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Spearfish’s Pot Pedaler

By Michael Zimny

Clay Dykstra in his Black Hills State University studio.

“This has got to be the best view in town,” says Clay Dykstra, gazing at Lookout Mountain from the windows of his Black Hills State University ceramics classroom.

Dykstra knows it well. He’s cranked his way up the mountain countless times since junior high, when the Spearfish mountain biking scene was growing out of its training wheels.

“Lookout Mountain was some of the first trail that a lot of us got to ride,” Dykstra says.”It’s close to town, so that’s kind of where you cut your teeth. For the most part in the early days it was a mix of hiking trails, fire roads and old logging roads.”

In a way, his potter’s wheel and all that two-wheel trail time share a common axis. When he moved back to Spearfish after college in Wyoming, one of the first works he made in clay was a trophy for the Dakota Five-O.

“It’s a really cool event and something that I’m passionate about. I just did it voluntarily. Then I started making mugs.” Twelve years later, he’s still making kiln-fired wares for riders at events like the Five-O and the 28 Below, in a town where mountain biking has become engrained in the local culture.

Dykstra Pottery has also expanded into making vessels for local independent businesses. You can find his mugs at Green Bean Coffee and Blackbird Espresso in Spearfish, Sturgis Coffee Company and Harriet & Oak in Rapid City. His tankards have been a feature at Flanagan’s pub in Spearfish for years.

Through homegrown connections and dedication to his craft he’s finding a way to make it doing what he loves. He’s also passing along the knowledge he’s acquired through the years as an adjunct professor at BHSU.

Lookout Mountain is the backdrop for Dykstra’s creative space.

He’s had some good teachers himself. “Dan Binder was the ceramics teacher at Spearfish High School. When I was a junior I thought it would be really cool to take a class from him. There were definitely a lot of kids that were better at it than I was. But I took a second semester in my senior year, and I’d go in during my free hour and make pots.”

He attended Northwest College, near Yellowstone, to study anthropology. “My goal at the time was to be an archaeologist. I’ve done a lot of volunteering with the Forest Service here and been on a number of digs in the area, so I thought being an archaeologist would be cool.” But the wheel had cast a hypnotic spell on him. “Pottery was open and unattended. They had a big box of clay and I’d go in and make some pots.”

“Then I kind of realized that the more I got educated, the more I’d be behind a desk. And it wasn’t the desk stuff that I liked. It was digging and walking around. I liked reading about it too, but I didn’t want to sit behind a desk most of the time. So I realized, ‘Okay, I think I want to be a potter.’ And I started getting serious about it.”

He continued his education at Casper College under the tutelage of respected potter and longtime ceramics instructor Lynn Munns.

Since moving back to Spearfish, he’s experimented with different formulas for making it as a small town potter, often doing other work — construction gigs and managing the family business (Good Earth Natural Foods) — to get by.

He estimates that the work he does for local businesses comprises the majority of his output. “It’s about ninety percent of what I’m doing. To make it as a potter in the Black Hills, you’ve got to branch out and do some different things.”

Making it here has challenges, but it can also inspire.

“The natural world, aesthetically, is a huge influence on me. Some of my favorite pots — I see them as pieces of a whole, like that really interesting stone that you see on the side of a trail, or that interesting branch on a gnarly old tree. If I had no limitations and could just make what I want, I’d make pots that look as if they were left on the side of a trail. They’d just look like they belonged there.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Spearfish Canyon Color

The highway through Spearfish Canyon is a favorite fall drive for many South Dakotans and out of state visitors. Jerry Boyer, who has tracked the progression of fall colors in Spearfish Canyon for more than 20 years, predicts Wednesday will be the peak day to view the full rhapsody of fall colors — especially the reds of the sumac, nanny berry, wild grape and ivy. But beware the alluring red leaves near the ground; they are poison ivy.

John Mitchell visited the canyon this past weekend. Here are some of his photos.

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The Man Who Played Christ

By Paul Higbee

Josef Meier brought his Passion Play to Spearfish in 1938.

So overpowering are the accomplishments of the man who played Jesus Christ that it’s sometimes hard to remember the individual behind them.

