Tag: vermillion

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Little Giant of USD

By Ann Grauvogl

Editor’s Note: Bill Farber died in Vermillion in March 2007 at the age of 96. This story is revised from the July/August 2005 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Bill Farber taught political science at the University of South Dakota for 38 years, and mentored many of South Dakota’s most successful people.

The small man with the mighty legend prefers his brown recliner just inside the front door of a small house across the street from the University of South Dakota campus.

It’s been Bill Farber’s favorite spot for years. His call,”Come in!” has welcomed students and politicos, dreamers and those who needed a firm kick. Set to celebrate his 95th birthday on July 4, Doc, as many of those students still call him, has become a living history lesson whose hand has moved behind the scene for decades in South Dakota, but whose reach has extended far beyond our borders to tackle questions of international cooperation.

When I was asked two years ago to help Doc write his autobiography, I had no idea how many lessons he still had left to teach. They’re the ones rooted in history, the ones we’re doomed to repeat unless we pay attention.

We began in March 2003 with a transcript of interviews from nine years earlier. We began with Doc’s dream of writing his autobiography from those transcripts. We began believing my job would be to write, rewrite and massage. Instead, we — Doc, political science secretary Mary Smart and I –embarked on a treasure hunt that became that history lesson.

The basement was our Shangri-La. A trip downstairs suggests Doc never threw out a piece of paper that crossed his desk, mailbox or any conference table at which he sat. Minutes and agendas — often multiple copies — from meetings held everywhere from Vermillion to Paris for the last eight decades. Letters to Doc and from him. Speeches and bits of speeches mixed with copies of the high school newspaper and yearbook he edited, old report cards, college papers, reports and research material.

The basement yielded treasures, but none so good as the day Doc wondered what was in the battered suitcase under another tall pile of papers. Inside, we found the letters he’d sent home from World War II and asked his mother to save. We also found letters he’d sent from Korea when he was setting up a school of public administration.

More than two years later, Footprints on the Prairie is due from the publisher this month (July) in time for Doc’s birthday celebration. At nearly 95, nothing seems to quench his interest in the world. Maybe to the chagrin of administrators and lawmakers, nothing can stop the endless flow of suggestions to improve government.

Just this spring, as committees discussed how to revitalize the legislature, Doc suggested that lawmakers meet quarterly, so they could deal with problems continuously through the year. Bills could be introduced in one session, adopted the next. Legislators could take advantage of what’s being done in other states.

Since money has always been a problem for state government, Farber also suggests adding 2 percent to everyone’s federal income tax returns and designating the revenue for health and education.”It’s simple,” he said.

A believer in travel and public service, Farber served in the Air Force at Hickman Field in Hawaii.

His rallying cry for more laws to encourage government consolidation in a state with few people never ends.”We need to do some bold thinking and not be afraid of experimenting,” he said.

The broad outlines of Doc’s story have often been told. He was hired to teach government at USD in 1935, and long before he retired as department chairman in 1976, he had become a force to reckon with. He’s still tickled that his July 4 birthday — just after the cutoff — meant he could teach until he was almost 66, instead of the previously state-mandated 65.

Here is the rare man who practices what he preaches. He believes in teaching and in public service. He helped establish South Dakota’s Legislative Research Council, and worked for constitutional revision, home rule, and single-member legislative districts. Besides the school of public administration in Korea, he helped set up an international training program for public administrators in Bruges, Belgium.

And he taught, his students becoming his family as he challenged them to do more than they thought they could. Among others, he prodded Tom Brokaw and Pat O’Brien — arguably the state’s best-known television personalities — out of college failure.

“His influence reaches well beyond the courses he taught in political science or the forums he organized, the research projects he supervised and the papers he graded,” Brokaw wrote in the introduction to Footprints.”Bill was a life force on campus, a roly poly energy cell constantly encouraging students in his department and others to look beyond the horizons of the Great Plains, to take their place in the wider world as well as in their home towns and counties across the prairie.”

At Farber’s retirement dinner, O’Brien remembered:”Doc and I talked about the fact that he is setting people up in life all over the country. He said to me, ‘I feel like the playwright sitting in the balcony looking down on stage at all my creations.’ I must say this playwright has had more success than Shakespeare.”

Besides that noteworthy duo, Farber mentored Rhodes and Fulbright scholars, and his students run multinational corporations, teach at the nation’s largest universities, run for political office and write books.

Most of Doc’s protÈgÈs are men. Mary Lynn Myers, one of the few exceptions, said there weren’t many women political science majors in her era. Besides, many of the men Doc mentored were those who were dropping by the wayside, she said.”Young women didn’t do that very often.” Women had to be smart, determined and wear thick skins if they went into political science.

Farber’s house is packed with miscellany from around the world. A Korean screen was a gift from a grateful father after Doc wrote a tuition check for the son. Doc’s dad started the collection of barber bottles. And there are books and photographs, more photographs than anyone would want to count.

In the 1950s, Farber helped to establish a school in South Korea and was pictured with a group he called, “five wise men.”

Bill Farber, the legend, is a small, portly man with a deceiving twinkle in his eye. He knows what he wants, and he usually gets it. The story began July 4, 1910, the day Doc was born but not breathing. The doctor swished him between hot and cold water and slapped him on the buttocks to make him cry. As Doc wrote in the book:”Some might suggest that from that point on I have never ceased to express myself in emphatic terms.”

Doc’s South Dakota accomplishments are well known. When racial equality became an issue in the courts and on the streets, Doc helped found the Institute of Indian Studies at USD, which brought tribal leaders together to talk about challenges they faced. When state senators and representatives saw the need for better information, Doc pushed and helped organize the Legislative Research Council. But his eye has never been confined by the state line.

In the two years we worked together, America invaded Iraq. Farber had lived through and helped shape national and international policy during the Cold War; he believed then, and he believes now, there’s no reason to go into combat.”Footprints” doesn’t dwell on war and peace, but the times threw war in our faces.

Doc has believed in a global community since he was president of the international relations club at Northwestern University during the Depression. He still remembers the German speaker who predicted that war would come, and Germany would be blamed. He does not excuse Hitler, but he says the economic roots of World War II were fostered by greed in countries like the United States.

