Some call the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday.” I’m not sure why, but it makes a catchy title for the last Whereizzit contest of November.
Name the town that still has this old wood water tower (we don’t think it holds water anymore) and you’ll win an autographed copy of our favorite photo book, South Dakota [...]
Tomorrow morning in our little country church, the pastor will continue his tradition of asking everyone to say what they’re thankful for this year. We’re mostly bashful Germans, so we’ll say “our family’s health” — up and down the pews — until it gets sickingly repetitive. Then we’ll say “a good crop year” and “cause [...]
Today I had a chance to visit with wind energy entrepreneur Joe Kolbach, who is working to restore the buildings on the old blind school campus near Gary. His project is easily one of the most ambitious and interestiing rural renovation projects in state history.
Joe and his associates plan to renovate the historic buildings, and [...]
I’m not a big investor but once or twice when I was a few dollars ahead and had enough hay for the horses I did buy some mutual funds. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the prices, but now I see that a lot of my fellow fund owners have sold their shares. [...]
Anyone age 55 or older spends at least a moment every Nov. 22 remembering where he or she was when news spread across the nation that President John Kennedy had been killed in Texas.
The innoble day is especially meaningful to longtime South Dakota politico Joel Rosenthal, who saw Kennedy just hours before the shooting that [...]
We’re adding a new contest to our Web site. We’ll call it Know Your County Courthouses, or if David Letterman sues us for copyright infringement we’ll change the name to Where’s Yeller?
Of course, all you have to do is be the first to guess the name of the county where the courthouse in our picture [...]
We often get memoirs written by South Dakotans, but none have had hair-raising stories about running from revenuers. Leona Pietz recently sent us her book, Memories of a Bootlegger’s Daughter. It’s about helping her father make moonshine on their farm southeast of Parkston in the late 1920s.
As she tells it, times were tough. Her dad [...]
As we explore South Dakota, we are constantly pointed by local people toward burial places with interesting stories.
Here in Yankton County, there’s a high hill with a big boulder at the top. Local lore says a bar owner shot a man who broke into his tavern in the 1950s, and then recruited some of his [...]
Perhaps the best thing about green tomatoes is that you can only cook with them for such a short time each year that you probably won’t grow tired of them. We just had a conversation with Grant Peterson, host of Depot Radio’s Afternoon Smorgasbord, regarding South Dakota food traditions. We were joined by Steve Hemmingsen, [...]
Thanksgiving is just around the corner. You can almost smell the aroma of turkey and pumpkin pie wafting through the air. Last week, at a party we attended, small pumpkin cheesecakes were served. They were delicious and a nice break from traditional pumpkin pie. Since the cheesecakes are small, they have the added benefit of [...]
WHAT MAKES AN artist? Sensitivity? Sense of color? A flair for design? Four paws?
Don Theye, a seasonal employee at Bear Country U.S.A., raised that question in the Black Hills last summer when he entered a painting into the Central States Fair that was created by an 8-month-old bear cub [...]
An interesting blogosphere debate has begun over the apparent “early retirement” of Terry Woster, perhaps South Dakota’s best-known print journalist.
Woster has covered statehouse politics from Pierre for the Argus Leader for a lot of years. He’s a Reliance farm kid and SDSU alum with thick ties to many people and institutions in our state. And [...]
Preserve South Dakota has listed the old School for the Blind campus at Gary as one of South Dakota’s endangered places for awhile now. The collection of 19th century brick buildings have great historical value, but not many people figured there was a chance for restoration because they are located in such a tiny town [...]
The USA elected its first black president with much hurrah this month, and on that same night South Dakota also achieved a first: for the first time we have a lady legislator whose mother also served in Pierre.
Mary Vanderlinde was a Democrat legislator in the 1990s, and her daughter Martha was elected Nov. 4 from [...]
We have an unwritten policy to focus only on stories that occur within the four borders of South Dakota Magazine, but rules are made to be broken and we can’t count the number of times in our 24-year history that we’ve strayed into stories about our state’s veterans.
Remember when Lesterville native Paul Kappel wrote a [...]