Popes honored Josef Meier three times for the religious inspiration he brought to millions. Meier was the Cal Ripken of theatre, his record 8,000 performances of a theatrical role unmatched in American stage history. And he was the very image of the immigrant who comes to the United States with very little, lives every day in celebration of American freedoms, and in so doing builds not only a livelihood but also an institution.

He did all this based in Spearfish, where in 1938 he transplanted an Old World passion play, a drama recounting Christ’s last seven days on Earth. It can be added to Meier’s accomplishments that he pioneered Black Hills tourism, putting his play in a town with no railroad. Tourism was still the domain of railroads in the 1930s, but Josef Meier correctly guessed that would change.

Of course, Meier’s mystique is enhanced by the fact that most photos show him costumed as Christ, the role he played 8,000 times for a total audience of 9 million people. But digging through Spearfish files one uncovers other pictures, such as Meier dressed in work clothes and a western hat, his beloved horses and dogs at his side.

A year after Meier’s death in 1999 at age 94, interviews with his family, friends and Passion Play actors revealed an individual every bit as remarkable as his honors and records, though he always downplayed those, explaining that the Passion Play’s message was important, not its numbers and awards.

One longtime Spearfish friend said, somewhat sheepishly, “I find I can’t talk about Josef Meier without quoting him, because he was such an articulate man. And I can’t quote him without imitating that wonderful German accent of his. So I imitate him, but with the utmost respect.”

Charlotte Carver, first South Dakota Arts Council executive director, recalled Meier as “a gallant gentleman. He possessed a true continental charm.”

Indeed he did, and a knack for winning lifelong friendships. At one point the Meiers’ Christmas card list numbered 6,000, He especially liked friends who held up their end of lively discussions about most anything: politics, the South Dakota cattle industry, the arts, the best spots in the Black Hills to find deer during hunting season.

Plenty of Spearfish people also recall Meier as a tough negotiator, who knew his play made a huge economic impact in Spearfish (it brought 4.5 million visitors to town during his lifetime) and who expected the community to help promote it and maintain quality roads to the amphitheater. At the same time, he’d do most anything to help the town move forward. He established scholarships at Black Hills State University, served on Spearfish’s first hospital board, sacrificed some of his own property to make certain Interstate 90 got routed to town, and contributed time to civic projects through the Lions Club and Knights of Columbus. Meier never saw Spearfish until age 33, and then his play kept him away for months almost every year. But there could be no doubt where he considered home.

Nine million people saw Josef Meier portray Christ in the Passion Play.

It was a home far from his native Lunen, Germany. Born in 1904, one of nine children, Meier gained an academic knowledge of the English language in school. He was a serious student who considered a career in medicine, loved competitive swimming and developed a deep appreciation for literature, music and theatre arts.

”I’m not sure if he was serious about a medical career by the time he was a young man or not,” said his daughter, Johanna. “At any rate, whatever his other interests might have been, his love of the theatre took over.”

So much so that at age 27 he boarded a ship bound for New York, part of a troupe that would stage the 700-year-old Lunen Passion Play, in German, to American audiences. Their idea was to play cities with large German immigrant populations. The players found some appreciative audiences in 1932, but Meier quickly saw that a better plan would be to translate the play into English. After doing so, he based the play in Chicago and began hiring American actors as the original cast drifted back across the Atlantic. He eventually toured to more than 600 cities across the United States and Canada.

On the road during the Depression, the cast sometimes outnumbered the audience. Seldom-used auditoriums often required hours of maintenance before scenery and lights could be rigged. The cast traveled by rail; once their poorly heated car sat through a cold Oklahoma night, waiting to be picked up by a freight train. That misadventure sent one actor to the hospital with pneumonia, and prompted Meier to buy a fleet of trucks and cars.

Josef and Clare Meier toured 600-plus cities and towns.

“I found that good actors are often not good drivers,” Meier said years later. “But we never had an accident that resulted in serious injury.”

In the early years, Meier once told The Saturday Evening Post, “I worried over so many things. I worked hard all day on the play, and then sat up half the night struggling with letters and other paper work. It seemed a hopeless struggle, until one night in the middle of the play as I spoke the lines to Judas, ‘Do you not worry about the tomorrow.’ It struck me that it was about time I took my own advice. I worked just as hard afterward, but I haven’t worried since.”

