Twenty Years Ago by D.H. Lawrence. What a sad end to happy beginnings. Is there a better way to express how we feel about the loss of Governor George Mickelson — twenty years ago?

Most of our readers will remember where they were on the evening of April 19, 1993 when the news came by radio and television that a plane had crashed in Iowa. At first the outcome was inconclusive. But no good news came. And then the worst. All on board were lost to us — the energetic young governor, five business leaders and two pilots — when the state airplane crashed into a brick silo on a farm near Dubuque, Iowa.

Twenty years ago. It hardly seems possible, maybe in part because many of the good deeds inspired by the governor continue to impact the lives of South Dakotans. (We say “inspired” because he would be the first to share credit with his staff, lawmakers, community leaders and the citizens who pay the taxes to make it all possible.) He inspired a resurgence in state pride by presiding over the state’s centennial, spent political capital to start the REDI fund, found a permanent funding source for long-overdue water projects, brought environmental regulations out of the 19th century and — perhaps most importantly — worked tirelessly to rebuild relationships between whites and Native Americans after a contentious decade of strife.

He didn’t succeed in everything. Some will remember his ambitious plan to start a commuter airline system in South Dakota to connect our larger cities. There were hardly any riders. Governor Mickelson just couldn’t imagine why we wouldn’t all want to hop and skip from Yankton to Mitchell to Aberdeen to Huron and back again. But mostly he had successes. He seemed to live a charmed life right to the end, and South Dakota benefitted from his good fortune. And then he was gone.

What if he’d lived longer? Served out his final term as governor? Went onto the U.S. Senate? What would South Dakota look like today? Even better, I promise you. There would have been other reforms: on my first day in the legislature in 1993 he was presiding over a big meeting that he’d called to find a way to provide health insurance to people who couldn’t get it on the open market. He became visibly irritated when several insurance executives balked at his idea of a risk pool. He eventually stood and admonished them. Before he was finished, he was red-faced and he looked eight feet tall. And the room was silent, and we all went to work on a risk pool.

We would be a better state if George Mickeson was 72 years old and alive today. I’m certain of that.

We didn’t have the governor for the full nine innings. As too often happens with the best and brightest, he came and went too soon.

But we had him. He was all South Dakota. And he always will be.

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Say It with Chocolate

By Laura Andrews

Chocolate lovers Vickie and Mike Marotz of the Watertown Confectionery. Photo by John Andrews.

Valentine’s Day is synonymous with bouquets of flowers, sappy cards and red, heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. But what if you want to keep your celebration local? South Dakota doesn’t have many bright blooms to boast of this time of year, and syrupy sentiment isn’t really our style. Luckily, three area chocolatiers can help you pay tribute to your love with handmade flair.

The folks at Mostly Chocolates have been delighting Rapid City palates for over 30 years. They are now working on the people of Pierre, where they opened up a second location in 2012. Try their chocolate roses, amaretto fudge, chocolate-covered cherry clusters — 3 big maraschino cherries dipped in milk chocolate — or sample their many other handmade chocolates. The Rapid City store also has a full espresso bar and a frozen yogurt bar with over 25 toppings available. For a special experience, gather a group of friends together for private chocolate-making classes with owner Peggy Kelly and her staff. Visit Mostly Chocolates at 1919 Mount Rushmore Road in Rapid City or 410 West Sioux Avenue #4 in Pierre.

The Watertown Confectionery covers everything from”I brew” to”I do.” Mike and Vickie Marotz’s Kemp Avenue store houses wine and beer-making facilities and an in-shop chapel for small, intimate weddings in addition to hand-dipped caramels, mint meltaways and other treats. If your sweetie has a sense of humor, hand them a South Dakota Cow Pie. Hopefully the name won’t scare them away from savoring the Marotzes’ concoction of chocolate, crushed English toffee and toasted coconut. You’ll find the Watertown Confectionery at 116 East Kemp Avenue in Watertown.