When war broke out in Europe a decade later, Farber was teaching at USD. What many have forgotten is that this country was largely isolationist in the 1930s. In 1940, Doc debated against Roosevelt’s lend-lease deal with Britain, believing it would draw America further into the war. He taught a Sunday school class for young men who knew they would have to go.

At 30, he asked a local minister whether a Christian could kill, even in military duty. The minister preferred not to answer. Today, Farber still feels guilty he wasn’t a conscientious objector.”I just didn’t have the guts,” he said.

Farber advised a young Tom Brokaw to quit college until he was done partying. Brokaw returned to campus with a better attitude and the rest is broadcast journalism history.

As a political scientist, Doc watched the war propaganda machine spring into motion, and he remembered how British propaganda had deceived America during World War I. Viscount James Bryce, an author of a well-used American government textbook, verified that Germans had killed Belgian priests, then hung them, heads down, as bell clappers. Knowing Bryce, the American political scientists supported war. Doc wrote:”Evidence after the war, however, showed the Germans had not massacred the priests. When confronted by the political scientists, Lord Bryce said he wanted to save as many English lives as possible and thought his report would help if it convinced Americans to get involved.”

Doc lived through war pricing and rationing, and his basement yielded sheaves of letters to merchants and manufacturers. A Des Moines manufacturing company learned how to set South Dakota prices for salad dressings; the Watertown War Price and Rationing Board was not allowed to add an extra charge for sacking sugar; an Iowa cafÈ was allowed to raise its milk prices.

At 33, Doc was drafted and spent the next three years in the history division of the Army Air Force in Texas, Hawaii and Guam. At one point he convinced Vermillion’s George Johnson to carry his 80-pound barracks bag because it was too heavy and his shoulders too small. When it came to marksmanship, he wrote home:”As you can guess, I am the class dumbbell on most of these outdoor things, and the corporal has a worried look every time he glances in my direction.”

The warrant officer test also proved a challenge:”I’ve only rarely been able to chin more than once — one jump up, then down. I knew I couldn’t do it until a guy asked me if I was really stupid enough to want to go overseas. When I said yes, he grabbed me around the knees and pushed me up 10 times so I could qualify.”

Doc did not dispute that a country should go to war if attacked. But he could not stop questioning the why of sending young men into the Army. He wrote to friends in 1943:”The great tragedy of those in the army is, as I see it, in all the time that is being taken from real living. The tragedy is all the greater for those in their twenties. To see these alert young men being conditioned to army thinking and ways of doing things, and to the army type of social contacts is most discouraging. War is blight from which not many recover.”

No university professor in South Dakota history has been accorded the honors of Dr. Farber on USD’s Vermillion campus, where there is a Farber lecture series, a Farber scholarship fund and Farber Hall. An outdoor bronze of the genial prof was unveiled in 2002 on the university lawn near Old Main.

From war, Farber learned to trust international organization; he’s convinced the 1945 formation of the United Nations should have eliminated combat. But he’s been discouraged.”Here we are again not seeing to it that the United Nations is the institution it ought to be,” he said recently. He’s convinced that the United States still does not understand the importance of international problems.

“We are all human beings on this globe,” he said.”We all ought to be concerned with the welfare of everybody on the planet.”

A dedicated traveler, Doc learned about fitting into another culture when he spent six months in late 1958 — just five years after the end of the Korean War — in South Korea helping set up the school of public administration at Seoul University.

The school hoped to train senior public servants to be more efficient and effective, so democracy would be more readily accepted. Doc writes:”In a country plagued by red tape, poorly paid personnel and duplication, our challenge was to adapt medieval society to the modern world overnight.”

In true Farber fashion, Doc half adopted a troupe of high school boys, helping them with their English, taking them out to eat and to see sites in Korea they would not see on their own because they had no transportation. And he learned.

“Very quickly one discovers Ö that that which one had thought of as being rather firmly fixed principles, may not be so firmly fixed at all,” Doc wrote in 1961.”One finds himself examining almost at once the fundamentals of his so-called science. Indeed, it goes much further than that, and one has some real questions to raise about things in the conduct of his own living that previously have been accepted without examination.” American representatives in foreign countries ought to be humble, Doc wrote, remembering an old Korean proverb:”Don’t speak too soon; wait and see.”

The lessons continued when South Dakota’s Sen. Karl Mundt asked Doc to be minority counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, a committee charged with making government more efficient. In his first Washington stint, 1960-61, Doc studied New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s proposal that would allow the president to appoint a first secretary of government to reorganize the executive office and improve response to national security and foreign affairs — an idea Farber would still like to see implemented.

Although Farber left Washington when John Kennedy arrived, he still believes firmly in Kennedy’s words after the Bay of Pigs invasion was averted.”The world knows that Americans will never start a war,” the president said.”This generation of America has had enough of war and hate Ö . We want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.”

“Unfortunately,” Doc wrote,”this century has proved Kennedy wrong. The current Iraq war shows we still must learn to make peace.”

Returning to Mundt’s service in 1965, Doc became the senator’s consultant to the North Atlantic Assembly’s Committee on Education, Information and Cultural Affairs. In that capacity he helped set up an international training seminar for mid-level government administrators. This was Doc doing what he believed in most: Training public servants to be the best they could be.

The North Atlantic Assembly assignment sat Farber across the table from Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a British representative, who already in 1966 predicted America would never win the Vietnam War.”The most important thing would be the propaganda effort with the people to get them to support you,” Maclean told Doc.”Americans think all they have to do is bomb the hell out of anybody and they’ve won. You can’t do it that way.”

Another message stuck.

Doc despairs at America’s inability to avoid war.”We ought to be better, and I am not confident, on the basis of our past record, that we can successfully avoid another major conflict — and that could well be the end of civilized society as we know it,” he wrote. His conviction has not changed.

After two years with Doc Farber, his vitality — even in his 90s — remains with me. I understood best when I told him I’d just turned 50. Doc’s bright eyes peered out from a Yoda-like face.”Well,” he said matter-of-factly,”then you’ve got another 50 to go.”