Things improved further after Chicago actress Clare Hume joined the cast. She and Meier were married a year later. She took over costuming responsibilities and played Mary, Christ’s mother.

Clare Meier recalled when the Passion Play came to Sioux Falls in late 1937. Among performances there was a memorable one at the state penitentiary, where the cast dressed in cramped prison cells. Sioux Falls businessman Leo Craig met the Meiers and learned that Josef one day hoped to find an outdoor venue for the production. Craig suggested the Black Hills, where he owned a cabin. Meier had already investigated possible sites, including the Ozarks, where the scenery was beautiful but the mosquitoes thick. He liked a Santa Barbara amphitheater, but not the ocean fogs that would surely cancel performances.

The play came to Spearfish in late summer of 1938 for a few performances at the college auditorium. Before Meier and his company left town, the Lunen Passion Play’s name had been changed to the Black Hills Passion Play. Spearfish photographer Joe Fassbender shot publicity photos, and builder Martin Thompson said he’d have an amphitheater constructed to Meier’s design specifications by the next summer. Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum welcomed Meier to the Hills, and the Borglums and Meiers became close friends.

Spearfish banker Walter Dickey topped Josef Meier’s list of people who made the Passion Play a South Dakota success. When the cast moved into its amphitheater for its opening performance June 18, 1939, it was the talk of the Hills. According to the Spearfish newspaper, 27 dates that summer drew 35,000 people. But in 1940, with most residents having seen the production and Black Hills tourism still in its infancy, attendance fell sharply. A local Passion Play corporation, which had built the amphitheater and was responsible for its upkeep, folded. Josef Meier personally assumed the corporation’s debts, and Dickey told him he could repay a bank loan as he was able.

Keeping the production afloat wasn’t Meier’s only interest in those years. Johanna is certain that Spearfish’s western setting was a reason her father settled there.

Meier relaxing with two of his many dogs.

“He grew up loving stories of the American West, and suddenly he had an opportunity to live here and have horses and livestock,” she said. “He acquired a ranch, and he was much more than a gentleman rancher. I remember driving across the state with him, buying bulls, and he spent long days calving, vaccinating, and doing everything else a rancher does.”

Meierís ranch stood out because of its camels, which he used in the play. He learned that two-humped Bactrians from cool regions of Asia weathered South Dakota winters well.

Had the Passion Play failed, would Josef Meier have been content as a South Dakota rancher?

“He loved everything about ranching, but I’m not sure he could have done only that,” said Johanna. “He had a charisma that needed a public outlet.”

During the Second World War, Meier’s public outlet became national in scope. Wartime travel restrictions shut down Black Hills tourism almost completely, but South Dakota’s congressional delegation helped Meier secure fuel for far-reaching national tours. In 1942, the Black Hills Passion Play ranked as the second largest box office draw among road shows in the nation. Some cast members spent the summer of 1943 growing victory gardens in Spearfish before embarking on a tour that saw sellout crowds in Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Time wrote that the Black Hills actors had scored “a solid, urban success.” Performances resumed in Spearfish in 1948, and the production, now nationally known, attracted 50,000 people for the first time in 1952. By 1966, attendance had grown to 100,000.

Meier spent a lot of time during those years supervising amphitheater improvements, transforming it into one of the best equipped in the world, a theater which accommodated 6,000 in stadium-style seats. As he made his rounds, a dog or two usually accompanied him. (He once owned seven Great Danes and nine dachshunds; he was a soft touch for strays of any breed). While most Black Hills people knew him as a leader in local tourism, few knew he held the same reputation in central Florida, where another amphitheater went up in 1952 for annual winter and Easter season performances. Meier beat Walt Disney to central Florida by nearly 20 years.

Just because he staged the play thousands of times didn’t mean he let it coast. He constantly reminded actors playing Jewish priests and scribes to think of their characters not as villains, as in some passion plays, but as educated religious leaders who feared their people would be punished by the Romans if Jesus proved too popular. Harold Rogers, one of the original actors who came to Spearfish in 1938 and who later became the play’s general manager, recalled many nights when he and Meier sat in the amphitheater after performances, talking about problems audiences didn’t see, but which rankled Meier.

Gov. Harlan Bushfield, center, met Josef Meier and Potato Creek Johnny in the early 1940s.