Mary”Chip” Tautkus’s Chubby Chipmunk has been receiving national attention lately — her Deadwood-made truffles were slipped into the swag bags given to performers and presenters at the Grammy and Country Music Association award ceremonies. Those with exotic tastes turn to the Chipmunk for chocolate made from Fortunato No. 4, a recently rediscovered variety of cacao plant long thought extinct. For a last-minute V-Day surprise, slide your cash in the”Chub-O-Matic” truffle vending machine next to Tautkus’s shop at 420 Cliff Street in Deadwood.

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Thanks, Red

By Bernie Hunhoff
Last winter, the Hunhoffs all gathered for a family weekend in Pierre with kids and grandkids. The little tykes splashed in the pool and raced around the capitol on a quiet Saturday afternoon when there was no one there. But we had the most fun at the South Dakota Discovery Center, a children’s activity center located in an old city water plant on the west side of town, near the river.
The grandkids made sand art, constructed a wood dinosaur puzzle, spoke in a whispering dish, crawled through a tree house and had all sorts of other fun. Most of the exhibits were simple and sturdy. I wondered who made them.
Today I was reading the Pierre Capital Journal and came across the picture of a kindly fellow named Albert “Red” Zarecky. It accompanied his obituary.
Red was a retired pharmacist, age 93 when he died Jan. 5, “at his home, surrounded by family.” He grew up at Flandreau, served with the Marines in the South Sea Islands during WWII and then studied pharmacy at SDSU. He ran the Corner Drug in Pierre, and later, the city’s first Walgreens.
Red retired in 1976, some 37 years ago. And that was just a beginning. He started working with wood. He built two homes and remodeled his own. Then he started making toys and gifts for children, friends and neighbors. Every Christmas, he made a special gift for grandchildren. And he made handcrafted gifts of wood for every grandchild’s high school graduation — keepsakes that will be passed down through the generations.
Finally, a paragraph near the end of the obituary noted that Red made many of the children’s exhibits at the Discovery Center.
It’s pretty amazing how one person’s talents can spread to so many — even a talent developed after retirement. Thanks Red, on behalf of my grandkids. Wish I’d had the chance to meet you.
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Museum Pieces

Lori Holmberg, Dakota Discovery Museum director, says Gilfillan’s wagon is a permanent exhibit.

By Katie Hunhoff

The coming winter will force South Dakotans to seek indoor amusement, and high on our list should be a visit to local museums. You might be surprised at what you find. Our writers found all sorts of treasures when we did a search for our state’s most interesting and unusual museum artifacts.

Right beneath our noses, in our hometown of Yankton where we publish South Dakota Magazine, we found a Native American pipe bag with an amazing story at the Dakota Territorial Museum. The bag was the centerpiece of a collection of Indian artifacts gathered by Andrew J. Faulk, a 1860s trader and later the third governor of Dakota Territory. Crow Indians probably made the tanned, 43-inch long deer hide bag.

The bag’s recent history is almost as intriguing as its past. In 1995, it was stolen from the museum. For eight years, Yankton County Historical Society board member and artifact collector Larry Ness carried a photograph of the bag, and asked other collectors if they’d seen it. He found it in New York in 2003, and after some legal maneuvering he was able to bring the pipe bag home to the Yankton museum, where it is once again on display.

The Thoen Stone, located at the Adams Museum in Deadwood, is another prized museum piece with an interesting story. The stone is an 8 1/2 by 10 inch scrap of sandstone, purportedly found near Spearfish in 1887 by Louis Thoen. Inscribed on both sides is a message that is still the subject of controversy. The rough script describes how a band of seven men found”all the gold we could carry” in the northern Black Hills, and then were killed by Indian warriors — all except for the writer, Ezra Kind.

Kind supposedly wrote that he was out of food,”without a gun and hiding for his life.” The inscription is dated 1834, 40 years before the Custer expedition into the Hills. The fate of Mr. Kind is unknown, as is the validity of the stone itself.