That’s when I understood Doc’s magic.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Vermillion via New York

By Michael Zimny

New Union / Re Union: Fifty Artists Who Know Vermillion and/or the Area Intimately Well — an exhibition of work by regional artists, inspired by the poetry of Cynthia Nibbelink Worley, is now on display at the University of South Dakota campus.

Curator — and Vermillion artist — Sarah A. Hanson first discovered the poetry of Nibbelink Worley through an interlibrary loan request, and was intrigued to find that when the book arrived, from Augustana’s Center for Western Studies,”the very book I was holding in my hands had come from [Frederick] Manfred’s personal library.” The poet, who had once studied with the Lord Grizzly author, had sent him a copy inscribed”to Frederick from Cindy.”

Hanson found something else familiar in Nibbelink Worley’s poems, something”extremely visual and visceral, brave and solid.” And something in sync with her surroundings. Even though Nibbelink Worley has been living and writing on New York City for upwards of 30 years, she still incorporates the imagery of her native northwest Iowa.

Hanson wouldn’t know until she met Nibbelink Worley in New York, that Vermillion was a familiar place to her as well.”When I first met [Cindy] in Harlem she discovered I was from South Dakota. She asked, ‘Where about in South Dakota are you from?’ I responded, ‘Vermillion,’ with a question in my voice. ‘Ahh, I know Vermillion intimately well,’ she said with a smile.”

So when Hanson was approached by artist Amy Fill — who had worked with her on an earlier community exhibition in which local artists worked under the influence the poem Desiderata, by Max Hermann — about the possibility of another interaction between a work of poetry and area artists, it didn’t take long before she realized the answer was in New York.

Nibbelink Worley acknowledges that she has never truly left the pastoral landscapes of her birthplace behind.”Northrop Frye said, ‘Poetry is the relaxation of the unconscious,’ and to me that’s having the integrity allow a poem to flow from your unconscious, which is your truest self. I think that is where my best poems come from and the imagery certainly, and that is reflective of perhaps what I know best, and I think that is a rural landscape.”

Hanson selected two poems to guide the project — These Photos Now and How Innocently — from Nibbelink Worley’s book Wild Wild Roses.

“I saw the creation of this exhibition as an opportunity to not only organize our community of artists,” writes Hanson,”but to also reunite those who know Vermillion and/or the area ‘intimately well.'”

Hanson, and fellow artists Amy Fill and Michelle St. Vrain, reached out to artists around the globe who have worked in or around Vermillion.

“Within the exhibition’s contents,” says Hanson,”there is diversity of thought and experience. You may praise accomplishment and mourn loss. You may be surprised and you may be reminded. Most importantly, you will find community — a celebration each of us share.”

The common thread uniting these visions is the poems of Cynthia Nibbelink Worley, the still prairie-inspired New Yorker.

Exhibiting artists include Luanne M. H. Bigbear, Mary Black Bonnet, Keith BraveHeart, Joni Castle Jimnak, Lateesha Caswell, Michele David Mechling, Andrew DeCaen, Julie DeCaen, Amy Fill, Jeff Freeman, Rebecca Froehlich, Alison Galbraith, Nicole Geary, Joshua Haiar, James Halvorson, Nicole Hand, Prairie Hanson, Sarah A. Hanson, Maiko Hasegawa, Susan M. Heggestad, Rayna Hernandez, Phillip Michael Hook, Amy Jarding, David Kitzler, Andrew Kosten, David Langner, David Lethcoe, Danielle Loftus, Kevin Loftus, Krishna Mastel, Angela Meyer, Jess Miller Johnson, Darcy Millette, Klaire B. L. Pearson, Jean Peter-Larson, Cheryl Peterson Halsey, Magil Pratt, Emmalene Aubrey Raasch, Shannon Sargent, Emily K. Short, Eli Show, Mary Sorensen, Tory Stolen, Michelle St. Vrain, Kelsie Jo Thomas, Jordan Thornton, David Versluis, Marc Wagner, Sophia Wermers and Greg Wortham.

New Union / Re Union is on display in Gallery 110 of the Warren M. Lee Center for the Fine Arts, on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion through Feb. 15

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.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

On with the Shows

By Rebecca Johnson

As a University of South Dakota alumna, I have many fond memories of Vermillion’s little movie theaters, the Coyote Twin and the Vermillion Theater. My favorite is when my husband — then fiancÈ — and I decided to see a film after a huge blizzard. We first had to clear the driveway to our small trailer, and weren’t sure we’d make the start. Jeremy called the Vermillion Theater.”We’ll wait for you,” the employee assured him. True story.

That’s why I felt so sad when I learned the Vermillion Theater, built in 1918, closed. A leaking roof in the Coyote Twin ruined a projector last summer and Vermillion Theater’s projector was moved down the block to keep the twin screens limping along. Then Jack March, owner of both theaters for over 40 years, put them up for sale with realtor Michelle Maloney. Maloney spoke about the theaters at Yankton’s 1 Million Cups gathering on Aug. 5. Without any real offers, March joked to her that she and her husband should buy them.”We never considered it because we both have our own businesses already and knew it would take a village,” Maloney says.”The Vermillion Downtown Cultural Association (VDCA) formed in the short term to take over the theaters and save a cultural opportunity from going away.”

Maloney is now vice president of the non-profit VDCA. The group took ownership of the theaters in July and the Coyote Twin continues to operate. Through the support of The Vermillion Chamber and Development, USD and other local investors the building got a deep cleaning, new ice machine and a speaker to fix sound that was fuzzy for years. Digital ticketing replaces the former cash or check only policy.”Employees used to make change out of a cigar box,” Maloney told the 1 Million Cups audience with a smile.”They figured sales tax in their head.” Guests will soon purchase tickets on the Vermillion Theaters website and even bigger updates are planned for the future.”We are going to do some very significant physical restoration,” Maloney says. She shared a teaser of the architect’s plans for the Coyote Twin, with a total facelift to the building’s front.