His interest in the arts extended far beyond his own production, said Charlotte Carver. “He sat on the first South Dakota Arts Council, about 1970. I was executive director and he was a tremendous asset. At the same time, Charlton Heston was on the National Endowment for the Arts board. I told people I worked with Moses in Washington, D.C., and Jesus in South Dakota. You can’t do any better than that.”

Meier was an arts council asset because, just as he saw problems in his play no one else saw, he also saw opportunities no one else saw. And he envisioned charitable auctions for the arts that others didn’t, and could bring them to fruition. For example, in the early 1950s, he met world-renowned opera singer Marjorie Lawrence in Chicago. Her career had been interrupted by polio, but she got back to the stage and Meier saw her perform. Like so many others, Lawrence was captivated by that charisma and continental charm, and before long she was in Spearfish, performing the first of two amphitheater benefits for young South Dakota polio patients.

Late in his career, so many plaques and lifetime achievement trophies came Meier’s way that the family lost count at about a hundred. One that meant a great deal was the Bundesverdienstkreuz, West Germany’s highest civilian honor. West Germany paid tribute to a South Dakota actor and rancher for two reasons ó because he helped keep a piece of German heritage alive in the New World, and because after the Second World War he helped rebuild a Lunen church that had been shelled.

However busy Meier might have been during the war, taking one of America’s biggest road shows from city to city, he never let Germany slip from his mind. In a eulogy, nephew Heinz Meier remembered treasured wartime packages that came to German family members from South Dakota containing Spam, chocolate, colorful American neckties, shoes, and even concealed contraband cigarettes and coffee.

Josef Meier turned the Passion Play over to Johanna and her husband, Guido Della Vecchia, in 1991. He and Clare traveled, splitting each year between Spearfish and a lake home in Florida. In South Dakota, he drove to the ranch outside Spearfish regularly, and there was also time to catch up on some reading ó his taste ranging from political history to German classics to Zane Grey westerns.

Thirteen months after Meier’s death, the first Passion Play performances of 2000 were staged on the road, in a Hamilton, Ontario coliseum. Once again the production that is Josef Meier’s legacy proved its staying power, drawing capacity audiences and winning critical acclaim. “It’s spoken with elegance and certainty by a commanding company of actors,” a Hamilton Spectator reviewer wrote, ” … taking us away from mundane daily concerns.”

Backstage between matinee and evening performances ó an environment of costume trunks and electrical cables and penned camels that Meier knew well ó the cast gathered around a table of sandwiches. Seven of the performers once worked for Josef Meier. During their meal, they shared memories: Meier’s precise direction, his love of experimentation with special effects, his disdain for laziness or complacency.

No one spoke more poignantly than Charles Haas, a Florida actor portraying Christ. “He sparked something in me that made me a better person,” Haas said. He is forever grateful for Meier’s guidance when he was in his 20s, playing the disciple John. In the middle of the Spearfish season, Haas’ parents were killed in a car crash.

“Mr. Meier told me life is movement,” Haas said, “that you have to keep your thoughts going and your body active through difficult times, and live in the present. Regardless of tragedies and obstacles, he believed we all have a responsibility to use whatever gifts and talents we’ve been given.”

That is the spirit that built the Black Hills Passion Play.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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West River Wintertime

Winter is settling in over the Black Hills, bringing many opportunities for beautiful photography. John Mitchell, Spearfish, has been exploring the frosty nooks and crannies in his neck of the woods. Here are some of his recent shots.

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Fall in the Canyon

Spearfish Canyon is a favorite fall foliage destination for South Dakotans and out of state visitors. Jerry Boyer, who has tracked the progression of fall colors in Spearfish Canyon for over 20 seasons, says the peak viewing time should be today and Tuesday.

“I do not remember a fall so beautiful. The yellows and golds are so vivid and the reds, oranges and purples so brilliantly plentiful,” Boyer says. “It’s amazing that primarily only four leafy tree-types can create such awesome splendor and excitement. The colorful trees are highlighted by the sharp contrast of the dark emerald-green pine and spruce evergreens.” But Boyer warns to beware of the alluring red leaves near the ground — they are poison ivy.

John Mitchell visited the canyon this past weekend. Here are some of his photos.

