Tag: scotland

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Let’s Go Shopping in Scotland

By Bernie Hunhoff

Dean and Karen Rettedal’s department store in Scotland features apparel for men, women and children, though Dean says women’s clothing is most popular. “The men will wear something three or four years or until it wears out, but fortunately the women want something new now and then.”

Ludwig and Donna Rettedal arrived in Scotland to run a shoe store in 1959. Within three years, Walmart, Kmart, and Shopko pioneered big-box stores and suddenly it seemed that small town retailers were an endangered species.

Nobody told the Rettedals.

“I was in the fourth grade when we moved here from Winner,” Dean Rettedal says.”It was in the spring of the year and all the Scotland boys went out after school and played baseball.” Before long, he was playing first base.

Dean’s dad was an avid golfer in Winner.”There was no course here in Scotland, so he and some friends went around and sold shares and started the golf course.”

Dean and his four brothers fished for bullhead and bluegill in Lake Henry. He mowed lawns for spending money and was inspired to play the trumpet by music teacher Len Vellek. The latter was life changing.

Dean majored in music at the University of South Dakota. When he needed an accompanist for his junior-year solo trumpet recital, someone suggested Karen Twite, a Beresford freshman. They married in 1971 and both taught at Centerville and Emmettsburg, Iowa, but Dean didn’t forget his happy childhood in Scotland.

In 1979, he and Karen bought the department store where his father had the shoe store. Incidentally, 1979 is also when Texas Instruments debuted a personal computer that would soon make it possible for people to shop from home. Amazon took advantage of the technology in 1994 and before long many of the big box stores were slumping.

Ludwig and Donna Rettedal came to Scotland with their young family in 1959 to run a shoe store in the town’s department store.

Only two JCPenney stores survive in all of South Dakota and there are now just three Kmart stores in the entire United States. Amazon is the world’s biggest retailer worldwide. But Rettedal’s Department Store is king in Scotland. It continues to exist as 4,000 square feet of calm and charm, aisles of gentility that seem very different from today’s often overhyped, overpriced and underwhelming commercial shopping experience.

Dean and Karen Rettedal only shrug and smile when asked about the contrast with the corporate culture.”We do have people who come in and say it’s nice to have somewhere to shop other than a big mall,” Dean acknowledges.

“We have a lot of loyal customers who have also become good friends,” nods Karen.

Understatements, if you ask around town. Mike Behl has a good view of the Rettedal Store. He works across the street at Farmers and Merchants State Bank, his family’s vocation since his grandfather came to town in 1938.

“Dean and Karen have a market that fits the people of Scotland,” Behl says.”And people come from all over the area. You see cars from everywhere. You can see that people like them, and they just like to shop there.”

The young banker says it is a godsend for the men, especially.”If you find you have to go to a funeral or a wedding and you need a nice shirt, you go see Dean.”

Rettedal’s has clothing for men, women and children, along with toys and books, greeting cards and a shoe department that looks exactly like it did when the family came to town in 1959. The same six steel chairs still await customers, though Dean reupholstered them a few years ago.

Behl, the banker, says having a beloved cornerstone store helps the entire town. He points up and down the street to a flower shop, coffee shop, hardware store, grocery store, four-lane bowling alley and several eateries that all benefit when out-of-towners arrive.

The neighboring stores also have their charms and niches. Jake and Valerie Sturges stock the usual tools, paints and plumbing supplies that you expect at Scotland Hardware, but they also offer Valerie’s handcrafted gift items and a big section of fishing tackle for anglers at Lake Henry.

“We also have a lot of the small appliances like coffee pots,” says Valerie.”It’s an emergency in town if someone’s coffee pot goes out first thing in the morning.”

Ron’s Market, just a block off Main Street, stocks the basic food items, along with local treats like Amish candies, Dimock Cheese, chislic from Kaylor Locker and eggs from a local Hutterite colony.

Scotland Locker, the town’s popular butcher shop, is best-known for flavored brats. Favorites include a breakfast brat stuffed with hash browns and cheddar cheese, as well as a hot brat known as Napalm in the AM.

Dean Rettedal says Scotland had more stores in the 1960s when he was a child.”We had three cafes, two hardware stores, two grocery stores. Fortunately, we still have all those services, but they are just not doubled up today.”

