By John Andrews
Sad news from this week’s Hamlin County Herald Enterprise. The annual St. Urho’s Day celebration, a tradition for decades in Lake Norden, is cancelled. Organizers cite “uncontrollable circumstances,” which might mean that the town’s Norwegians have finally established dominance and put an end to the silly celebration.
All kidding aside, St. Urho’s Day was [...]
By John Andrews
Chances are Lloyd Cunningham has photographed you, or someone you know, in his nearly 40 years as a staff photographer at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. This week, our dean of photojournalists is retiring.
We featured Cunningham in our September/October 2009 issue. We asked the obligatory “favorite photos” question that all writers must ask [...]
By John Andrews
2009 was a rough year for South Dakota beekeepers.
Numbers released by the Department of Agriculture’s Statistics Service show honey production in South Dakota in 2009 was down 17 percent to 17.8 million pounds. Still, that makes us the second highest honey-making state behind North Dakota (34.7 million pounds).
The honey business, like most agricultural [...]
By Bernie Hunhoff
During the legislative session, I get a daily chance to read the Pierre Capitol Journal. Though it is one of the smallest dailies in the West, the staff does an admirable job with day-to-day news.
And they do better than any South Dakota daily at news from long ago. Matthew Reitzel compiles a [...]
By John Andrews
Did you know that sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s eccentric social attitudes once drew the ire of Adolf Hitler? We didn’t either, until we read a column from the Twin Falls (Idaho) Times-News that a reader recently sent to us.
Much of the column was about Borglum’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan. He supposedly joined [...]
By John Andrews
History buffs in Minnehaha County will want to attend this month’s meeting at the Old Courthouse Museum March 18 at 7 p.m. Emma Abbott, a recent graduate of Augustana College, will talk about John Dillinger and his brazen robbery of the Security National Bank on March 6, 1934.
We wrote about the robbery in [...]
By John Andrews
From 1880 to the 1930s, you could find corn and grain palaces in 24 towns in eight cities across the Midwest. We know this because today we received a book by Rod Evans entitled Palaces of the Prairie. Evans, a scholar and playwright living in Aberdeen, researched and wrote about every one of [...]
By John Andrews
We’re finishing up a story on South Dakota filmmakers for our May/June issue. During the course of research we discovered that Chad Coppess, a photographer for the state’s tourism department and a frequent contributor to the magazine, is a film buff, especially when it comes to films produced in South Dakota. He also [...]
By John Andrews
Is there anything South Dakotans won’t race? We do all the mainstream stuff, like cars and horses. But people in Chamberlain race lawnmowers, and the residents of Volin race turtles. This weekend, the good citizens of Nemo will race outhouses.
Competitors build their own privy, mount it on something that will traverse snowpack well [...]
By John Andrews
It had to happen sooner or later. With all the snow and cold we’ve received, people are starting to compare the winter of 2009-10 to the doozy of 1996-97.
I get little sympathy around here when I talk about the winter of 1996-97. It’s clearly the worst winter I can remember. I recall snow [...]
By Bernie Hunhoff
Some of South Dakota’s best-known bloggers showed up in the State Capitol today to argue for and against a proposal by Rep. Noel Hamiel, a longtime South Dakota newspaperman, that sought ways to identify people who defame others anonymously on the Web.
Noel’s bill would have required bloggers and Web site publishers to main [...]
We received a note last week about the death of Frank Base in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Base was a South Dakotan and one of the last survivors of World War II’s hellish Bataan Death March.
Base grew up in Tyndall and worked as a clerk in a drug store. He enrolled at South Dakota State College [...]
Photos from celebrity weddings show up all over television and in newspapers and magazines, but there probably won’t be a single paparazzo in Redfield this weekend for the wedding of the century.
Congregants at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church are staging an interactive play called “Ole and Lena’s Wedding.” The play is an actual wedding ceremony with [...]
About a year ago we did a story on preserving the Lakota language. It was eye-opening to see how rapidly the language is being lost. According to 2000 census figures only 14 percent of Indians living on reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota could speak Lakota or Dakota. And indications are the number has [...]
We’re hearing more and more South Dakotans say this winter has gone on long enough. They are longing for summer, but spring will do. Even a temperature above freezing will satisfy some.
Today we thought we’d share a summertime poem sent to us from Denton Morrison in Florida. Morrison and his wife grew up in eastern [...]