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After the Blaze

Lightning sparked a fire that blazed across Crow Peak near Spearfish from June 24 into July, burning more than 2,700 acres and temporarily closing its trail. John Mitchell recently explored the popular path, much of it now running through a direct burn area. The forest service urges visitors to stay on the trail due to unstable trees.

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If You Live Long Enough

By Robert Speirs

I have lived in the western shadows of Crow Peak for nearly three decades, and in all of that time, I have never had this much company.

Long lines of tourists pack the drive, sitting with cameras and binoculars watching the mountain shed an irritating layer of pines after a fortuitous lightning strike gave her the opportunity to lose some weight.

It has been burning for four days now. The endless rotation of helicopters that fly over my roof in 5-minute intervals drop lake water from north of the interstate onto the flames in an attempt to steer the worst of the damage away from homes and ranches. Shifting winds hopefully will cause it to burn back upon itself and toward the layers of bug-killed pine that have fed the fire and kept it blazing.

I have a bit more history with Crow Peak than most. Other than having her name associated with my business, I spent a summer 36 years ago as a high school student building the hiking trail to the top. I earned my first promotion that June, becoming a crew chief while trying to impress a few of the ladies on my team by working a little harder than my companions.

I still have a piece of that summer on my desk — a pine slab cut from a pitch stump that we carried down from the summit on our shoulders. The growth rings are enormous, speaking of a 50-year period where it must have rained in epic proportions. Eventually, that tree was also taken by fire.

History tells us that between burrowing beetles and fire, the pine forest has been regularly swept away to make room for oak and aspen, grasses and wildlife. Each time, those who are merely tourists mourn the darkening of a specific view.

If you are only here for a short time, it seems such an inconvenience and perhaps even a loss to have a view you cherish altered during your days or years here.

But if you live long enough, or have faith that you might, fire can be a beautiful thing.

My grandfather is nearing 102. At his 100th birthday, he blessed me with a journal from my great-grandfather, who also lived more than a century. They both traveled through Spearfish 53 years ago to inspect me, their newly-born namesake. Great-grandpa’s journal mentions the lush hay fields along Spearfish Creek. He must have seen the barns now being dismantled and repurposed.

Barns, forests, and people transition through life and the newer versions can be even more beautiful than those they replace.

Many of us recall the devastation we felt in 1988 when more than a million acres of Yellowstone burned. Twenty-five thousand firefighters took turns battling the blaze. I, too, have fought fires for the Forest Service and admire the efforts being made on my behalf on the slopes of Crow Peak. Yet 20 years later, I relish my return trips to Yellowstone. The fire is but a memory and a few blackened stumps.

Here in the Hills, the two largest fires consumed 63,000 and 83,000 acres and occurred in the last 20 years. Once blackened, these areas are now some of the most sought after wildlife winter ranges, so much so that the majority of our elk now winter near Custer and bighorn sheep were able to be transplanted on the newly opened slopes near Deadwood.

If we live long enough, or expect to, fire can be seen as a way to sweep away the old and usher in the new. Perhaps there will be bighorns in Crow Peak’s future after the flames subside.

The thought of hiking the trail I helped build with future great-grandchildren and bumping bighorns from the rock slides is worth living a century for.

Robert Speirs is an educator and operates Crow Creek Wildlife Management Service in Spearfish.

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Crow Peak Wildfire

Crews continue to battle a fire started on Crow Peak near Spearfish last Friday. An estimated 1,000 acres have burned and the blaze is still uncontained. The lightning-caused fire is largely fueled by pockets of dead ponderosa pine brought down by pine beetles. Abnormally dry and warm spring and summer weather has also been a factor.

Crow Peak is a favorite of local hiking enthusiasts. The summit provides an expansive view of the Black Hills, Montana and West River’s plains and Wyoming’s Bearlodge Mountains.

Photos by John Mitchell.

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A Developing Story

By Paul Higbee

Rand Williams bought Spearfish High School at auction in 2011. The hometown developer hopes his mountain city’s “world class natural ambiance” will help attract a new tenant to the stately old structure.

Forty years after his 1971 graduation, Rand Williams generated a real buzz as he walked into Spearfish High School’s all-class reunion in 2011. He had just arranged to buy the old alma mater.

No, he told former classmates that night, he didn’t know exactly what he’d do with the big 1924 brick building two blocks east of downtown. He was open to ideas and, in fact, enjoying hearing from people who offered suggestions.