“What we’re trying to do is provide a cinematic opportunity with either classic films, film festivals, documentaries, that type of thing, in the Vermillion Theater and more traditional films in the twin theater,” Maloney explains. The group hosted their inaugural Friday Cult Classic, screening The Princess Bride the weekend of Aug. 7. Another is planned for the weekend of Sept. 11.

Follow the Vermillion Theaters Facebook page and website for events, fundraising and updates on their progress.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Finding Home in Flyover Land

By Michael Zimny

Editor’s Note: Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and will contribute arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

I’m honored to write for South Dakota Magazine. Ever since the Black Hills pulled me from the city, I’ve been relentlessly stupefied by the breadth and diversity of natural beauty secreted away here from the wider world.

I’m a native of a seen-better-days suburb south of Chicago called Harvey. My alma mater is the University of Memphis, but I learned more in four months at Fort Benning.

My immersion in Dakotiana has only begun, though I’ve tried to make up for lost time. Fourteen months ago, the love of my life and I left Harlem, bought a’96 Infiniti and took off for the Black Hills. I had spent seven years rebuilding my writing career in New York City — after a stint in the Army at Fort Hood and in Iraq — as a creative copywriter.

New York was good to us, if not in a material sense. But beneath all the cosmopolitan sheen was the reality that a kind of insularity can thrive even where the rents are high. When that itch sets in, you start batting at some flitting notion of the flyover as a place to be you again.

When you commit to leave manufactured experience behind — and having worked in the factory, I think I know it when I see it — you want to settle on a place that speaks to you matter-of-factly, and here’s where South Dakota has a chance, as a place where pretense never bothered to plant a flag.

So we bought a jalopy in Tennessee and drove through St. Louis, crossing the Muddy as it snakes through St. Charles then Kansas City, then across the Plains of southern Nebraska, through the Sandhills and up across the Cheyenne where the Southern Hills begin to bristle with Ponderosa pines, and into Hot Springs, where I spent a sopping wet fire season at Wind Cave, falling back on Infantry experience and writing the occasional PR piece for the NPS on the side. That led to an opening at South Dakota Public Broadcasting, where I attempt to stake a claim for the polite world of public media in the cutthroat social media space, write for the Art & Culture blog and some other things.

In a short time, I’ve seen four corners of South Dakota, from the buffalo ranges of the Southern Hills to the sunny butte country of Perkins County, across the glaciated plains to the Coteau des Prairies, back down to where the Mo holds the Loess Hills at bay. I sincerely hope to be stop-lossed on this tour as long as possible. The people I’ve met, and the land I’ve only just begun to befriend, take time to know.

There’s so much still to do — kayak Split Rock Creek and the Belle Fourche, and ride the Mickelson Trail — and journeys started that have longer to go, like exploring the arts communities of Sisseton and Agency Village, digging into the history of the cowboy Atlantis under Oahe once known as Le Beau, and rediscovering artists like Charles Greener and Hazel L. Drown Sawinsky Hoven. If you’re thumbing, I’d be glad to have you ride along wherever this road takes us.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The King Hits the Road

By Roger Holtzmann

One of the world’s greatest musical instruments, a 16th century Amati ‘King’ cello housed at the National Music Museum (NMM) in Vermillion, is part of a summer-long exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“The ‘King’ is one of the National Music Museum’s crown jewels, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of Italian stringed instruments,” said NMM Director Cleveland Johnson.”We are proud to share this treasure with The Met and its many visitors this summer. We’re especially grateful to the NMM’s corporate sponsor, Citi, for underwriting the expenses of this loan and making the King’s trip to New York possible.”

The Amati ‘King’ cello is the earliest surviving bass instrument of the violin family. Made in the mid-1500s by Andrea Amati, the founding master of the Cremonese violin tradition, the ‘King’ remains an iconic masterwork of the Italian Renaissance. The innovative craftsmanship of Andrea Amati, his sons, and grandsons directly influenced Antonio Stradivari and an entire lineage of renowned stringed-instrument makers.

The ‘King’ derives its name from its royal commissioning. In the 1560s, the instrument was painted and gilded with the emblems and mottoes of King Charles IX of France, son of Catherine de’ Medici. The cello formed part of a set of 38 Amati stringed instruments made for the Valois court. Evidence suggests that this set was dispersed by the end of the French Revolution, according to NMM Curator of Stringed Instruments Arian Sheets, and only a few of the instruments have survived.

“Years later, around 1801, the ‘King’ was ‘modernized’ and cut down in size, possibly by Parisian maker SÈbastian Renault,” said Sheets.”Wood was visibly removed down the center of the cello’s back, leaving the painted and crowned woman who represents ‘Justice’ without her waist, left arm, and her scales of justice. Despite the alteration, the instrument retains its beauty and rich sound.”

Given its rarity and value, the ‘King’ travels infrequently. The last time was in 2007, when it returned to its birthplace in Cremona, Italy, to headline the Andrea Amati Opera Omnia exhibition.

For the cello’s trip to the Met, only royal arrangements would do. It was swathed in protective cases to insure a proper, stable environment and trucked to New York in one climate-controlled 24-hour run.

“We are delighted to host the King cello this summer,” said Ken Moore, Frederick P. Rose Curator in charge of the Department of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum.”This collaboration with The National Music Museum provides an opportunity for thousands of our visitors to see and study this rare and important masterwork alongside other instruments by Andrea Amati, his family and other great Cremonese makers like Antonio Stradivari.”

While in New York, the ‘King’ will be an ambassador for The National Music Museum said Director Johnson.”We work unceasingly at the NMM to introduce new audiences to our nation’s preeminent collection of musical instruments and archives. We are supported at present almost completely by local and state resources, so we need music-lovers across America to support our mission too — especially with a much-needed new museum facility in the works.”

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Love for the Game

By Mel Antonen

The Canova Gang plays under the lights at the ballpark in Canova. Photo by Christian Begeman.

As a kid in Hamlin County, Burt Tulson was marked for baseball success. He belted rocks with a bat, took batting practice at the granary and played night games under the only yard light on the family farm.

He chased foul balls for a nickel at Lake Norden Lakers games and in school he wrote an essay about how he wanted to be in the big leagues and build baseball fields.