In the town’s early years, it even had two main streets. The town was founded in 1870 on Dawson Creek by C.T. Campbell, a Civil War soldier from Pennsylvania who nearly died from battle injuries. Though badly crippled, he recovered enough to return to the fighting and served with distinction. Reassigned to Dakota Territory after the war, he was drawn to the beauty of Dawson Creek and chose it as his townsite.

When the Menno Wolves and Scotland Highlanders merged their football programs, their gridiron name became the Trappers. Dean Rettedal shows off the mascot, a highlander with a wolf head hat.

Campbell helped Scotlanders relocate to the present site in 1881 when the railroad arrived. In its early years, the town had two shopping districts because of language barriers between Germans from Russia and other settlers. The former group built stores along Currie Street (now Curry Street), which still intersects Main Street on the west side of town. However, as immigrant families became more acclimated to the English language and American culture, Main Street dominated. Today it still features pioneer brick architecture, though some of the handsome structures need repair.

Fortunately, the Rettedal Department Store looks much as it did in 1929 when JCPenney leased the space. Dean has a deed for the property that shows the terms: $1,500 per year plus 2 percent of gross sales over $90,000.

The store still has the same high tin ceiling and big wood door. Greeting card racks are where they were in the 1950s but gone is the mechanical cash carrier that carried customers’ payments and receipts to an upstairs office.

When the Rettedals bought the store in 1979, Karen ran it full-time while Dean split his days between the store and a part-time role as a music teacher and band director at Mount Marty University in Yankton.

“When I retired from Mount Marty in 2015, friends asked me what I was going to do with all my time,” laughs Dean.”I said I was going to just work six days a week.”

On summer mornings, he rises early and visits the golf course his father helped to start.”I go out for about 20 minutes and walk as fast as I can go,” he grins. Then he heads for the store.

He serves as treasurer for the Scotland Chamber of Commerce, a job he’s held for 40 years. Karen directs the church choir and Dean still plays trumpet for the Yankton Summer Band and the Sioux Empire Brass. They visit their children, Kristi and David, who live in Sioux Falls and Dakota Dunes, respectively. They also travel”to market” at Minneapolis several times a year to shop for inventory. But most of their days are spent together in their store aisles, along with Vickie Fillaus and Marlys Haase, two longtime co-workers.

Dean, a man of few words, describes a good day at the store like this:”You’re busy. People are happy. You have what they want.”

He doesn’t need to say that working alongside Karen, in the same space that attracted his parents to Scotland in 1959, is something he cherishes. It’s apparent to every visitor who walks through the old wood door.

“We are retirement age I guess, but it’s a great life for us,” Karen says.”It’s a big commitment so you have to enjoy it, but we do. I don’t know what we’d do all day if we didn’t have the store. If someone came in and said, ëWe want to buy it,’ I guess we’d have to think about it a little harder Ö.”

Obviously, Karen has no enthusiasm for selling. She didn’t even finish the sentence, and Dean acted as if he wasn’t listening to such talk. That’s good news for Scotland’s remaining Main Street.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Too Many Counties?

By John Andrews

South Dakota’s 66 counties have been arranged like this since 1983.

Does South Dakota have too many counties? It’s a long-discussed topic that resurfaced at Augustana College’s annual Dakota Conference in April. Bill Peterson, a former legislator from Sioux Falls, discussed the county consolidation proposal he brought to the legislature in 1998. It would have required South Dakota reorganize into no fewer than 15 counties and no more than 30 by 2005. Despite touting its cost savings — something that generally catches the attention of frugal South Dakotans — the plan got very little traction.

Neither did a joint resolution that appeared before the legislature in 2009. It would have placed a constitutional amendment on 2010 general election ballot to limit counties to 25,000 people or 5,000 square miles, whichever was less.

Peterson and his co-presenter, Joe Kirby, cited the dramatic population shift from rural to urban areas of South Dakota. It’s been happening for decades and it’s very likely to continue, meaning some form of reorganization is probably inevitable. Yet here we are in 2015 with the same patchwork of 66 counties that we’ve known since 1983, when Washabaugh County was absorbed into Jackson County and became South Dakota’s last county to be eliminated.