“I still don’t know where this is going,” he said several weeks later.”Of the ideas I’ve heard, I’ve ruled out only two — minimum security prison and brothel. All other suggestions are still on my list of possibilities.”

That list includes condos, apartments, office space and hostel. A gymnastics organization is interested in the gym with its wonderful hardwood floor, and Williams has also heard from a women’s roller derby team. The possibility that intrigues him most, what he considers the”highest and best use” in the language of building restorers, would be some type of school.”Maybe a trade school, private college or a seminary,” he says.”It was designed for education and preserving it for that kind of use would be ideal.”

Although Williams has acquired and refurbished other public, commercial and residential buildings over the years, his high school wasn’t in his sights. But he showed up at the auction last June after the school district pronounced the building surplus, and of course anything can happen at an auction.

Now that he’s the owner, he takes that role seriously.”I want it to be a functioning part of the community,” he says.”If it ends up being torn down to make way for something else, I’ll consider that a personal failure.”

If Williams’ 40th school‚Ä® reunion was memorable, so‚Ä® was his 30th.”You always‚Ä® hear people say, ‘I love ‚Ä®Spearfish. I want to live there someday,'” he says.”And my 30th reunion was where I heard a lot of classmates who had left the area for careers say they hoped to move back. In terms of investing in the community, hearing that all the time confirms that your investment is sound. Individual circumstances can change with jobs, but that impulse to live here remains.”

He considers Spearfish a place of”world class natural ambiance.” Anyone who attended Spearfish High School from 1924 until about 1970 will attest that the building showcased natural splendor beautifully. Wide windows in classrooms on the second and third floors framed stunning views of Spearfish Canyon’s mouth to the south, and Crow Peak to the west. Concentrating on algebra problems or a history lecture on soft spring mornings challenged the resolve of even the most serious scholars. A renovation that reduced window sizes, about 1970, didn’t reflect an effort to keep students on task, but rather one to cut heating costs.

Spearfish High School later became Creekside Elementary, and housed students for 87 years. Now the building is ready for new life.

As Williams walks the quiet hallways, memories are triggered by smells, or the way light streams through windows as seasons change.”That’s been an unexpected treat, something I didn’t think of,” he notes.”Something sensory will bring back a memory, vividly. Things I hadn’t thought about in years.”

To sit down with Williams to discuss this latest project is to come away with lots of bonus material. During a single interview over breakfast this fall, he spoke mostly about the high school, yet also touched on comparative economic philosophies of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and George Gilder, the benefits of reservoirs (including beaver dams), a Japanese adage about stewardship, and Black Hills historical figures.

It would be easy to simply describe Williams as a man of varied interests, but that would be selling him short. He seems to tap all of those interests regularly to drive his business thinking. Rand owns Williams Properties, which acquires and leases both residential and commercial real estate. His wife, Gayla, runs the company’s business office. In the past, he worked as a journalist, served eight years on the Lawrence County Commission, and was longtime president of the Spearfish Area Historical Society. Earlier this fall, at a history celebration in Spearfish, he demonstrated considerable acting skill when he performed a monologue as Deadwood-Spearfish stagecoach driver Harvey Fellows.

“And a lot of people remember me as the town’s grave digger for 39 years,” he adds. He’s not kidding. He dug graves for nearly four decades, beginning at age 15. He can’t even estimate how many graves he did over the years, but it was work that marked the beginning of his entrepreneurial enterprises.

The high school that contributed to Williams’ development and worldview was planned in the early 1920s. The state legislature decided that towns like Spearfish, with state colleges, had to establish their own high schools instead of sending their teenagers to the local college to take coursework for secondary diplomas. Several factors entered into the policy change, including campus overcrowding as higher education institutions drew more college students than ever before. Plus, many of those students were sticking around for four-year degrees, as opposed to two-year certificates. Meanwhile, neighboring towns (in Spearfish’s case Deadwood, Whitewood and Belle Fourche) had complained that they were in effect subsidizing secondary education in college towns through state tax dollars, while simultaneously being taxed locally for their own high schools.