Tulson wasn’t one of the handful of South Dakota-born big-leaguers, but in a state where town-team baseball is the closest thing to a common religion, Tulson has been a deacon of the diamond.

We are in South Dakota’s 82nd season of amateur baseball, and Tulson, 67, has been a manager almost half of those seasons. He’s in his 40th year of running the Lake Norden Lakers, and that makes him the dean of managers in the state.

Tulson has good company. Of approximately 75 managers, he is one of five with 30 years of experience leading an amateur baseball team.

The Canova Gang’s Dave Gassman and Kirk Sorensen of the Vermillion Red Sox are each in their 37th seasons. Paul Martin of the Akron (Iowa) Rebels and Fred Obermeier of Clark are each at 33. The Dell Rapids Mudcats’ Jim Wilber, who also managed Redfield and his hometown Miller, is at 31.

“Managers are the most important ingredient we have in keeping amateur baseball alive,” says Dale Weber of Salem, president of the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Association.”The average fan has no idea how much work a manager does outside the white lines.”

A manager does more than write lineups an hour before the game. They oversee the team finances, and sometimes foot the bill for expenses out of their own pocket. They buy equipment and uniforms, schedule games and organize ticket-takers, concession stand operators, umpires and announcers. Managers are groundskeepers — mowing, chopping weeds and preparing the field — and they fix everything from drinking fountains to bathroom light sockets.

“We have this notion that our ball fields should look like Yankee Stadium,” Wilber says.

The morning after a game there’s ballpark cleanup and calling newspapers and radio stations with game highlights.

Overall, town-team baseball is doing well, but there is a slow decline in teams, and that’s related, in part, to the difficulty in finding managers, says Herb Sundall of Kennebec, the association’s secretary-treasurer:”It’s not that there isn’t enough players or money. It’s that managers are hard to find.”

So, why do managers manage? Managers on the three-decades list don’t like attention and quickly credit spouses, children and townspeople for the success of a program. But managing gets in their blood, and they love it because of the competition, camaraderie and community. And, they don’t want to see baseball fade away.

Gassman says retirement isn’t an option.”Baseball is all we have left in Canova. I’m a die-hard. I’m not going to let baseball die as long as I am around.”

Except for Obermeier, who never played baseball, each manager followed a familiar path: They finished daily chores quickly so they could play baseball. They joined youth leagues, played American Legion and were drafted to play on the town team. After a couple of decades, they were handed keys to the equipment shed.

The Fireballing Manager

Dave Gassman’s dad, Bernard, was a manager in Epiphany. As a kid, Gassman tagged along and chased foul balls for a nickel and then spent his money on ice-cold pop at the concession stand, a taste that he’ll never forget.

Dave Gassman is interviewed after his team won the state championship in 2009.

Today Gassman, a farmer who owns the Canova Service Center, follows in his dad’s footsteps in Canova, his 37th season. He also managed one year in Scotland, the year he earned four state tournament wins as a pitcher and Scotland beat Renner 7-5 for the Class B title. Gassman has managed for so long, players might not remember that he was a pitcher, arguably the best in state history, with 376 wins and 5,595 strikeouts, both state records.

In 1966, as a Legion player, he pitched five innings of relief for Canova against Aberdeen in a state tournament semifinal game, allowing the Gang to use ace Lee Goldammer in the championship. Goldammer tossed a one-hitter in a 3-1 win against Woonsocket, giving Canova its first state title.

It was the first of four titles for Gassman. In addition to Scotland, the Gang won in 1979 and again in 2009 when Gassman got to share the experience with his son, Garrett, a left-handed batting catcher.

This year, in addition to Garrett, there are three other Gassmans on the team, including Dave’s nephews, Tucker and Gavin, all who either pitch or play infield.

Scout in Disguise

Burt Tulson and his sister, Pauline, had four places to play ball on the farm between Bryant and Lake Norden.

Burt Tulson.

They played with a plastic bat and ball on the front lawn. The second field had a granary as a backstop so they could hit balls toward the road. The third field was big enough for a game with the neighbors and the fourth was under the yard light, where players had to keep the ball inside the base paths or it was an out.

“That game taught us how to bunt,” Tulson says.”We had to play that game because there was only one yard light on the farm. I learned a level swing and bat control. It was like using a hammer. If you swing too hard, you miss the nail. It was important to be in control.”

His parents, Glenn and Fern, brought him to Lakers games in the late 1950s. He wore Lakers blue for the first time in 1966.

As a player, Tulson was a pitcher, but he injured his right shoulder in a motorcycle accident and moved to first base. He was a line-drive hitter with a lifetime average of .362 and 60 home runs. Tulson and business partner Frank Andrews, a longtime volunteer ticket-taker, were the contractors who built the amateur baseball Hall of Fame in Lake Norden.

He started managing the team in 1976 and earned his 700th career win in 2012. He’s managed the Lakers in 28 of their 39 state tournament appearances.

Tulson’s an accomplished manager, but one night, during the late 1990s, he used an off-the-wall scouting trip to see if he could break the Lakers’ late-season slump. A few days before a game in Huron, Tulson told his team he would be gone and that pitcher Paul Raasch would manage.

A smattering of fans attended, including one sitting alone at the top of the grandstand in Huron. The fan had enormous hair and wore a trench coat with big shades — a bit odd considering it was 90 degrees and muggy.

The Lakers’ players recognized the fan as Tulson, who was trying to watch his team from a different perspective.

During warm-ups at the Lakers’ next game, Tulson was asking about the Huron game, as if he wasn’t there. The players played along, but eventually they cracked and told him they knew where he was.

“It was hilarious,” Raasch said.”We played pretty good the rest of the year. We won the district and a couple games in the state tourney.”

Baseball and Healing

Kirk Sorensen, who farms west of Vermillion, has been a Red Sox fan his entire life. As a kid, he’d visit his grandma, Jessie Jensen, on summer Sundays and walk six blocks to see a game. He chased foul balls and hung numbers on the scoreboard.

Kirk Sorensen guided the Vermillion Red Sox to state championships in 2003, 2004 and 2006.