Another famous stone can be found at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre — and its validity is certain. In 1742, Pierre Gaultier de la Verendrye sent his sons from Hudson Bay in Canada to find a water route to China. On foot and horseback, Louis-Joseph and Francois trekked west for over a year — until their Indian guides refused to go farther. The French-Canadians did not find a route to the sea, but they were among the first Europeans to see the Dakota plains. Camping with Indians along the Missouri on March 30, 1743, they buried a lead plate on a hilltop near the mouth of the Bad River to commemorate their journey. Three teenagers found the Verendryes’ partially-exposed lead plate in February of 1913. The artifact helped historians map the Verendryes’ route in their search for the Pacific.

Some of other amazing discoveries we found at local museums include paintings, like the Harvey Dunn originals at Brookings’ South Dakota Art Museum, sculptures like Borglum’s Statue of Lincoln at Keystone’s Borglum Historical Center and more Native American treasures like parfleche containers at Akta Lakota Museum in Chamberlain. Sometimes the museum building itself is a treasure, like the Pettigrew House in Sioux Falls or Adams Museum and House in Deadwood.

Ranchers will be nostalgic about Archer Gilfillan’s sheepherder wagon at the Dakota Discovery Museum in Mitchell. The early-day”mobile home,” a double floored and heated covered wagon, came to the museum 50 years ago. Gilfillan, a popular Harding County writer and speaker, was born in White Earth, Minn. in 1886, the son of an Episcopal missionary to the Ojibway Indians. Gilfillan studied Latin and Greek in prestigious universities and traveled in Europe. He returned to the West to homestead in Harding County. That venture failed and he worked for other ranchers, keeping a journal of the people and events he encountered. He gave a speech about sheep, coyote and human behavior at a wool growers’ convention at Helena, Mont., in 1924 called”Secret Sorrows of a Sheepherder,” and it was so well received he compiled his stories into a book, Sheep: Life on the South Dakota Range.

Every South Dakota museum, large and small, has treasures awaiting us. What better time to discover them than on a cold winter’s day?

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Joe Foss Remembered

By Dave Beckwith

For a 9-year-old newspaper boy in Pierre, balancing 50 to 100 papers on a bike was a challenge. One day in 1956 I hit a rut and crashed into the pavement. Newspapers scattered across the highway. With a badly skinned knee and embarrassed, I saw a black limousine coming straight at me. I scrambled to get out of harm’s way as the car screeched to a halt.

A man in a suit stepped out of the limousine and began picking up newspapers. I didn’t know he had been a fighter pilot in World War II or that he scored 26 personal aerial victories against the Japanese. I didn’t know he had been shot down over the Pacific or had received the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Purple Heart and the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I didn’t know that in 1941, he was the Officer of the Day, in charge of base security at Pensacola, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He rode around its perimeter defending against Japanese invaders on the only transportation available…a bicycle.

Was this on his mind as he saw me take a spill in the middle of the airport highway? When he said,”Let me help pick up your papers,” I was in awe. Without fanfare, Joe Foss, the governor with a state to manage and a plane to catch, took a few minutes to help a kid with a skinned knee.

Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the July/August 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117. The author, Dave Beckwith, was a retired California pastor who grew up in Pierre. His story later appeared in the book Chicken Soup for the Republican’s Soul.

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Ballin’ in South Dakota

By John Andrews

Carroll Hardy of Sturgis was one of South Dakota’s noteworthy athletes.

This week I got my registration form for the annual history conference in Pierre. I’ve never attended, but this year’s focus on our sports history looks especially interesting. Conferences like these love to focus on the political or economic aspects of our history, which are important. But cultural and social components like athletics are just as important, and sometimes overlooked.

One of the speakers is Mel Antonen, who grew up across the street from the baseball field in Lake Norden and became a national baseball writer. He’s going to talk about how baseball games in Yankee Stadium and South Dakota are alike. I’ve heard the presentation before, and it’s well worth hearing again. Not to steal his thunder, but he’ll probably tell the story of covering Cal Ripken when he was going through contract negotiations in Baltimore. He ultimately decided to stay with the Orioles, and when Antonen asked why he turned down more money and bigger markets, Ripken said,”Mel, you just don’t understand baseball in a small town.”