Under the guidance of city supervisor Martin Thompson, Spearfish High School’s construction began in early 1924. The school opened on September 30 of that year. One of the construction workers, J. Howard Kramer, moved on to earn advanced education degrees at the University of South Dakota and University of Iowa, then successfully applied to work as superintendent in the very school he helped build.

Most everyone called the place”the high school,” but in fact it was both Spearfish’s high school and junior high. Back when most students walked to school and Spearfish’s streets hadn’t been paved yet, keeping the building mud-free was a constant struggle. Still the school held up well. The 1942 yearbook noted,”Few realize by taking a look at the building that it is as old as it is.” The high school was 18 years old that year and, keep in mind, the student writer was probably 17.

Williams has also revamped Spearfish’s old City Hall, in use from 1939 to 1995. His grandfather, Jack Williams, planted three spruce trees on the grounds shortly after its completion.

Through most of the 1930s,’40s and’50s, Spearfish graduated classes of about 50 every year. The board of education knew that would change, though, as the big post-World War II baby boom generation appeared on the scene. In 1961 a low-slung junior high annex building (not included in Williams’ purchase) took form and was attached to the older school by a breezeway. It was that bright new portion of the structure that played host to smiling”First Teenager” Luci Johnson in 1964, as she stumped the Black Hills for her father, President Lyndon Johnson.

About the same time, Spearfish’s people realized it wasn’t only the baby boom generation that was pushing enrollment upward, but the fact that the community’s overall population was soaring with no end in sight. The class of 1968 numbered 108, more than double what the school district long considered standard. In the 1970s committees went to work planning a replacement high school on the town’s north side. The last”old Spearfish High School” class graduated in May of 1979. Students and community volunteers showed up over the next Christmas break with pickups and moved furniture, books, and files to the spanking new building.

As it turned out, the old school still had 31 years of service to public education in it. Somewhat forgotten as alumni recounted old Spearfish High School memories at last summer’s reunion was the fact that, from 1980 until 2011, thousands of students and their teachers and parents knew the school as East Elementary. Finally, with the opening of Creekside Elementary in 2011, the old school’s hallways were silent for the first time in 87 years.

Williams knows and deeply appreciates all that history.”But I don’t confuse the artifacts of history with history itself,” he says.”When the artifact is a building, that confusion can lead to bad results, because people start thinking old buildings can only be museum pieces. I like to see buildings remain functioning parts of the community, and functioning within what’s economically feasible.”‚Ä®

Williams traces his belief in free enterprise’s potential for making good things happen in communities to a book that deeply influenced him 30 years ago: Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder. After excelling in debate at Black Hills State University, he considered becoming an attorney. But Gilder’s book told him,”it was time to get off the sidelines” and follow his instincts as an entrepreneur. As it turned out, he developed into an entrepreneur who helps other entrepreneurs realize their business goals.

“When you have a building, the ideal situation is fitting a tenant’s needs to what you have,” he says.

This isn’t the first time Williams has come to own a prominent public building in Spearfish. After officials moved to a new City Hall in 1995, he acquired the beautiful native stone City Hall of 1939. He transformed it into a center with private sector offices, shops and services. Spearfish people were surprised to one day find a little stream flowing through old City Hall’s front lawn. Williams knew that one of Spearfish’s irrigation channels, moving water from Spearfish Creek through residential neighborhoods and on to outlying agricultural lands, passed through the old City Hall property. He found it 4 feet underground, opened it up and landscaped the lawn with terraces descending to the water.

Williams is leery of regulations often attached to historic properties that make creative renovation difficult.”If not able to be fully utilized, a building can be virtually a liability,” he says.”If you’re involved in building projects, you realize that sometimes mistakes are made in the original design. To say that those mistakes can’t be corrected because the building is historic is incredibly detrimental to future owners.”

It would be easy for outsiders to look at a small city like Spearfish, consider the buildings and employees and opinions Williams has, and assume he’s prominent in all aspects of local life. In fact, he and Gayla value a low-key lifestyle, immersed in business and church activities. They have no use for late-model cars or other status symbols. Community newcomers who say they’ve never met him perhaps have — dressed for a day of labor and driving a pickup full of tools.

For Spearfish old timers who can’t place the quiet but creative developer, rest assured. Your old school is in good hands.