He was a catcher with speed, but an elbow injury moved him to first base. His resume includes a six-hit game and a season where he had 11 triples.

Sorensen, who also plays bass guitar in a country band, is the only manager to win state titles in Class A and B.

At times, baseball was therapeutic for Sorensen. When his first wife, Teresa, died in June of 1997, he thought about quitting as a manager. Then, a week after her funeral, he was at home as the Red Sox were playing. He decided to go to the game.

“It was a beautiful evening, so I put on my uniform and went to the game,” he says.”It allowed me to forget for a few minutes. The support of the baseball community meant everything to me. It got me through a tough time. It was so good. I’ll never forget it.”

The Bizarre Champs

Paul Martin grew up on a farm and played high school baseball in Westfield, Iowa. The year after his graduation, he formed a baseball team because he didn’t want to play fast-pitch softball.

Paul Martin.

He had a choice to play in a league in northwest Iowa or join South Dakota’s association. (Akron is just across the Big Sioux River, 18 miles east of Vermillion. Larchwood, Iowa, Wynot, Neb. and Crofton, Neb., are the three other out-of-state teams that play in South Dakota’s association.)

Starting a team from scratch isn’t easy. For several years, Martin, a former catcher, paid expenses himself and recruited players minutes before games.”There were times we had to pull dads out of the crowd to complete a lineup,” he says.”It took about 15 years to get going.”

These days, things are easier. There are plenty of players and Akron has a wonderful field.

The Rebels started in the early 1980s and have had their share of history-making moments.

In a 2008 game vs. Elk Point, they turned two around-the-horn triple plays — from third to second to first — meaning the Rebels had a feat that’s only been accomplished once in thousands of Major League games.

But the Rebels’ defining moment came in 2005, when they won a district title against Larchwood in bizarre fashion to make their first state tournament.

Larchwood was beating the Rebels 13-4 when rain stopped the game. The delay lasted two days because of wet grounds and other conflicts. When the game resumed, the Rebels rallied and won 17-16.

“It was an insane celebration because so many times, we were just one game away from going,” Martin says.”I’ll never forget it. We had a big dog pile of players on the mound.”

Rush of Memories

Fred Obermeier, who grew up raising Black Angus on a ranch near Clark, started a baseball team, too. He didn’t grow up playing baseball, but he loved the sport, and he was umpiring games as a sophomore in high school.

Clark’s Fred Obermeier (in blue) started a team from scratch.

In the spring of 1983, a group of players asked if he’d manage a baseball team, and the Clark Cubs were born.

Eventually, the team’s nickname became the Traders, in honor of Obermeier’s cousin, Chess, who trades corn options on the Chicago Board of Trade and supports the team with checks from the Windy City.”If we need uniforms or anything like that, he always helps,” Obermeier says.

As a manager, Obermeier played only when there weren’t enough players.”I didn’t have any talent,” he says.”I have been in two games and gotten one at-bat. I struck out. But, I love the game.”

There were good and bad times. In 1995, they went winless. In 1985, Claremont beat Clark 9-2 in the Class B title game. That game is stamped in Obermeier’s mind forever.

“I was nervous because I had not been to that level before and I was pretty new,” Obermeier says.”It was nerve-wracking.”

But while managers say the sting of losing big games never goes away, the hurt softens. The runner-up trophy stands on a shelf in Obermeier’s home, a snapshot of what amateur baseball is all about.

“Every time I look at that trophy, it brings back a lot of good memories,” Obermeier says.

Patience is the Key

Jim Wilber, who brokers farm land in Sioux Falls but grew up in Miller working in his dad’s feed and seed business, is in his 15th season as a manager for the Dell Rapids Mudcats, but his resume also includes 15 state tournaments for Miller and Redfield. He was a right-handed pitcher who also played all four infield positions.

Jim Wilber’s Dell Rapids Mudcats share the spotlight with Dell Rapids PBR, but the Mudcats finished on top in 2008.

Wilber’s state title was a long time coming.

The Mudcats beat Wynot for the championship in 2008, something they weren’t sure would ever come. After losing twice to cross-town rival Dell Rapids PBR in the state finals, the Mudcats blew an 11-6 lead in the eighth inning, only to come back and win 15-13.

“The lasting image was a strange combination of relief and euphoria,” Wilber says.”The Mudcats weren’t blessed with the best of luck during the final weekends of previous state tourneys. When Wynot rallied, the mood of our team was, ëHere we go again.”’

Wilber says the passion for baseball is unique:”It is the same in the Pony Hills, James Valley or Corn Belt League. Hometown pride has a lot to do with it. Attendance isn’t great at every home game, but the community keeps track of how their town team is doing. And playing in the state tournament is just plain fun.”

About the Author: Mel Antonen is a Lake Norden native. He is a pre-game co-host for MASN-TV, which covers the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles, does baseball analysis on Sirius XM radio and writes for SI.com. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Lisa, and son, Emmett.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

USD’s Anarchist Professor

By Dana C. Jennings

The football game was tight that October night a hundred years ago, emotions high. The University of South Dakota was on the rival’s grid, her fans outnumbered by partisans of the home team. Agitated youths from Mitchell went too far when they tore the USD colors from the hands of a cheering USD co-ed. The girl’s friends struggled to reclaim the banner, but in the skirmish that ensued, outnumbered USD students were being soundly trounced.

Professor Alexander Pell to the rescue. The usually mellow professor of math leapt into the fray, decking attackers one by one. When the brouhaha was done, according to a story in the 1902 student newspaper, the Volante, Pell emerged with bloodied face and torn shirt, but with highest esteem from his students.

Pell had earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1897, and that fall, the 40-year-old and his wife, Emma, arrived in Vermillion. He had been hired to teach math at the fledgling university on the prairie at the north edge of town.

Pell’s Vermillion friends knew that he was born in Russia, that he had fled the czarist rule of his homeland, first to Canada and then to the United States. They knew in a general way that Pell had opposed the czar. But they knew few details about his life before he arrived in America. Pell talked little about his past.