A few years ago, we embarked on a search to find one interesting spot in every county that we thought people might like to see. After our”66 counties tour” feature appeared in the magazine, several readers wrote to tell us that they had set out on their own South Dakota road trips, magazine in hand, to see the places we’d written about.

There are fun and interesting things to be found in each county, so while we still have all 66, let’s celebrate them. Beginning today, and continuing every two weeks, we’ll pick one South Dakota county and write about the unique facts and places that we’ve discovered in our travels there. As always, we encourage additions to our reports. Please leave a comment if you’re a resident, a South Dakota native reading from afar or anyone with an interest in the featured county.

Our first installment features Bon Homme County, officially organized in 1862. Its recorded history reaches back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which floated into the area in the late summer of 1804. The explorers noted in their journals passing a large island in the Missouri River called Bon Homme Island. The exact origins of the name are unclear, but some speculate that a Frenchman lived on the island and was considered a good man (“bon homme” in French) to local Indians, who bestowed that title upon the land.

The area’s earliest settlers relied on the fur trade for their livelihoods. The first trading post in the county was opened by Emanuel Disaul in 1815 at the mouth of Emanuel Creek west of Springfield. Zephyr Rencontre built a station on Bon Homme Island in 1828.

The county was effectively opened to non-Indian settlement after an 1858 treaty that required the Yankton Sioux Indians to relocate west of Chouteau Creek, just beyond the present county’s western boundary. John Shober and several families from Minnesota arrived in 1858, just before the treaty was signed. Soldiers from nearby Fort Randall, charged with keeping trespassers off Indian lands, disassembled their log homes and threw them into the river. They returned in 1859 and began a more permanent settlement.

Shober and his party are credited with establishing the first schoolhouse in what would be Dakota Territory. Ten students enrolled in the spring of 1860 under the tutelage of Emma Bradford. The original school building has disappeared, but a replica still stands a few miles east of Springfield.

A replica of the first schoolhouse in Dakota Territory stands near the Missouri River in Bon Homme County.

Bon Homme County’s land appealed to settlers from across the ocean, as well. Hutterites, long oppressed in Europe, sent scouts to Dakota Territory in the early 1870s, looking for a place to establish a colony. They liked what they saw along the banks of the Missouri River and bought 2,500 acres of land in 1874 from notorious Indian agent Walter Burleigh. Bon Homme Colony became the first Hutterite colony in North America, and has been continuously occupied ever since.

Bon Homme County is the resting place of six unknown soldiers belonging to George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. The men were camped along Snatch Creek in May of 1873 when several soldiers contracted typhoid fever. Seven men — six unknown and one identified — were buried along the banks of the creek. Later they were moved to the Bon Homme Cemetery, where a large stone marks their burial place.

Veronica Sanders helps prepare kolaches at the Tyndall Bakery.

Every county most likely has a skeleton in its closet, and Bon Homme is no different. The first tumbleweed ever reported in North America was found near Scotland in 1877. Its origins were probably in a shipment of flax seed from Ukraine.

Today just over 7,000 people live on farms and in Bon Homme County’s five towns — Avon, Scotland, Tyndall, Springfield and Tabor. Immigrants from Czechoslovakia settled around Tabor beginning in 1869, and their culture is still evident at Czech Days, the town’s annual June festival. If you don’t make it to Czech Days, you can still buy kolaches — a traditional fruit-filled Czech dessert — at bakeries in Tabor and Tyndall.

Tyndall, the county seat, boasts a miniature replica of the Eiffel Tower on the courthouse lawn. County commissioners voted to erect the tower as a memorial to South Dakotans who fought during the Spanish-American War.

Tyndall’s miniature Eiffel Tower.

On our most recent trip through Scotland, we met Victor Settje, who is carefully dismantling St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, built in 1886. He’s hoping to find new uses for every board, including the old wooden cross.

The town’s VFW Hall boasts a new 5-by-10-foot painting by Menno airbrush artist Mickey Harris that honors a local World War II veteran. Leon Woehl was aboard a B-17 that crashed in Germany in 1944. Harris’ painting depicts the crash and the Nazi soldiers looking for Woehl and the eight other crewmembers who hid in the woods until their capture.

Springfield sits right on the Missouri River, so it makes sense that Greg Stockholm is in the midst of crafting a 68-foot boat. You can see the work in progress outside his shop at 811 College St.

