Years ago, plutonium was allowed to contaminate the soil near the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal in Colorado. When the wind blew hard, nearby neighborhoods were exposed to invisible, potentially toxic, radiation. Pouring over weather data and writing elaborate calculations, Jill Weber Aanenson mapped the path of these radionuclides to understand where they went and who might have been exposed. 

With this work in 1995 Jill began her professional consulting career studying radiation and other contaminants in the environment. In recent years, she has collaborated with teams of scientists evaluating sites including the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Although she travels to collect data and meet with colleagues and clients, most of her work is done from her home office in the small town of Freeman, South Dakota.

Growing up in Sioux Falls, Jill loved math and science, as well as playing basketball and the alto sax. Her teachers recognized her academic talents and encouraged her to look far and wide at colleges, but Jill chose to stay close to home. “I am a momma’s girl,” she confesses, “and I just wasn’t ready to leave yet.”

At Augustana College in Sioux Falls, she was challenged academically. During the summers, she applied for and accepted interships at various national laboratories, including Brookhaven in New York, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. These jobs gave her a chance to see other parts of the country and work with top scientists from around the nation. Continue reading this post…

Hollywood stars and their lawyers have been buying Montana ranches for decades. Now, with retirement on the horizon, many urban and suburban baby-boomers with less tinsel but plenty of cash are looking for their own piece of paradise in rural America. In a recent story in The Wall Street Journal demographer Peter Nelson suggests that these “new gentry” are transforming the economies of many rural communities, shifting them from resource-extraction to an “asthethic-based” economy focused on place-related amenities.

In the Rocky Mountain West the influx of the new gentry sparks demand for everything from interior design to organic produce, but the biggest impact is on land values and uses as wealthy urbanites buy acres of newly subdivided farms and ranches. The impact of the new gentry on communities in the northern Great Plains is not as dramatic as in the Rocky Mountain West, but it is evident. Continue reading this post…

When she graduated from high school, Kara Elsberry wanted to be an artist. “Since I could pick up a crayon,” she says, “it was all I ever wanted to do.” She dreamed of being a Disney animator or illustrating the gothic world and characters of a computer game. But in 1997 the cards seemed stacked against her.

Winner, South Dakota was a long way from Disney’s studios in southern California. The town of 3,000 people offered no role models or mentors for a would-be animator. At 18 she had shouldered serious adult responsibilities, becoming the mother of a baby girl. She and Albert Miller, her daughter’s father, needed to make some tough decisions.

Growing up, Kara had lived in various small towns in South Dakota. Her father was a teacher and school administrator. Between kindergarten and graduation Kara had lived in McGlaughlin, Hurley, Hoven, Freeman and Winner. Her mother worked as a writer and editor for various small town newspapers. After her parents divorced when Kara was in third grade, she and her four brothers had lived off and on with each of her parents.

With their new daughter, Kara and Albert decided to move closer to Kara’s mother who was living in Grand Island, Nebraska. Trying to keep herself on track, Kara enrolled at the University of Nebraska, Kearny as a graphic design major. She took various jobs so that she and Albert could keep a roof over their heads, but trying to be a student and a working mom didn’t go well. When her younger borther was killed in a car accident, the family was devastated. Kara’s mother moved to Columbus, Ohio to be closer to her own parents. Kara and Albert packed up the baby and went with her.

Columbus was a shock. With as many residents as the entire state of South Dakota, the city “was a mad house,” Kara says. The day that she and Albert moved in an FBI agent knocked on their door to ask questions about a neighbor. Continue reading this post…

If you were “painted blue” in the 1970s, you were set for life. IBM dominated the computer market in the era before the PC, and people who worked for “Big Blue” usually stayed until they retired. Graduating from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSM&T)with a degree in computer science in 1984, Don Roby thought he had been given the golden ticket when he landed a job with IBM. But Don didn’t know that the forces leading to a flat world were already eroding IBM’s dominance of the digital landscape.