Pell quickly gravitated to the center of social life in Vermillion, playing in chess tournaments, ice skating, entertaining the football team in his home, leading pep rallies as well as academic debates, taking his turn directing chapel exercises.

Alexander and Emma Pell even took needy students into their home.

In those early days, USD counted 410 students. Pell realized there might never be enough students to fill his math classes, so he shifted to applied sciences and promoted the idea of a department of engineering, a goal he would reach in 1903. Pell was regarded as”a model teacher, an able administrator, and a kind, generous, outgoing friend to students and faculty colleagues,” wrote Von Hardesty and John D. Unruh, Jr. in a 1972 article in South Dakota History. In 1904, the year Emma died, students dedicated the Coyote yearbook to the Pells.

Pell’s popularity and his proselytizing grew the new engineering department so rapidly that within two years, the governor was complaining that there was”too much mechanical engineering [taught] at Vermillion.” By 1907 the engineering department was firmly established, with Pell as its dean. Pell’s friend, the legendary Dean Lewis Akeley, would later recall that Pell had once proclaimed that girls couldn’t make it as mathematicians, and if one did,”someone would marry her and spoil it all.” Nevertheless, in 1907, when he was twice her age, Pell married his prize former student, Anna Johnson from Akron, Iowa, whom he had tutored and promoted for graduate study.

It came as a surprise the next year when Pell resigned his full professorship — and the $1,650 salary that went with it. He and Anna moved to Chicago, where Alexander taught math and theoretical mechanics at Armour Institute of Technology, and where Anna earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, the second USD graduate to earn a terminal degree.

In 1911 Pell suffered a stroke, which two years later forced him to give up teaching. Anna was appointed assistant professor of math at Mount Holyoke, and the Pells moved to Massachusetts. Later they moved to Pennsylvania, where Anna taught at Bryn Mawr. There, in 1921, Pell died, and with him, Sergei Degaev.

Perhaps if Alexander Pell’s students at USD had known of their professor’s former life as Sergei Degaev, they might have better understood his rampage on the football field. If they had known that a”wanted” poster issued by the czar’s imperial police two decades earlier had offered 10,000 rubles for his capture, they would have been impressed. If they had known he had betrayed his comrades and shot a secret police officer in cold blood, they might have feared him.

But that was not Alexander Pell. That was Sergei Degaev. That was a different continent, a different time, far from the insulated life of Vermillion, where adoring students called him”Papa Pell.”

Sergei Degaev was born in 1857 into a Russian family fermenting with revolutionary fever. The lad grew up dreaming of derring-do to free his country from tyranny, a place where merely criticizing the czar could send one to prison for years of hard labor. At the university he studied mathematics, engineering and languages, but was attracted by anarchist politics. Nevertheless, upon graduation he was commissioned a sublieutenant in the Russian army, retiring three years later as a captain.

At some point, Degaev joined a radical group known as the Peoples’ Will, whose goal was to assassinate Czar Alexander II and establish a revolutionary government. Among the projects in which Degaev engaged was tunneling from a cheese factory under a road traveled by the czar in hopes of blowing him up when he passed. That plot failed, but in 1881 another succeeded, and the czar was dead. To the dismay of his enemies, Alexander II was replaced by his son, the even more repressive Alexander III.

In 1882 young Degaev was caught with an illegal printing press and sent to prison. In prison he came into contact with Col. George Sudeikin, inspector of the Russian secret police. It is unclear how the deal evolved, or exactly what it entailed, but perhaps Sudeikin convinced the prisoner that the hope of changing Russia depended upon cooperation between reformist elements of the secret police and the revolutionaries. Apparently an agreement was reached in which Degaev’s escape from prison would be arranged, so he could continue attacks on Sudeikin’s corrupt rivals. In return, Degaev identified comrades who might be drawn into the proposed collaboration.

When the friends he named were arrested, Degaev realized he had been had. He confessed his part to the leader of Peoples’ Will, and was ordered to atone for his sin by executing Sudeikin. Now living under the pseudonym Pavel A. Jablonskii, Degaev used the confidence he had built with his police conspirator to lure him to his apartment. He shot Sudeikin in the back. Two accomplices finished him off with crowbars.

But Dagaev was still distrusted by former comrades, who would soon expel him from Peoples’ Will as a police collaborator. Meanwhile, he was hunted by the police for the assassination, a 10,000-ruble price on his head. Dagaev’s wife, Emma, had fled to Paris, and in 1884 he managed to escape Russia and join her. From there they sailed to Canada, where he faded into obscurity, working as a stevedore and in a printing shop.

In 1886 the Degaevs turned up in St. Louis, he under his third name, Alexander Pell. He got a job as superintendent of a chemical plant, became a naturalized citizen in 1891, and began studying math. In 1895 he entered graduate study at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, receiving his doctorate with honors in 1897. That fall the Pells arrived in Vermillion, where his latest life began.

Though Alexander Pell risked discovery by returning occasionally to the East Coast and even to Europe, he did take steps to cover his trail. The year after Pell left Vermillion, he and his brother arranged to have widely published the obituary of Sergei Degaev, purported to have died in New Zealand. Nevertheless, a former fellow anarchist living in New York discovered his old comrade’s new identity in 1915. Apparently respecting Degaev’s good works in later life, he decided not to expose him as a traitor, leaving him to live in peace. In the words of Von Hardesty and Unruh, Sergei Degaev,”informer, agent provocateur, killer” had become Alexander Pell,”outstanding scholar, beloved teacher, warm friend and counselor to students, loving husband.” And defender of cheerleaders, extraordinaire!

Editor’s Note: The author, Dana Jennings, was a longtime South Dakota journalist who passed away in 2009. This story is revised from the May/June 2004 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Oscar Howe’s ProtÈgÈ

Editor’s Note: Bobby Penn, a student of Oscar Howe, was among the foremost Native American artists of the late 20th century. He was a master of oil and acrylic painting, drawing and printmaking. His subjects focused primarily on Indian themes and his own life story. Penn died Feb. 7, 1999, after a long battle with lung problems. His work is included in public collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago. Some of Penn’s artwork is available through the Akta Lakota Museum online gallery. This story is revised from the July/August 1991 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

By Rick Geyerman

From its perch above a southern window in a century-old Clay County farmhouse, a stuffed crow watches Bob Penn paint South Dakota landscapes and Native American symbolisms. Outdoors, a pair of red-tail hawks flies above the hilly grasslands. Just a few country miles away is the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where Penn studied under Oscar Howe, the master of Sioux art.