Avon is the hometown of Sen. George McGovern, whose father served the Methodist church in town before moving his family to Mitchell. The museum includes memorabilia from the McGoverns.

The history, the river and the ethnic traditions all make Bon Homme County fun to explore, especially if you enjoy the kolaches and ignore the tumbleweeds.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here to read other installments.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

King Ziegler’s Car Farm

By Bernie Hunhoff

People came from miles around to search for treasures in Alfred Ziegler’s salvage yard near Scotland, South Dakota.

Auto junkyards were once a staple for a town. The carcasses of cars and trucks were kept in rows on the outskirts of town, where one or two grease monkeys made a decent living by selling parts.

Today’s salvage yards have more in common with K-mart than with the junkyards of yesterday. Vehicles are stripped of radios, rims, alternators and everything else of value. The parts are checked, cleaned, inventoried and available to buyers across the USA thanks to the Internet.

It’s a very efficient system of recycling, but something is missing from the business model practiced by King Ziegler, who ran a junkyard near Scotland in the 1990s. When South Dakota Magazine visited him in 1996, King was earning a living from a crop of rusted iron and nostalgia. People came from miles around — some from as far away as Europe and Asia — to search for treasure in his 30-acre field of cars.

His real name was Alfred. But if you asked for Alfred Ziegler at a cafe in his Bon Homme County town the locals would look puzzled until you added that he is the guy with all the old cars.

“Oh, you mean King,” everyone would say in unison.”King Ziegler.”

King ran a place some people would call an auto junkyard. In the phone book, it was called King Ziegler Salvage. So you’d expect to arrive and find workers removing parts from car carcasses. Grease. Oil. Sweat. Noise.

None of the above. Blackbirds sang in a nearby cornfield. A herd of sheep grazed between rusting automobiles. A rooster crowed on a nearby farm and a donkey brayed in reply. That’s about as noisy as it got at King Ziegler Salvage.

“When he went into business, everybody thought ‘How do you make any money on this junk?'” said Wilbur Foss who ran a hardware store in Scotland for 17 years.”He’s one of a kind. He built a reputation far and wide. Everybody likes him and he likes everybody.”

If that’s true, it’s not because he was so accommodating. King didn’t remove parts from the cars. That was understandable when we met him in 1996 because he was 79 years of age. But he never did believe in removing parts before they were needed.”I have the customer take the parts off. I tell them if they take if off, they’ll know how to put it on,” he told us.

That might seem quaint to big-city salvage yards with rows and rows of Chevy transmissions, shelves full of GM radios and boxes of Ford alternators.

Real steel builds lasting memories. And the proof is at King Ziegler’s car farm.

King’s self-serve salvage wasn’t tailored to the customer in a hurry. He didn’t have an inventory of the cars in his field. They were not inventoried on a computer. They were not even logged on a yellow pad. And he didn’t pretend to remember what’s available.”Just go take a look,” he advised. Customers seemed to like that attitude. It would never work for Wal-mart — but King Ziegler Salvage was as different from chain store retailing as a whale is different from an ocean liner.

A business school grad might think the Scotland salvage yard needed more modern management. But after spending an afternoon at King’s field, you’d start to wonder if maybe the rest of the world has gone overboard on organization.

After all, his system worked splendidly. He spent nothing on advertising, yet customers came from all over the world. He had only an eighth grade education, yet he made a good living without getting any grease in his fingernails.

He had no labor costs. No labor worries. No stress. No office expenses. No signs. The 1950 Chevrolet wrecker he used to hoist or haul cars had a phone number painted on the side. But it was not his phone number.

He spent nothing on mowing. Instead, he invited a good friend, Elmer Brandt, to bring a herd of sheep to the field every summer.”I guess I could run sheep myself but then I’d have to put up hay to feed them in the winter,” he said.

He closed when the weather was bad. He closed for much of the winter. Customers could call him in an emergency. But it’s hard to imagine why there would be a critical need for a 1949 Studebaker carburetor.

King Ziegler didn’t start out in the car business. He was raised on a farm near Tripp, where he had a stud horse called King (that’s where his buddies found his nickname). After service in World War II, he was in the oil business at Kaylor.”I bought cars to fix them up and all of a sudden I got into this business,” he remembered with a wry grin in 1996.