Don grew up in Watertown, South Dakota, the youngest of five boys. The last to graduate from Watertown High School, Don played football, ran track and served as president of his senior class. He chose SDSM&T for the in-state tuition and on the recommendation of one of his older brothers who had already become a Hardrocker.

IBM recruited Don to the sales side of the business, using his technical expertise to help customers understand the potential uses of IBM’s systems. Over the next 11 years, he moved around the Midwest with assignments in Sioux Falls, Sioux City, Denver, Omaha and Minneapolis. Benefiting from IBM’s superior management training programs, he deepened his technical knowledge, improved his management skills and gained expertise in sales and marketing. Along the way he was climbing the corporate ladder. ”At IBM, your name was in a box on an organizational chart,” he says. ”The goal was to get your name in the box above.”

Unfortunately, IBM was in trouble. Continue reading this post…

At 25, Sharlet Brown loved Chicago. She was young and “still incredibly immortal.” Getting mugged once and hit by a cab didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for Lake Michigan, skyscrapers, elevated trains and crowds of people downtown. And why not? As a girl growing up on an isolated ranch in northwestern South Dakota, Sharlet heard her mother say: “get an education and see the world.” Chicago was the world and what an education it gave her.

She didn’t intend to move home. But then her father contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the mid-1990s she made the roundtrip from O’Hare Airport to Rapid City once a month. The two-hour drive north gave her a chance to think about the pace of life in Chicago and the importance of her family.

On one of these trips home, she met John Teigen. He was a rancher with a place south of Camp Crook just across the Little Missouri River and into Montana. He was older than Sharlet with children from a previous marriage. She liked him. On her trips home they began to date.

John was serious enough about the relationship that he visited Chicago and “got a sore neck” from looking up at the buildings. She introduced him to her former colleagues and current clients at the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, and he got a better understanding of her work as a freelance marketeer. But she knew he would never leave the ranch. “This is what he was born to do,” she says.

When they talked about getting married, Sharlet explained that she couldn’t be the traditional ranch wife. Continue reading this post…

Annette Slaba faced a tough choice. She loved teaching. The pay supplemented the income from the ranch that she and her husband operate with the help of their kids in the remote northwestern corner of South Dakota. But in 2003 her new school assignment meant driving 40 miles one way on gravel roads in all kinds of weather. The travel would cut into the time she needed for ranch chores in the pre-dawn and late afternoon hours, especially during lambing and calving season. Common sense dictated that she would have to quit.

After turning in her resignation, Annette had an idea. A couple of years earlier she had a attended a workshop where she heard about Sylvan Learning’s online tutoring program. They were looking for teachers. Through Sylvan, she could continue to do what she loved and supplement the family’s income. She could do it on her own schedule because Sylvan had students in a dozen different time zones. The only challenge she faced was getting connected. Continue reading this post…

From her home in Deadwood, South Dakota Kate McGraw plans parties all over the country. She’s part of a new breed of professional meeting and event planners. She organizes conventions in Miami, conferences in Hawaii, celebrations in Las Vegas. She books charter flights, reserves blocks of hotel rooms, and plans meals for thousands of people. In an average year this 94-pound long distance runner sleeps more nights in a hotel room than at home. She could live anywhere in the country. She chooses to live in the Black Hills.

As a child growing up in Rochester, New York McGraw didn’t see much of the world. Her father worked for an office supply company and her mother was a homemaker. Her grandmother was an entrepreneur who made awnings and decorations for parties. When Kate graduated from high school in the late 1960s, she thought she would go into human resources and work in a school or a nursing home. She didn’t imagine herself as a jet setter.

McGraw’s life took a turn in the late 1970s after her first husband was transferred by Kodak from New York to Colorado. Living in Windsor, about halfway between Fort Collins and Greeley, she took care of the children and worked a couple of part-time jobs in bookkeeping and banking. When she and her husband divorced in the early 1980s, she moved with the children to Las Vegas. Thinking she might pursue a career as a travel agent, she took a course in travel planning. Continue reading this post…

Michael Cales wanted to be a rock star. He had grown up in Southern California. His dad was a hard-working entrepreneur who laid carpet for a living. When Michael was in high school, the family moved to a small town in Utah to get away from the tensions of urban life and get closer to the land. After graduation, Michael tried going back to California, but he didn’t stay long. Relationships pulled him back to Utah and necessity kept him in his father’s line of work. When his parents moved to Chadron, Nebraska, he joined them on the Great Plains.