South Dakota has a rich sports tradition. A few years back we asked longtime Yankton sports writer Hod Nielsen to compile a list of 12 of our greatest athletes. That’s not to be read,”the 12 greatest athletes in South Dakota history.” It’s simply a list of impressive athletes that Nielsen saw during his decades of work for the Yankton Press & Dakotan.

He chose all-time greats like Billy Mills, the Pine Ridge native who won the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympics.”Smokey Joe” Mendel briefly held the world record in the 100-meter-dash when he ran it in 9.5 seconds as a senior at Yankton College. Sturgis native Carroll Hardy made an impact on professional football, but he’s probably best known as the only man ever to pinch-hit for the great Ted Williams.

And South Dakota’s athletes continue to make history this week. The University of South Dakota women’s basketball team is in the WNIT for the first time. They welcome Drake to the DakotaDome in Vermillion Thursday at 7 p.m. Also Thursday, South Dakota State University’s men’s team makes its first ever appearance in the NCAA tournament. The Jacks play Baylor at 6:30 p.m., on truTV. And SDSU’s women, in the tournament for the fourth consecutive year, play Purdue Saturday at 12:30.

If you’re near a television or radio, watch and listen. You might hear names we’ll be talking about 50 years from now at another history conference.

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A Lobbyist’s View

Jeremiah M. Murphy is a contract lobbyist from Rapid City (and occasional contributor of pictures to South Dakota Magazine). At the end of this 2012 legislative session, when his lobbying projects were complete, Murphy picked up his camera and made pictures of some of the folks who are involved in the legislative process in Pierre. Legislators, lobbyists, even a Sergeant-at-Arms made their way in front of Murphy’s lens. View more of Murphy’s photos at Tumblr.

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Capitol Geese

By Chad Coppess

South Dakota’s state capitol grounds in Pierre include the five-acre Capitol Lake, which becomes a winter haven for thousands of Canada geese each year. For photographers visiting the Capitol, they are a welcome bonus.

Most often photographed from the southeast side of the lake, the geese sitting on the water make a nice foreground for morning pictures of the Capitol building. It’s also fairly easy to shoot them isolated without modern intrusions giving a natural”wild” look. A short walk around the lake and onto the peninsula in the middle will give you an idea which angles you like for shooting.

While geese and ducks may be found on Capitol Lake at any time of the day, they are most prevalent in the morning and evening. They sleep overnight on the lake and often head out of town during the day for feeding in nearby fields or on the Missouri River. They also gather on the front lawn of the Capitol and in Hilger’s Gulch to the north of the building.

These urban geese get very used to pedestrian and vehicle traffic and at times don’t really want to move for either. For photographers that means a chance for up-close images of the flock.

Standard to wide-angle lenses can be used to capture the spectacle of birds crowding the small lake. Telephoto lenses, fast shutter speeds and quick reflexes can capture flying action.

Watching for varying weather patterns can give clues to great photography on Capitol Lake. Very cold mornings usually mean the warm water in the lake will be shrouded in a thick fog. With sunrise streaming through it, the steam can look magical. On days when it’s snowing the birds sometimes hunker down and become coated with white.

I like to observe the flock and watch for behavior patterns that give me clues to when a group may fly or dip some water on their backs and then shake it off in a wing-spreading display.

If you like photographing birds you also won’t want to miss a trip through the Oahe Downstream Recreation Area below Oahe Dam where dozens of eagles tend to hang out, watching for an easy meal of goose or duck. Many species of birds can be found along the Missouri River and in the grasslands to the south and west of Fort Pierre.

As spring approaches, the geese will leave central South Dakota, but you can expect them back each fall, just as regular as lawmakers on the Capitol grounds.

Chad Coppess is the senior photographer at the South Dakota Department of Tourism. He lives in Pierre with his wife, Lisa. To view more of his work, visit www.dakotagraph.com.