Penn, a 44-year-old Sicangu Sioux/Omaha, is rising to the top of his field and is currently doing some of his most bold and striking work. Penn paintings hang in permanent collections at the Smithsonian and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago, as well as a dozen regional galleries on the Northern Plains. He has been the focus of 16 one-man shows, including exhibits at the Dahl Fine Arts Center in Rapid City and the Two Rivers Gallery in Minneapolis. Next year, he will share the spotlight with two Oglala Sioux artists, Richard Red Owl and Arthur Amiotte, at an exhibit of Plains Indian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art. A new mural commissioned by the Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Medical Center and the mounting of a traveling retrospective occupy his current studio time.

He served as chairman of the art department of Sinte Gleska College in Mission for three years, and has also taught at three other institutions. Early this summer he taught the Oscar Howe Native American Art Institute at the University of South Dakota, an honor Penn particularly cherished. The workshop had been discontinued since Howe’s death in 1983. Penn originals can sell for many thousands of dollars, and thanks to his partner/wife Alta, many of his works are now marketed as prints.

He never imagined such success when growing up on the Winnebago Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. At the age of 8, he was placed in an orphanage. In the summer, the school closed and students were sent to foster homes.

Bob learned about farming, carpentry and machinery in boyhood summers. He also joined the orphanage boxing team and for two years was the national champion in his weight class. Every boxer on the orphanage team, in fact, placed as either the national champ or the runner-up.

Looking back, he attributes such success to the fact that other fighters cannot “psyche out” an Indian. Bob’s father was a professional boxer and Bob thought about going to the Olympics or turning pro. Instead, he turned to the other love of his life — painting.

Ironically, it was the second time art triumphed over combat for Penn. His first art lesson occurred when his father separated him from a fight with his brother, sat him down and drew an Indian chief’s head. “Sit here until you can do that,” he commanded. Bob was fascinated … and hooked on art.

He attended St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Reservation and then enrolled at USD in Vermillion and experienced “super shock.” It was the first time he felt the pains of prejudice. But it was also the place he met Oscar Howe, the Yanktonai Sioux from the Crow Creek Reservation who became South Dakota Artist Laureate and was recognized worldwide as the leading painter of Sioux art.

Howe rigorously fought the categorization of Indian art. In 1958, the curator of the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa refused one of Oscar’s works because it didn’t fit the “Indian style.” In an indignant reply, Howe wrote: “Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. … Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with individualism, dictated to, as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child … ?

“Well, I am not going to stand for it,” continued Howe’s letter. “Indian art can compete with any art … I only hope the art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.”

Howe’s letter cast off restrictions that had bound Indian artists for years at the Oklahoma exhibit. Indian painters deluged the competition with new and innovative styles of work.

It was in this atmosphere of new artistic freedom that Bob Penn began his instruction under Howe. For five years, the two worked together, often one-on-one, and Penn recalls these years as the most significant period of his life. Howe termed Penn his most talented student.

However, talent and hard work don’t always mean immediate success in the art world. Penn has paid his dues. He played in several rhythm and blues bands and worked as an artist for both the USD School of Medicine and USD Educational Media Services. Though much of the work involved graphic layout, signs and posters, he learned technique and self-discipline. Between jobs he traveled to show his art, and slowly his paintings gained popularity.

His career also was boosted by romance. He met his wife, Alta, when she was an art gallery curator in Sedona, Arizona. She is an artist in her own right, but she is also adept at business and handles most of the family financial arrangements. She spirits Bob’s works from the studio as soon as he finishes. “Otherwise,” she says, ”I’m likely to come downstairs and find that he’s done a touch-up, and covered a perfectly good painting completely with an entirely new one!”

They enjoy Clay County living. The hawks who patrol the river valley seem to welcome the Penns, and Bob and Alta persuaded their landlord to preserve the prairie grassland pasture which cascades southward from their front porch to the Vermillion River.

Vermillion, despite those first awkward years in the 1960s, has been good to Bob Penn. The university commissioned him to create a mural for the Lakota cafeteria in 1989. It is a traditional Sioux design Penn had contemplated for years, saving for just the right location. The pattern — narrow horizontal bands of color which represent the four directional winds, struck through with yellow (lightning) and anchored by a shield — wishes visitors a long and fruitful life.

W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion also commissioned a piece that Penn calls “in the Charles Russell style.” The museum is building a room to showcase the painting.

Penn has not yet seen the movie Dances With Wolves but says he was glad to hear it is not just another movie where the white super-hero comes along and saves the Indian. “I understand that (Costner as) Lt. Dunbar is respectful and inquisitive, willing to let the world be what it should be.”

Penn added, “I try to approach my art the same way. To be prejudiced closes so many doors to things you can learn.”

A look around his workshop makes it obvious that Penn, like his mentor Howe, is stretching the limits of what might be considered traditional. Abstracts, still lifes and unusual landscapes are on canvasses. With a smile, he notes that anything he does is Indian art solely because he is Indian.

“The important thing is not to draw limits for myself, but to continue exploring new media and styles,” he says. “If a brush stroke doesn’t give me the effect I’m seeking, I may go into the yard for a misshapen twig. Art is what forces me to grow … my desire is just so strong.”

The crow watches, always, from his roost by the farmhouse window. And the crow often appears in his works. Penn calls it his personal totem.

“Birds were important to the Indian,” he explained. “They could fly higher, carry the prayers closer to God. I chose the crow because of its cunning, its adaptability, and ability to survive. The crow is the organic shape of many of my works that balances the harder edges. For a good painting I try to find a balance; I try to live my life the same way.”

Rick Geyerman, of Mitchell, was a classmate of Bob Penn at USD in the 1960s. One of his avocations is freelance writing.