He didn’t have time to repair all the fixer-uppers he was buying so he started to park them in the field at his farm near Scotland. He bought most of the cars for $25 to $100. Sometimes, dealers sold him used cars they couldn’t move. He also attended farm auctions. And he bought many privately.”People even tried to give me cars but I always paid something. I wanted to be fair.”

At first, he put the cars in neat rows. But as the field began to fill, he squeezed the last few hundred in wherever they would fit. An open path meandered between the cars but it got narrow at some points — barely wide enough to squeeze King’s two-passenger three-wheeler motorcycle through.

King continued to operate his Kaylor company until 1972, when he sold it and moved to Scotland to run the salvage yard full time. He quit buying cars years in the 1970s, when the lot filled up. He estimated there were about 1,500 cars and pickup trucks in the field, as well as dozens of old tractors, grain threshers and other farm equipment. King Ziegler was one of the last people on earth who could still sell a manifold for a Cockshutt tractor.

Most of his collection dated back to the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Twenty years ago, there were lots of salvage yards with cars of similar vintage. But when iron prices increased and machines became available to crush cars, many dealers”recycled” their older models.

For sentimental reasons — and because it seemed like a waste of good parts — King never sold to the scrap dealers.”I just didn’t care to crush my cars. I thought they might be useful to somebody someday.”

It was a good business instinct.”I had people here from Sweden last week looking for Pontiac and Buick parts,” he told South Dakota Magazine. “We had somebody here today from California.” They came from all parts of Europe and Asia as well.

Most customers had so much fun looking around the field that King joked about charging admission. But he never would have done so. He made his money from the parts they hauled away. A man with an armful of chrome from an old Pontiac wrote a check for $35.”I’m not trying to get rich on anybody,” King said.”At least I’ve got something to do and I get to visit with a lot of people.”

Most of his visitors were professional car restorers. Others had an old car or two at home.”Most are fixing up a car like the first one they ever owned in their youth.”

King’s collection was especially well-stocked with Pontiac and Buick parts. That’s because Bon Homme County residents loyally supported the late Frank Pillar, who sold those name brands for decades at his lot in Scotland.

“Frank was one of the top-selling small town dealers in the United States,” said Wilbur Foss.”People in these parts were very loyal to him and he was loyal to them. He took care of their car problems, even if it had to come out of his own pocket.”

Frank’s brother, Ed, ran a Ford dealership in Scotland and many of his vehicles are also in the lot. Pillar decals can still be found on many vehicles.

Some insightful people, realizing King had a good thing going, have offered to buy the place. But how do you put a price on a business that markets rusted iron, chrome and nostalgia?

Besides, if an appraiser did a true inventory, Ziegler’s collection would have cost more money than most buyers would have available.”Some people tell me there’s a million dollars worth of cars out here,” says King.”I don’t think so.”

King lived modestly for a paper millionaire. A lifelong bachelor, he rented an apartment above Scotland’s main street and ate most of his meals at a local cafÈ.

He drove a 1980 Ford pickup. He also owned a fully-restored 1959 Ford convertible that he drove in local parades.

His business headquarters was a small, wooden building at the entrance of the field of cars. Inside, a girl-in-a-bikini calendar from an auto parts store stood out as the most colorful decoration. The office was full of reading material that he enjoyed between customers.

Like many entrepreneurs, King Ziegler was the first to admit that he sort of stumbled into success. Who would have dreamed that the cars he collected would be such prizes in the 1990s?

Which brings one to wonder whether today’s Tauruses, Intrepids and Escorts will be as popular in 50 years as the Studebakers, Mercuries and ’57 Chevies of yesterday? Should someone be saving today’s discards?

King had his doubts.”They make pretty light stuff these days,” he said.”They’re like a pop can. With all the salt on the roads I don’t know how long they’ll last. Years ago these cars weren’t exposed to all that salt. That’s why Minnesotans are always coming up here to buy parts. They used more salt.”

Besides that, he said, today’s cars have so many plastic and fiberglass parts that they aren’t likely to hold up long enough to become collectors’ items. People don’t tend to have fond memories of cars that are cracking and falling apart, he said.

Real steel builds lasting memories. And the proof is at King Ziegler’s car farm.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is revised from the Nov/Dec 1996 issue of South Dakota Magazine. King Ziegler died a few years later. To order this back issue or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.