He had played guitar in high school. In his early twenties in Chadron, his play turned serious. He spent long hours teaching himself and practicing. “I learned a discipline then that paid off years later when I began telecommuting.” He played with several rock bands, and it was through one of those bands that he met his wife Betsy. In the early 1980s, they moved to Fargo/Morehead so Michael could join a band that seemed to be going somewhere.

 After months on the road playing in clubs in Minnesota and the Dakotas, the rock star dream began to fade. Betsy convinced Michael to go back to school. He applied and was accepted to the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City. Ten years removed from his last high school class, he was surprised to discover how much he liked math, chemistry and the other classes he took at Tech. He decided to major in computer science.

When he graduated in 1986, there were no jobs in Rapid City for someone with his skills. With a brand new baby, Michael was anxious to find something. Continue reading this post…

When Tom Unterseher and Heather Bohr moved from Pasadena to Mobridge in 1994, they imagined a short stay. It was a cost saving relocation to reduce their overhead while they worked to make their publishing business successful. When the World Wide Web suddenly became popular over the next several years, their business was transformed. They gave up publishing in 1999 to focus on “third party fulfillment,” shipping orders for companies with virtual storefronts. 

Drawn back into the life of his hometown, Unterseher joined a loose coalition of leaders hoping to revive Mobridge’s economy.  Appointed to the City Council in 2000, he led efforts to clean up the city park, redevelop the area close to the river and revive Main Street. All of these projects cost money. Employing two young grantwriters from the East, Mobridge sought help and brought in hundreds of thousand of dollars of grant money over the next several years.  Throughout this period, Unterseher was outspoken, chiding the naysayers and encouraging those who dared to change.

When a team from the South Daktoa Rural Development Council visited Mobridge in 2004, many of the city’s projects were either partially completed or stalled for lack of federal appropriations. Continue reading this post…

Throughout history writers and artists have retreated to the countryside to think and work. Maybe they have always been New Pioneers. The age of the Internet makes it easier. Yesterday I drove to Howes Corner at the intersection of highways 34 and 73 in western South Dakota to interview writer and teacher Joan Wink. Joan and her husband Dean are natives of the Great Plains. They met the first day on campus at Yankton College in the early 1960s. They married and graduated four years later.

Over the course of a remarkable life, Joan has been a teacher, a teacher of teachers and a prolific writer on life and learning. She is passionate about her work and able to honor the passion that others feel for their vocations, even when it makes her life difficult. In 1991, with two children grown and graduated from high school, Joan finished her Ph.D. at Texas A&M. At the same time, she and Dean had the opportunity to buy the ranch that had belonged to her grandparents in this remote section of western South Dakota.

A cattleman for most of his career, Dean wanted to buy the ranch. Joan wanted to take what she had learned and become a teacher of teachers at a university. There was no opportunity for her close to Howes Corner. So they agreed to live at a distance from each other. They bought the ranch and Dean went to work. Joan joined the faculty at California State University, Stanislaus in Turlock, 1534 miles away. Over the next 15 years, Joan spent her summers and holidays on the ranch. Dean visited in California. After she had taught enough years, she was able to take a sabbatical. She spent it in South Dakota helping Dean with the chores and writing the second edition of her book CRITICAL PEDAGOGY in a tiny space on the second floor of their small ranch house.

This year, after a tough battle with cancer, Joan is beginning the next chapter of her life, which will include some teaching, more consulting, and lots of writing. She and Dean have added onto the house. From the desk in her new writing room, she looks south across the prairie, feeling the exquisite isolation of the landscape and the connectedness of her world.

To visit Joan’s website, go to www.joanwink.com.