Editor’s Note: Since this story appeared in our November/December 2011 issue, Williams has also purchased the 6,000-seat amphitheater where the Black Hills Passion Play was performed for 70 years. The school building and its grounds remain well tended, but no development has begun to date. To order a copy of this issue or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Atop Rose Hill

By Paul Higbee

It’s a steady climb, more than half a mile, from downtown Spearfish to the top of Rose Hill. I make the walk now and then for exercise. One day this summer I got up there just as the sun broke through clouds, illuminating Lookout Mountain to the northeast in a shaft of light. To the west Crow Peak loomed against spectacular, purplish cloud formations, and to the south Spearfish Canyon’s wide mouth gaped.

Had someone built a luxury hotel atop Rose Hill, those views alone would justify tacking $50 a night to room charges. Home lots up here? They’d be as expensive as any in the Black Hills and they’d all sell. But long ago Spearfish put Rose Hill to another use. Since November 1876, this has been the town’s cemetery. For a long time I thought it unbelievably ironic that the first person buried here, a Mr. Blizzard, actually died in a blizzard. It reminded me of the stale, dark joke about how strange it was that Lou Gehrig died of the very disease that bore his name. As readers swifter on the uptake than I may have guessed, this is what happened: a stranger carrying no identification perished in a snowstorm near Spearfish. The tombstone bore witness to the manner and date of his death. Local folks called the unfortunate drifter Levi Blizzard, which leads me to believe he was found wearing Levi Strauss denim, produced beginning in 1873.

Levi Blizzard is one of only a few strangers buried at Rose Hill. You know a community is your hometown when you can’t walk 50 steps through the cemetery without anecdotes and emotions of every variety flooding your mind. My teachers, the first two businessmen who offered me employment, and the minister at my wedding are interred here. So are schoolmates who died young and tragically, kids I thought I could never possibly forget but almost have.

You find yourself doing a lot of math in your local cemetery, often with surprising results. I happened upon the graves of two men I thought were old codgers when I was a teenager and discovered each was in his 50s during those years — which gives me a clear idea of how teens view me today. On the other hand, not long ago I used to enjoy talking to a gentleman who lived on my street. Earlier this year I heard a story I knew he’d enjoy but I never got around to calling him. At Rose Hill I learned he died in 1999 — and that he would have turned 100 in 2011. He was my peer, never an old man, and I still can’t figure out how it’s been more than a decade since we spoke.

I’m not implying anything spooky or otherworldly when I say I hear voices in the older cemetery sections. It’s just that these are the graves of historical personalities I’ve studied in-depth the past couple decades, and I know their written words and adventures well. Daniel Toomey (1852–1941), a Brooklyn-born buffalo hunter, stood on this very hill in May 1876 and described what he saw below as”a pretty picture,” with”no sign of settlement, only a light fringe of oaks, ash, and elm with a few cottonwoods bordering the stream.” Toomey’s mortal remains now lie here, as do those of Irish-born Robert Evans (1840–1929), who wrote of traveling stealthily across Montana in”the year Custer was killed and we were continually looking for trouble.” Evans transformed the view Toomey described, turning Spearfish into a garden by digging a web of irrigation channels that still carry water today. Rose Hill is the final resting place for Mary Kercheval (1833–1921), who historians believe was George Custer’s personal cook when he rode to Dakota, and for Harvey Fellows (1845–1929), the classically stoic stagecoach driver renowned throughout the West for adeptly handling the steepest trail grades and never injuring a passenger.

My favorite Rose Hill personality, though, is Fayette Cook (1850–1922). He stepped off a stagecoach in Spearfish in 1885, charged with building a viable institution of higher learning in a rough and tumble mining district. Within hours the Minnesotan feared school boosters had bamboozled him into coming west. Cook found the only campus structure to be”the poorest excuse for a schoolhouse, dugouts or sod houses excepted, that I ever saw. It was evidently planned, if indeed there ever was a plan, by someone quite unfamiliar with school architecture, but having some knowledge of stampmills.”

Still, Cook didn’t board the next stagecoach and return east. He went to work building a school that today is the state’s third largest university, and lived in Spearfish the rest of his life. Toomey, Evans, Kercheval and Fellows — all drifters and professional itinerants in one way or another — obviously stayed, too. Standing atop Rose Hill, taking in the vistas, you don’t have to wonder why.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.