I was on the road to Aberdeen yesterday, and at various points along the way people were talking about turkey buzzards.
The big black birds have returned to roost on the water tower in downtown Mitchell. At Wessington Springs, I walked the city’s nature trail with retired science teacher Lowell Stanley. He said the birds have [...]
If you had asked me before Friday night to guess how many cartoonists we have in South Dakota I would have answered with the fingers on one hand: Scott, um, Marty, ah, John, ahem … Tim … I still have a finger remaining.
So I went to the Cartoonists’ Exhibition at Michelle’s Cafe in downtown [...]
The Center for Western Studies was kind enough to include me in last weekend’s Dakota Conference, and by luck the speaker prior to me was Sterling Evans, a North Dakota native who now teaches at Manitoba. He may be the world’s leading expert on farm twine, and in fact Sioux Falls physician Jerry Simmons — [...]
We’ve learned that there will be a special rebroadcast today of a live performance at the Heritage of the American West theater in Spearfish. The show featured Hank Harris, one of South Dakota’s most popular singer/songwriters, along with cowboy poet Slim McNaught.
The show will be on Grant Peterson’s Great Dakota Smorgasbord, which airs weekdays from [...]
Lowdon Heller, a “good ol’ boy” from Ideal, South Dakota, has been a longtime reader and friend of South Dakota Magazine so I am a little embarrassed to admit that I just now discovered his Web site, Ideal News and Views.
One amazing thing about the Worldwide Web is that people like Lowdon — who [...]
Veteran South Dakota photographer Chad Coppess has a wonderful pictoral of the little ghost town of Cottonwood on his Web site, Dakotagraph.
Cottonwood is just a short drive east of Wall on Highway 14, which runs parallel to I-90, about midway between Quinn and Philip if you happen to get lost.
The little Jackson County town [...]
Yankton County’s board of equalization is meeting today to hear landowners’ appeals of their valuations. That may sound boring, but I’d wager it’s the best entertainment in town. Humor, tragedy, irony — all the Shakespearean ingredients of life — are happening there in the room.
Some land valuations went up 67%. Many parcels rose 25% to [...]
This is the season when coaches and teachers start to look around for new opportunities. I just had coffee with Mark and Lorraine Miller, retirees from Gayville. Mark remembers a time when a young coach from Sisseton by the name of Sonstegaard came to Gayville to apply for a job. Before he drove uptown to [...]
I stopped by the State Democratic Party’s McGovern Day awards luncheon in Sioux Falls on Saturday, and was glad to see that Judy Olson Duhamel — the party’s longtime state chair — was among those honored. Judy and I have a history.
She was a state senator from Rapid City. She left the legislature in 1992, [...]
Our Town Drunk died today. I’m not going to give his name, but he probably wouldn’t care if I did. He knew who he was, and that’s more than a lot of us can say.
The TD used to stop by our office — as well as many other establishments in town — but eventually he [...]
George McGovern recently granted an interview to Joel Rosenthal, a conservative S.D. blogger. I must admit that this was my favorite line:
I was on an airplane the other day and a fellow after 3 martinis reached across the aisle and tapped me on the shoulder and he says you’re Mc Govern. I said that’s right. [...]
The race for the most votes in the Smithsonian Photo Contest now seems destined to be between a little kid with a basketball from Fort Thompson in South Dakota vs. two Little Leaguers from California. Of course, we wish all could win. Since that’s not possible, we’re partial to our picture of little Tjay Head, [...]
The New York Times has a good article today by Timothy Egan on “Lost Town Blues,” and how none of the presidential candidates are truly addressing how to bring tomorrow’s economies to towns doing yesterday’s work, or no work at all.
It’s worth reading overall, but what really caught my eye was a Nebraska poll [...]
Old newspaper reporters know that “30″ was the official end of a story, back in our Smith-Corona and teletype era. Is there a better way to say farewell to longtime South Dakota cowboy journalist Dale Lewis?
A letter came today from his wife, Mary, telling us Dale died April 5. We didn’t even know he’d been [...]